Jamie Arnold vs. Liam Doyle: Fast-Moving College Lefties Go Electric

The most electrifying moment of the NCAA Tournament came in a game that was all but out of reach already.

Tennessee left-hander Liam Doyle, on his third team in as many seasons, was not present for the Vols’ College World Series title in 2024. But over a short time in Knoxville, he’d nudged his way into a very select group: Along with Florida State’s Jamie Arnold and LSU’s Kade Anderson, Doyle is a candidate to be the first college pitcher taken in the draft.

Doyle entered the game, Tennessee head coach Tony Vitello said at the time, more or less on his own volition. By the time Wake Forest’s Luke Costello came to bat with two outs in the eighth inning and Tennessee leading 10-5, the game was well in hand. Doyle was still bouncing off the walls anyway.

With one strike left in the inning, Costello stepped out and Wake called an offensive timeout. A pitcher in Doyle’s situation would usually confer with his coaches and teammates. One last run-through of the scouting report, one more encouraging slap on the backside.

Not Doyle. The New Hampshirite, a few hours from his 21st birthday, waved everyone off. He stepped off the mound and started to mumble to himself, or rather to Costello:

“You’re [doomed],” Doyle said to Costello, using a synonym that begins with F.

Sure enough, when Costello returned to the box, Doyle had already loaded up the next pitch: a 99-mph fastball right on the inside corner. Already quivering with intensity before the pitch, Doyle sprinted off the mound, through a mob of teammates, and out the back of the dugout entirely.

This was one of the biggest moments of Doyle’s career, in a series where nerves were already worn incredibly thin. Of course Doyle would be pumped.

But on the mound, at least, he’s just like this. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a pitcher — especially a starter — so relentlessly keyed up during a game. There’s a little bit of Bob Gibson to how Doyle flings his arms and torso at the plate. When he gets strike three, he’ll either bounce off the mound or prowl toward third base while the catcher throws the ball around the horn.

All pitchers pace the mound between batters, to get back to the rubber and clear their heads, but Doyle scans the infield like he’s making sure nobody else out there is going to try to fight him.

To be honest, it’s very un-baseball, even after it stopped being against the rules to have feelings 10 years ago. Doyle doesn’t just challenge his opponents by coming inside with the fastball, he challenges them verbally. His call-out of Costello is the closest thing I’ve ever seen on a baseball diamond to a basketball player wiping off the bottoms of his shoes and calling iso on a weak defender. It’s great. I can’t get enough of it.

Last season, when Doyle was playing at Ole Miss, he struggled to harness that intensity into starter-length outings. “There were pitches thrown where that mentality became a weakness instead of a strength,” Vitello says. “Whether it’s 0-2 and he’s trying to throw one through a brick wall, or a ball goes over a guy’s head because he’s trying to do too much.”

“I think that’s just kind of how I am,” Doyle says. “I always carry the underdog mentality with me wherever I go. Being a kid from New Hampshire, this is something that is very uncommon. You get a lot of doubters with that… I bring that mentality to the mound: Always have great energy and just try to compete.”

Face-to-face, in street clothes at the MLB Draft Combine, Doyle is the furthest thing from intimidating. He doesn’t seem as big in person as the Vols’ roster (which lists him at 6-foot-2, 220 pounds) would have you believe. He still brings a palpable energy into the room, but that energy manifests itself not as swagger or bravado, but in Doyle being one of the fastest talkers I’ve ever met. He doesn’t stop to breathe or collect his thoughts, or even move his jaw; that’d only be wasted motion. Instead, Doyle dispenses whatever information he sees fit in a rapid, but soft, stream of consciousness. He’s very difficult to transcribe and damn near impossible to punctuate.

But after just one year in Knoxville, Doyle became incredibly popular in the clubhouse.

“Whether it’s Arnold or [Arkansas lefty Zach] Root or Kade, they all seem to be great guys, and they wouldn’t be in the position they’re in if they weren’t good teammates,” Vitello says, name-checking a couple of Doyle’s draft rivals. “But I think, no matter who you’re debating out of that group, Liam wins the clubhouse battle easily. I wasn’t in the big leagues, but I know from guys I’ve coached that there’s a lot of time in the dugout, a lot of time in the clubhouse, and I think he’s going to be phenomenal whatever organization he’s in.”

Doyle’s teammates seem to love him just as much.

“He’s one of a kind with the way that he goes about things on the mound,” said the Vols’ no. 2 starter, Marcus Phillips. “His emotion, his character, the way that he pitches; he’s an incredible human, incredible player, one of my better friends at Tennessee. He’s just a good dude, man.”

Infielder Andrew Fischer transferred to Tennessee from Ole Miss alongside Doyle, and sees him as a kindred spirit in terms of intensity and emotion on the field. Vitello says Doyle and Fischer are “like brothers.” And having played with Doyle on two different teams, Fischer was able to offer some unique insight on his friend.

“He’s an unbelievable person, just a great guy, great teammate, really committed to his craft,” Fischer says. “He changed his body over the course of the past 18 months. If you ask him to take his shirt off, he’s got a six-pack now.”

Doyle says improving his fitness was the biggest positive change he’s made this season. After getting stronger and fitter, he’s able not only to throw harder but to throw more. The result: 164 strikeouts in a career-high 95 2/3 innings.

“When I got to Tennessee, it all got mapped out for you by the strength coach,” Doyle says. “He just kind of laid it out on the table for me, showed me what I had to do. I was either going to buy in or I wasn’t, and I fully bought in. Just put my head down, put in the work because of that, lifting four or five days a week, making sure my running was very consistent, and my diet was all healthy, good protein and stuff like that.”

As useful as the underdog mentality has been for Doyle, he managed to get recruited by — and throw 56 1/3 innings for — Coastal Carolina in 2023. From there, he transferred to Ole Miss, where some trouble with home runs inflated his ERA to 5.73. When he started the 2025 season, Doyle’s upside was obvious: It’s an upper-90s lefty fastball with tons of carry that is nearly unhittable at the top of the zone. But questions about his track record and durability left him in the 20s in our preseason draft ranking.

It was only after Doyle established himself at Tennessee that he rose to the position he’s in now: A lock for the top 10 picks, with an outside shot at being the first pitcher off the board. He’s one of three college lefties fighting for that distinction. One is Anderson, last seen tossing a complete-game shutout in Game 1 of the College World Series final.

The other is Arnold.

Last season, Arnold was the only underclassman selected as a finalist for National Pitcher of the Year. He went 11-3 (plus a save in his only relief appearance) with a 2.98 ERA in 105 2/3 innings in 2024. In 2025, he put up similar numbers overall: 8-2 with a 33.9% strikeout rate, in 21 fewer innings thanks to the Noles’ earlier exit from the NCAA Tournament. Arnold’s ERA remained the same: 2.98.

There’s some debate over which of the three top college lefties should go off the board first, but while Anderson, Doyle, and Arnold are valued similarly within the industry, the label “college lefty” elides how different they are as pitchers. Anderson is a smooth-as-silk southpaw with multiple breaking balls who gets comped to Max Fried. Doyle has his ball-of-plasma fastball and pitches like he’s chained to a chair and is trying to get out.

Arnold is a little different:

“I threw from a high-three-quarter slot in high school, which was probably 5-foot-4 to 5-foot-6 release height,” Arnold says. “I gained 30 pounds my freshman summer before college, so that dropped my slot a little bit. And I felt comfortable, the ball was coming out about the same, so there was no need to change it. But as the years have gone on, I’ve found my slot in different places. After my freshman year it was low, so I raised it back up to where it’s at now, and I’ve stuck with it and gained some velo with that.”

Arnold’s long arm swing and extreme low release point make it hard to find an easy comp for him. There are a few lefty starters who come at hitters from that angle, like Chris Sale and Nick Lodolo, but they’re both five or six inches taller than the 6-foot-1 Arnold. In terms of a polished college starter with a low slot and a big breaking ball, maybe Arnold comps to a young Aaron Nola. But as much as Nola’s motion made it look like his arm was going to come unstuck at the elbow, he didn’t have Arnold’s ridiculous plate-traversing slider.

Arnold can hit the mid-90s and hold his velo throughout a start, despite his lack of size and unorthodox arm slot. A fastball at that speed and from that release point can be unnerving for left-handed hitters and downright frightening for righties, if Arnold can locate it inside. But the slider is Arnold’s biggest weapon. He can bury it back-foot to righties and sweep it away from lefties, changing shape and velocity as he pleases.

“I have a great feel for it, so I’ve had the ability, if I wanted, to just sweep straight across,” Arnold says. “And if I wanted to have some two-plane depth, I kind of get to the side of it, just make that action work.”

Arnold’s favorite out pitch is a two-plane slider down to lefties.

“Earlier in the year, I was trying to sweep a lot to lefties, and they were doing a good job staying on it, because it stays in their bat path,” he says. “But if I’m going two strikes, I’m going to try to throw a two-plane, almost thinking curveball, and it gets guys swinging on top of it. It’s been good, because I don’t think guys see the same slider twice.”

Arnold isn’t as intense on the mound as Doyle, though I guess that isn’t saying much. Begbie from Trainspotting isn’t as intense as Doyle is on the mound. He says he’s a laid-back Florida guy, and he had to put real work into amping himself up.

At the urging of his pitching coach, Arnold started watching videos of Kobe Bryant to learn how to play with an edge. (Which concerned me at first; I worried that a pitcher who tried to learn from Kobe would throw a lot of pitches but not really care if he hit the strike zone. Arnold assured me this was not the lesson he learned.)

“[I was] just trying to find some edge when I went out there and attack hitters,” he says. “That was big for me, because off the field I’m very chill and relaxed, but it helped me a lot. Now I get pretty fired up when I pitch, and it just happens. I don’t have to train myself to do anything.”

Even in Clark Kent’s clothes, Arnold exudes confidence. MLB put the FanGraphs delegation in a suite at Chase Field for our interviews, and Arnold offered that, having grown up in Tampa, he went to a lot of Rays games as a kid, and Tropicana Field did not have facilities like this. That same day, news had broken that Rays owner Stu Sternberg had entered exclusive negotiations to sell the club to a group of investors headed by Jacksonville-based developer Patrick Zalupski. So naturally, I asked Arnold if he’d heard.

“Really? I hope,” Arnold said. “I mean, that owner just needs to move on. I don’t think he’s done a good job dealing with everything. I mean, Tampa is booming right now with sports and everything else. So just move the team to Tampa.”

I interviewed almost 20 players over three days at the Combine; suffice it to say that Arnold is the only one who dropped a “Sell the team” within 30 seconds of me turning on my recorder. (I checked; the Rays don’t pick until no. 14, by which time Arnold ought to be long gone.)

As different as Doyle and Arnold are, both in terms of repertoire and personality, I like the same thing about both of them: They’re not the prototype. The top of every draft has its fast-to-the-majors workhorse starter, and from Stephen Strasburg to Gerrit Cole to Paul Skenes, those guys tend to be big. They have immaculate mechanics and prototypical secondary stuff. It’s easy to put the fortunes of a franchise on a player who looks like what you know.

Doyle and Arnold are a little weird. They’re small, they don’t have prototypical arm actions. You don’t have to know a thing about pitching to understand why Doyle can climb the ladder so effectively with his fastball, or how Arnold can make guys fall over swinging at a slider in the opposite batter’s box. But it’s not what Skenes, or Cole, or even Chase Burns, looks like on the mound.

With modern training and pitch design, and the understanding that if you have one 70-grade pitch you can build a starter’s arsenal around it, Doyle and Arnold are breaking the mold, and new ground for college pitchers in the draft. The pitchability lefty with the funny arm slot can hit 97 now, and the max-effort fastball guy can throw strikes and pitch into the sixth and seventh inning. A new era is dawning; might as well get up and pump your fist about it.