Julio Teheran: From Prospect Fatigue to Potential Ace?
Yesterday, two former Braves prospects took no-hit bids into later innings. One was was Jason Marquis, a 34-year old veteran getting by largely thanks to the roomy confines of Petco Park. (Though as a reader points out, Wednesday’s game was at Dodger Stadium.) The other was 22-year old Julio Teheran, and his gem seemed to herald his arrival as the real deal. Marquis was a supplemental first rounder in 1996. (He was the 35th overall pick, 34 picks behind Kris Benson.) Teheran was the top 16-year old pitcher signed in 2007. Marquis isn’t sexy, but Julio would be happy to have his career: Marquis’ career FIP is 4.85, but he has pitched 1873 innings and won 119 games in the big leagues.
Julio has a chance to be a whole lot more than that. But it would have been understandable if many Braves fans and dynasty league owners were starting to suffer from prospect fatigue. Julio has been on the Baseball America Top 10 Braves prospect list for six straight years; they called him the Braves’ 10th best prospect after he was signed as a 16-year old, before he had thrown a pitch in the United States, they saw him as the Braves’ top pitching prospect from 2010-2013, and as the top prospect overall in 2011-2013. There was no doubting that he could destroy minor league hitters. Until last night, though, as Ben Duronio writes today, some may have doubted that he could destroy major league hitters. So what has happened over the last six years?
The Braves signed Julio Teheran almost exactly six years ago, in July of 2007, for $850,000. He was pursued by numerous teams, but at the time, his uncle and coach, Miguel Teheran, was working for the Braves as a scout. He was seen by many observers as the most promising international free agent pitcher. At the time, Chris Kline of Baseball America wrote, “The 16-year-old righthander pounds the zone with an 88-91 mph fastball, and also features an above-average curveball and plus changeup–which is easily his best offering.” But the consensus was not universal; a month and a half before Teheran signed, Kline ran an interview with an anonymous scout who said:
He’s a good worker, seems like a good kid, but I just don’t see anything beyond a No. 4 or No. 5 starter in the big leagues. I’m not crazy about the arm action and I don’t think he’s going to increase velocity very much from where he is. I think he’s going to stay and work at 90-91 with good secondary stuff.
But for upwards of $1 million I wouldn’t do it. You give me all the great arms to ever come out of Colombia… There are none. I think Teheran is OK, but nothing more than a back-end-of-the-rotation guy or a middle guy—which is more likely.
His fastball velocity has always been variable. When the Braves signed him, the MLB.com beat writer wrote that his fastball “is regularly clocked between 90-93 mph.” And an article written in the Colombian newspaper El Tiempo shortly after the signing noted that he’s a “lanzador derecho, con velocidad de 94 millas por hora.”
In fact, he has maintained that exact velocity range over the past six years. By MLB Gameday data, in yesterday’s game he varied from 89-94 with his fastball just in the first two innings, 89-91 with his two-seamer and 93-94 with his four-seamer.
The Tiempo article noted that his idol was Curt Schilling, and most poignantly, it reminded readers that he was in ninth grade. Even though he’s been a top prospect for six years, he’s the same age as a graduating college senior. The Schilling comparison may be apt, at least in one respect: this year he has 55 strikeouts against just 15 walks, and in his last eight starts he has a sparkling 43/8 K/BB ratio.
(Schilling had a stunning career K/BB of 4.38, but he took a while to get started: through his age 27 season, he had a career K/BB of 2.34. So what Julio is doing sure ain’t bad for a 22-year-old.)
He’s been a known quantity for quite a long time, but his rise through the minors was essentially smooth and uneventful for three of his first four years in the Braves system. He struggled in 15 innings and suffered from shoulder trouble in short-season ball in 2008, but flourished as he moved from rookie ball to A-ball in 2009, from A-ball to High-A to Double-A in 2010, and spent 2011 in Triple-A before a late-season callup.
And then… he had an awful 18 months. He had a couple of mediocre spot starts in 2011, beginning in May, and then 2012 was almost a lost season, as he attempted to make adjustments demanded by the Braves and went from one of the top prospects in baseball to John Sickels’s “Most Disappointing Non-Injured Top Prospect” of 2012, as Julio repeated Triple-A and saw his homers spike from 5 to 18 while his strikeouts fell from 122 to 97, in 13 fewer innings.
He also wasn’t showing anything in his brief cups of coffee. In 2011 and 2012, he pitched a grand total of 26 innings in the major leagues, allowing 15 earned runs — he wasn’t ready. In late 2012, Martin Gandy of the Braves blog Talking Chop speculated why:
The Braves tweaked Teheran’s delivery, something they also did with Hanson between the 2011 and 2012 seasons. BA says this led to a lot of Teheran’s struggles in early 2012, including his home run binge in spring training, and his drop in velocity.
But the Braves were doing this to help Teheran in the long run — to help reduce the risk of injury and improve his control.
…
[Then, Gandy quotes GM Frank Wren in the 2012 offseason as admitting that Teheran was going back to a “more natural delivery.”]
Holy 180 Batman! The Braves are almost admitting that they cost Teheran a year of development because they were tinkering with his delivery. The quote from Wren above tells me that the Braves asked Teheran to abandon the changes they made to his delivery, described in the first quote from Baseball America. I guess their intentions were right, but the results not what they had hoped for, and I suppose we have to give them credit for returning Teheran to his original delivery, from which he had the bulk of his minor league success.
The Braves clearly retained faith in Teheran, declaring him untouchable even as they dealt fellow pitching prospects Randall Delgado and Arodys Vizcaino, and he’s rewarded their faith. Few outside the organization could have quite understood the effect of the mechanical adjustments on Teheran’s results. But it’s hard to deny the results thus far, and now that he’s pitched 71 innings and faced 296 batters, it’s possible to say a few things with reasonable certitude: he strikes out a lot more batters than he walks, and he gets a lot more groundballs than flyballs.
Almost no prospect ever has a straight line progression from projection to success. (In underpants gnomes terminology, step one is being a prospect, step three is profit, and no one knows step two.) So, in proper perspective, Julio’s 18 months in the wilderness look like a relative blip between his three great years in the minor leagues and his seven recent months of success, beginning with a solid performance in the 2012 winter leagues and continuing through 2013 spring training and the first two months of this season.
Julio provides a curious counterexample to the famous dictum “There Is No Such Thing As A Pitching Prospect”, as Julio is a prospect who is almost exactly meeting expectations, even though the internet agonized when he didn’t get there immediately. Injuries aside, Teheran proves that just maybe there IS such a thing as a pitching prospect. You just have to be patient.
Alex is a writer for The Hardball Times.
Excellent read — thanks!
Underpants gnome terminology should be in every article.
UNDERPANTS!!!
“You give me all the great arms to ever come out of Colombia… There are none”
Sounds like a real smart guy… >_<
Yeah, that was my impression as well.
Obviously, it makes him sound like a jerk when he says it that bluntly. However, there actually haven’t been all that many successful major leaguers from Colombia — the two biggest, by far, were the shortstops Orlando Cabrera and Edgar Renteria. (Perhaps the third-most-successful position player is Orlando’s brother Jolbert Cabrera.)
There have been literally only four Colombian pitchers in major league history: Teheran, Ernesto Frieri, and Jose Quintana. Teheran has a real chance to be the greatest pitcher in the history of his country.
http://www.baseball-reference.com/bio/Colombia_born.shtml
In regards to scouting him though it seems irrelevant what country he’s from. Drawing conclusions about his potential from his nationality, which it seems he’s doing, is the kind of thing that gives scouts a bad reputation.
Well… I mostly agree with you. Except insofar as countries with better-developed baseball programs are likely to have better competition among prep talent, making it easier to determine whether a player will actually be able to succeed at higher levels.
I mean, look, it sounds racist, obviously. But if you want to put the best possible spin on it, he may have a point.
I keep thinking as a scout he’s meant to evaluate a player based on what he sees and he’d be seeing the same thing whether the player was from Columbia, Cuba, or Venezuela.
Still I don’t mean for this to become the focus of the entire article, which as a Braves fan, I’ve been waiting for, and as always really appreciate the interaction.
I don’t think racism was intended at all.
Stop reading injustice into your daily baseball reads.
@ No, I guess that was directed at me?
I wasn’t even really implying racism, I had a problem with him using irrelevant categories to measure a player’s potential, it’s not good scouting and attributes to the bad reputation of scouts in sabre circles.
But if you want to attack me and be immature go right ahead.
I don’t necessarily think racism was intended either, which is why I was trying to defend the comment.
Access to education and a competitive baseball environment is very important and is not the same across Latin America. Some of these comments stating the scout was ignorant assumes everything is equal across Latin America. This scout knows better.
@Mike Newman, that would make sense in understanding the talent in the country as a whole, but not in evaluating a single player who has already gone through their development in the country and is now in an MLB organization. In this situation a scout is meant to judge the player on what they’re seeing on the field, why would the level of the country’s development quality matter?
When that scout made his comments, Julio Teheran was a 16-year-old high school freshman who had yet to be signed by a major league ball club.
I’m from Colombia. Listen baseball isn’t really the countries main sport like our neighbors Venezuela and Panama, but there are two cities that do play it, Cartagena and Barranquilla. Both of those cities are in the coast, which is the reason why they have the caribbean baseball culture, so just because there hadn’t been many pitchers before Frieri, Teheran and Quintana doesn’t mean there couldn’t be.
I hope that stereotype is over with those 3 guys, a shut down closer, a potential ace and a #3 starter. It is true that we need investment in baseball programs, but it’s not coming from the government in Bogota who have more important problems to deal with, and they don’t like basball, this is a soccer country with the exception of Cartagena
He’s been doing things a bit differently this year, as well. Teheran’s best pitch has always been his change-up, according to a consensus of his previous scouting reports; he threw it to hitters on both sides of the plate. This year he’s barely throwing it. He couldn’t find his feel for it during spring training, and he was really wild with it-it’s been a pitch that he hasn’t known where it’s going all year.
He only threw four or five yesterday during his start, but they were generally effective-got at least one strike out with it. If he can get that pitch back later this season, or at least for next season, he should continue to improve.
Yep. Instead, he’s throwing a whole bunch of sliders. The thing is, he’s missing bats. And that’s what tells me that this is real.
Still, I always worry about young starting pitchers relying heavily on a slider as it tends to be harder on the arm than a good change-up.
I don’t think that is his long term strategy. He for some reason just doesn’t have a feel for his change right now, which is crazy because it used to be his best pitch.
I’m betting in the future this pitch will factor in more than his slider.
Agree with Wil. I think the wishy-washy mechanics situation caused him to lose confidence in the pitch, and it’s just not quite back to being a pitch he should throw to big league hitters. His knock coming up was that he couldn’t develop a breaking pitch, but switching from a curve to the slider seems to have been the trick. If/when he regains the feel for the change, he should be really, really good.
You have to remember that Columbia is a Soccer country. All the
kids want to grow up to be like Pele (the King of Soccer),
and Babe Ruth is not quite as popular. However, that does not
mean they don’t have any baseball talent. It’s just not as
prevalent as that of the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Puerto Rico,
etc.
Pele is not the King of Soccer.
Marquis pitched at dodger stadium on Thursday not Petco Park. Get yo facts straight.
Fixed. But it was Wednesday, not Thursday.
Das racist
Are you really impersonating me on an internet comments section?
That’s pretty weird.
Too bad he was cheating his last turn out and had some substance under his brim.
https://twitter.com/bromeara/status/342357462424371201/photo/1
Looks like rosin from the rosin bag got on his fingers, and then on his hat. Nothing to see here…
Or it’s Vaseline.
That’s obviously the shape of Colombia’s political boundaries.
Gtfo
I still mostly agree with the anonymous scout quoted in the article, even with the mild success he’s had this year. He’s a middle of the rotation starter if he continues to develop his stuff other than the slider, but I think he’s much better suited as a great arm out of the bullpen. That arm action scares me in the long run.
Das racist
I don’t think you should be too concerned about durability. He’s still only 22, and listed at 175 pounds (he’s probably 160 after a trip to the buffet). He should fill out some, though he’ll probably never be a big guy. If his body progresses as it should, and being on a major league workout schedule, I think he should eventually hit 95 with little effort. He already has three professional seasons with more than 135 innings, going back to when he was only 18. If the change comes back and his arm action is good…. man, that’s a scary pitcher.
Jealous Philthy fan?
Pete Rose Jr.
But as near as I can tell Teheran wasn’t betting on baseball games.
Das racist
What is wrong with you?
I don’t like his arm action that much, but his delivery is so much more fluid now than last year…he gets his lower half involved more and doesn’t put as much strain on his arm for velocity.