Picking Berrios: Top Prospect Debuts for Twins Tonight

This hasn’t been a particularly fun season for Twins fans. Not only do they have an abysmal 7-14 record, but their young players — who are supposed to usher in a new era of Twins baseball — haven’t been performing. Top prospect Byron Buxton has been all sorts of terrible, minor-league performer Max Kepler hasn’t been much better, and Miguel Sano has underwhelmed (with the exception of a walk-off single last night) due to an alarmingly high strikeout rate.

Things are about to get a bit more fun for Twins fans, however, as top pitching prospect Jose Berrios is set to debut tonight against the Indians. Based on minor-league performance, the Puerto Rican righty looks like he’s more than ready for the show. He’s been carving up minor-league hitters for a few years now, and has been especially dominant since Minnesota promoted him to Triple-A last July. In 15 starts over that span, he’s struck out 28% of opposing hitters and walked just 6%, resulting in a 2.33 ERA and 2.78 FIP. All that and he’s not even 22 yet. Berrios was a consensus top-30 prospect heading into the year. John Sickels (ninth overall) was the high man on Berrios, while Baseball America (28th overall) was the low man.

Unsurprisingly, KATOH loves it some Berrios. With a projected 10.0 WAR over the next six seasons, he appeared 12th overall on KATOH’s top-100 prospect list. Among pitchers, he ranked second behind teenage uber-prospect Julio Urias. With a ~30% strikeout rate, Berrios has missed plenty of bats in the minors. Since minor -eague strikeout rate tends to be very predictive of big-league success, this bodes well for Berrios’ long-term future.

The stuff backs up the numbers. Berrios throws a fastball in the mid-90s, and complements it with a solid curve and an excellent changeup. Here’s what lead prospect Dan Farnsworth had to say about Berrios’ arsenal over the winter.

His fastball sits in the low- to mid-90s, but has reached up to 98 in the past. His changeup is already a plus to plus-plus pitch with enough fade to get righties and lefties out, complemented by a solid breaking ball. His curve is regarded as clear third pitch, but the feel he shows for adding and subtracting speed with great movement may give him a third plus offering at its peak.

Berrios has both the statistical track record and the stuff of a top-tier pitching prospect; but at 6-foot-nothing and 190 pounds, he doesn’t necessarily have the build of one. Evaluators often voice concerns about pitchers like Berrios, noting their frames may not be durable enough to withstand a starter’s workload. Conventional wisdom holds that tall pitchers with meat on their bones are better suited to stay healthy while taking the ball every fifth day.

My KATOH research doesn’t disprove this theory, but it suggests the importance of a pitcher’s build might be overstated by some. Given two pitchers with identical stat lines, the tall pitcher is more likely to succeed in the big leagues, but not by a wide margin. For example, if Berrios were 6-foot-4 instead of 6-foot-0, his KATOH forecast would be 12.8 WAR — rather than 10.0 WAR — over the next six years. Height is a factor, but is by no means a make-or-break proposition. If it were, Urias and Berrios wouldn’t be KATOH’s favorite pitching prospects.

To put some faces to Berrios’ statistical profile, let’s go ahead and generate some statistical comps for the undersized — but hard-throwing — righty. I calculated a weighted Mahalanobis Distance between Berrios’ 2015 season and every Double-A and Triple-A season since 1991 in which a pitcher recorded at least 350 batters faced. In the table below, you’ll find the 10 most similar seasons, ranked from most to least similar. In generating Berrios’ comps, I only considered pitchers who cracked Baseball America’s top-100 list after the season in question. This is intended to act as a proxy for “good stuff,” which Berrios certainly has.

Jose Berrios’ Mahalanobis Comps
Rank Name Proj. WAR Actual WAR
1 Pedro Martinez 8.8 48.4
2 Matt Riley 10.2 0.5
3 Bud Smith 9.2 1.3
4 Jeff Suppan 9.5 13.3
5 Salomon Torres 11.1 0.9
6 Hayden Penn 9.5 0.0
7 Rich Harden 8.0 15.1
8 Bruce Chen 8.6 4.4
9 Frank Rodriguez 7.3 5.3
10 Joel Zumaya 10.2 3.2

It doesn’t get much better than that for a top comp. Pedro Martinez is exhibit number one in favor of undersized pitchers who held up as starters. You don’t need me to tell you how good Pedro was, but you may have forgotten that he was that good with a 5-foot-11 frame. Jeff Suppan and Rich Harden are a couple of other successful pitchers who had similar minor-league numbers to Berrios, though the former did not necessarily have a similar frame.

The pessimist in you might observe that several of the pitchers on this list had trouble staying healthy, including Harden, Matt RileyBud SmithHayden Penn,and Joel Zumaya. This, along with Berrios’ slight build, might concern you about Berrios’ durability. But if you’ve seen a few of these Mahalanobis comps lists, you know that nearly every pitcher has at least a few duds mixed into his list. Every pitching prospect is an injury risk, but there’s no reason to think Berrios is any more risky than the rest.

There’s no doubt that Berrios makes the Twins a better team in 2016. He’s a clear upgrade over Kyle Gibson, who he’ll be replacing in Minnesota’s rotation. But Berrios has the potential to make his greatest impact in the future: when the Twins won’t be in last place, and won’t be giving regular playing time to Eduardo Escobar and Kurt Suzuki. At 21, Berrios should have plenty of very good years ahead of him, and might even develop into one of baseball’s premier pitchers in time. I look forward to watching Berrios come of age, and anticipate he’ll give my FanGraphs colleagues some much-needed reasons to write about the Twins.





Chris works in economic development by day, but spends most of his nights thinking about baseball. He writes for Pinstripe Pundits, FanGraphs and The Hardball Times. He's also on the twitter machine: @_chris_mitchell None of the views expressed in his articles reflect those of his daytime employer.

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Mario Mendozamember
7 years ago

Is that the best top comp any prospect has had since you started doing this for call-ups? Or even for organizations?

Johan Santa
7 years ago
Reply to  Mario Mendoza

It is. And will be. By definition.

OddBall Herrera
7 years ago
Reply to  Mario Mendoza

Didn’t we get Hank Aaron or something as a comp for Trout?

I may have made that up though.

Also, te: strikeout rates translating to the majors, I has heard somewhere that pitchers with a sub-par fastball can sometimes dominate minor league players if they have one great offspeed pitch it breaking ball, but they would have trouble replicating this in the majors. Straily comes to mind. Is this actually shown by numbers/experience or did I make this up too?

OddBall Herrera
7 years ago

God I hate typing on a phone…I swear I am more literate than the above paragraph seems

Ozzie Albies
7 years ago

I am not Hank Aaron or something different is not salmon?

They can once again have.

In addition, a record price for Gaich: the big leagues, I heard somewhere that the ball is in paragraph pitchers can sometimes dominate player in the minors if they have a wide field to shoot the ball or offspeed difficult to copy in the big leagues. Stralei when comes to mind. This is really to demonstrate experience / phone number or so, I created this?