Dec 09 2014 10:11 AM
Re: Syndergaard for Profar
| yeah obviously his injury is something to watch. But this is the kind of thing they oughta look at doing. Maybe they need to tweak it so that we also give up Gee and they include a guy we can start at AAA, or maybe even throw in Muffy and get a lefthanded reliever out of it too. |
Alex Claudio.
[youtube]JQnN-qZ3_aw[/youtube]
Fangraphs sez:
Claudio made his made his major-league debut at the age of 22 years and 194 days — the 15th youngest player of the 167 to do that so far in 2014. Generally speaking, prospects who enter the majors with such youth are doing so because they’re either (a) regarded almost universally as top prospects or (b) a LOOGY. Claudio’s absence from McDaniel’s organizational list for the Rangers suggests that he doesn’t belong to the former category. And yet, even though he’s a left-handed pitcher, Claudio’s not a traditional LOOGY, either. Rather, his best pitch — or at least his most excellently strange one — is a changeup that sits in the mid- to high-60s, roughly 20 mph slower than his (rather slow) fastball. The changeup, of course, is typically utilized to neutralize opposite-handed batters. It follows, then, that if Claudio has an excellent changeup, that he’s also a candidate to neutralize platoon advantages.
In either case, here’s slow-motion footage of Claudio’s entirely slow changeup. Science indicates that, upon viewing it, one is able to travel backwards in time:
