D-Backs’ Ray Montgomery on Bauer and Bradley
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The Diamondbacks had two of the first seven picks in last June’s amateur
draft, and to say that scouting director Ray Montgomery is excited about
those players is an understatement. You can’t blame him. Right-hander Trevor
Bauer, who was taken third overall out of UCLA, is already close to
big-league ready with the potential to become a perennial all-star. Archie
Bradley, a 19-year-old right-hander, came out of Broken Arrow, Okla., with a
high-90s fastball and an equally good chance to become a dominant front-line
starter.
Montgomery gave scouting reports on both pitchers. He broke down their
deliveries, their repertoires and their mindsets.
——
Montgomery on Trevor Bauer: “I think you can start with the fact that prior
to us re-signing Joe Saunders, Trevor was going into major-league camp with
designs on that fifth-starter spot. That says a lot about his talent.
“He’s a four-pitch guy. He’ll tell you that it’s six pitches, but I think
that four is what he’ll end up throwing once he moves into the upper
echelon. They’re all average to above. He works off his fastball, which is
plus-plus at times.
“He throws a plus fastball, a plus-plus curveball, a tick-above-average
slider — which is almost a cutter — and a split-changeup. The fifth is kind
of a screwball, which he calls a ‘reverse.’ Basically, it’s a changeup
with screwball action and he’ll throw it to both right- and left-handed
hitters. He throws variations of his pitches, which sort of accounts for what
he means when he tells you it’s six.
“Velocity-wise, his ability to go up and down the scale, anywhere from 90 to
98, is what benefits him. That goes for all pitchers. He throws both a
two-seamer and a four-seamer. He has the ability to sink a two-seam fastball
in the 90 to 93 range, and he also has the ability to throw a four-seam
fastball in the 95 to 96 range. That’s all predicated by how he’s attacking
hitters.
“I think the one thing that sums Trevor up best is that he just turned 21
and he understands the idea of changing speeds, changing tempo and disrupting
hitters’ timing. He’s a very advanced thinker on the mound. Although he
gets lots of [Tim] Lincecum comparisons because of his delivery, I think his
stuff works more in an [Roy] Oswalt-type comparison.
“Mechanically, his delivery is an up-tempo, high-paced, high-energy
delivery, somewhat in the Lincecum mold. Trevor is 6-foot-1 and he gets every
bit of his 185 pounds into his delivery. Whereas some may call it a
max-effort delivery, I call it a maximum-optimum delivery. He’s using all of
his body parts equally. He’s using the stronger muscles to protect his arm —
his legs and his trunk. From a true mechanical standpoint, he’s very good
when you slow it down. There aren’t a lot of red flags in what he does.
“The way he trains is unique, and very extensive. Most of his movements are
for explosion. They’re all done in five- to 15-second increments, because
that’s how his body operates in the game. He’s not training for a marathon,
he’s training for the short, explosive movements that’s he going to have to
repeat 100 to 150 times a game.
“Trevor’s arm slot is high-three-quarters, almost overhand at times. He’s
got a little bit of what I would call a ‘head clear’ that gets him into
that slot, a la Lincecum.
“One thing Trevor has is really good deception. That goes back to what I was
saying about the disrupting of timing of the hitters. It’s very hard to pick
up the ball against him. Everything that comes out of his hand looks
identical, and that’s a very uncomfortable feeling as a hitter. If you can’
t discern between the pitches in the first 13-hundredths of a second, you’re
in trouble. That’s what makes guys like that really, really difficult. Up
until his one hiccup in Double-A, which he backed up by throwing five strong
innings in the [Southern League] championship game, he was striking out 40%
of everyone he faced. To me, that’s indicative of hitters just not seeing
the ball.
“Trevor is remarkably well-versed in the study of pitching — the art of
pitching — and the mechanics as they relate to him individually. He
understands the mechanics of what the body needs to do create optimal energy
and force, and how to throw a baseball with the optimal energy and force. He’
s extremely intelligent. The other side of the coin is that he does need to
learn how to apply it to major-league hitters, and that’s going to be the
toughest part.
“If you talk to Trevor, you’ll understand that he pitches to quadrants of
the zone. He also pitches to try to disrupt hitters’ eye levels, so he wants
his pitches to come out on planes as well as to zones. He wants to repeat
pitches in their release point, plane and direction. Trevor is viewed as an
out-of-the-box thinker, but he’s a tactician.”
——
On Archie Bradley: “Archie is different from Trevor in the physical sense —
he’s a lot bigger [6-foot-4, 225 pounds] — but he’s very similar in how
he goes about his business. He’s extremely focused and extremely passionate
about pitching. He’s a very good athlete. As you know, he was also a
football player.
“Archie is more of a two-pitch power package. Both are well above average.
His fastball touched 100 last year and I would grade his curveball, when it’
s on, as good as anybody’s.
“He was a two-pitch guy in his high-school career, but he worked on a circle
changeup extensively in instructional league. I think it’s going to be a
good pitch for him. Our player development guys — Mel Stottlemyre,Jr. and
Jeff Pico — did a nice job citing the emphasis to him. They said, ‘We know
you have the fastball and breaking ball, but let’s make a concentrated
effort to add a third pitch because it will expand your repertoire and make
you more valuable.’ We’ll see down the road if it’s average or plus, but
for all intents and purposes, at this age, he’s a two-pitch power pitcher.
“You hear people say that you need three pitches to start in the big
leagues, but I would argue that. It’s nice to have three, but Ben Sheets
made a nice living with two power pitches. You could go down the list and
name others, as well. Ideally, like Trevor, the more the merrier, to disrupt
hitters’ timing, but you don’t necessarily need that.
“Mechanically, Archie is very solid. He throws from a high-three-quarters
slot with a fairly clean, easy, repeatable delivery for his age. Despite
having [been drafted] out of high school, Archie has been a pretty well known
commodity for years. We’ve been scouting him since he was a freshman in high
school. We watched his delivery continue to improve every year and we saw
some more of that at the end of the regular season last year, as well as in
instructional league. He grades well within the [biomechanical] parameters.
“I think the perception of Archie is that he’s a two-sport athlete who is
gifted with the ability to throw a baseball, and that’s all he does. But one
thing that has been very impressive with Archie, as we’ve gotten to know him
through this process, is that he’s quite the baseball historian. He has a
pretty good sense of what’s going on in the game. He’s not Trevor in that
respect — Trevor is unique — but he’s a pretty astute kid.
“Historically, your better high school arms tend to track through systems
pretty quickly. But to put a timetable on Archie, beyond him hopefully
starting the year with a full-season club, right now I think the idea is to
let him dictate to us how fast he moves. We challenge our prospects. We’re
not afraid to move them and if they show the ability to handle a level, they’
ll continue to progress. Archie has a lot of talent, so he has chance to do
that.”
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