Minor League Recap: Pitching prospects also have bad days.

I don’t have reliable ground ball numbers, but Stewart’s peripheral numbers are a mixed bag this season.

His strikeout rate is significantly down, but he’s also improved his walk rate, which I think is a great trade-off for a starting pitcher. He’s also lowered his HR rate, which is probably the very hardest statistic to stabalize, and is almost meaningless in the minors unless it’s extremely high or extremely low. The whole point of having a xFIP and FIP is because HR rates are the single most likely statistic to regress to league average (as far as I understand). While that doesn’t mean a flyball pitcher wont continue to give up a bunch of home runs, it does assure us that a 6 start sample size for Zach this season is almost statistically irrelavent to count that as a positive yet.

All of this is in an extremely small sample size, but his IP/start has went up from less than 5.1 innings/start to just a shade under 6 (including this start). If he can see even a marginal improvement, to say 6.2 IP/GS then he’ll be setting himself up nicely to be able to pitch into the 7th as a rookie in the big leagues next season.

Considering the small sample size, I’d say it’s more likely Zach is improving his control and pound the strikezone more. This will cause him to give up a few more hits until he can find a balance and locate his out pitches. All things considered, I think it’s for the best that Zach’s control is improving, because his stuff is good and will always be there.

Not including yesterday’s game, FIP tends to agree that Zach is pitching significantly better this season, over half a run better. As a soon-to-be 25 y/o, I think he really needs to be in AAA for us to draw any more conclusions.

His bat is worrisome, but it’s only his second season here. I think he’s just turned 22 if my memory serves me. We all want to see our young guys who get all the attention bust into the big leagues at 23, but if it takes Hech until he’s 24-25 that’s not a big deal. We have Yunel blocking him anyway, so 2-3 more seasons of minor ball wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world. If he’s hitting that way at this time next season I think we should be very worried.

So hopefully we’ll see an improvement later in the season to get the call-up.

Thanks so much for your daily recaps of the minor leagues. I follow them almost every day on the play-by-play (for the low minors) and gameday for the AAA games, but when I do miss them your recaps highlight everything I’m interested in knowing. Truly, a great job!

I do have a suggestion, instead of having a game-by-game GO , might not a cumulative GO be more informative? Game-by-game is subject to wild fluctuations, and what we’re really after is how often the pitchers can keep the ball on the ground over the course of a season. I totally understand if that info isn’t available or is too hard to obtain, but I thought I’d throw it out there for you to chew on :)