Drake Fellows Appears for FCL Pirates

First Time on the Mound in Two Years

Drake Fellows has been a mystery man since the Pirates acquired him from San Diego in the Joe Musgrove trade in January 2021. The Padres drafted him in the sixth round out of Vanderbilt in 2020, but he didn’t appear for them that year. The scouting on Fellows back at draft time was a fastball that reached 94 with shaky command, an excellent slider and a fringy change. After the off-season trade, he opened 2021 on the injured list. The Pirates sent Fellows to rehab in the FCL in June, but after 11.2 IP divided between there and Bradenton, he went on the injured list and eventually had Tommy John surgery. That cost him all of 2022 and he opened 2023 on the 60-day injured list.

On Tuesday, Fellows finally made it back into action for the Pirates, in a rehab start in the FCL. It lasted just an inning and went well enough. Fellows’ command wasn’t good, which is far from shocking. He walked the first batter, struck out the next, walked the third and got a double play grounder. It’s not much to go on, aside from the obvious, and at this stage meaningless, control issues. Fellows’ velocity looked good, I’d guess (in the absence of gun readings) that it at least approached the mid-90s some of the time. The slider also looked good, and Fellows threw a few changeups. And he appears to be healthy.

Hunter Barco, who made his pro debut five days ago following his own Tommy John surgery, came next. Barco breezed through three innings, as his command looked sharp. He retired the first eight hitters, six on grounders and two on strikes. The ninth hitter reached him for a double, but he struck out the next guy on three pitches. The hitters obviously had a lot of trouble elevating anything Barco threw, especially his slider. He sure looked like he could be pitching in full season ball.

As an added bonus, the pitcher after Barco was Michael Kennedy, the Pirates’ fourth rounder from 2022. (Two lefties even!) Kennedy wasn’t as sharp as when I’ve seen him before. He was missing some and got too much of the plate at other times, with the result of seven hits and three walks over three innings, and four runs. He gave up a lot of hard contact in his first two innings, but no runs thanks to leaping snares of liners by Wesley Zapata and Jeral Toledo, a caught stealing and a pickoff. (Kennedy has a good move.) The runs all came in Kennedy’s third inning, much of it due to three cheap hits.