Morning Rundown: Jack Brannigan triple, Alessandro Ercolani pitches, site update

More action in the Arizona Fall League featuring Pirates' prospects

Photo Credit: WTM

Before I get into the recap of the Arizona Fall League, I wanted to do another site update. If you to the home page and look at the top, you will see a tab that says ‘Resource Page’.

If you click that, it will take you to a page that starts off with links to two of Ethan Hullihen’s articles he has written for the site - one breaking down service time and options for the Pirates this year, with the other going over his update on the Regional Sports Network situation.

Both fantastic tools, that will grow with the next couple of days, that you can easily get to now from at the top of the site.

At the bottom of the page is something that WTM and NolaJeffy have been working on collectively since the start of the site.

Resource Page

They have made player pages for everyone in the Pirates system, sorted them by what affiliate they are on, and will link you to every article written about them on the site.

For example, follow it to the Greensboro Grasshoppers team page, select Termarr Johnson and it will take you to his specific player page where it will give you a quick bio, all his information and his history in the system. Not only that, but there is also a link to his Baseball Reference and Fangraphs page, plus any article that he is tagged in on this site.

Truly fantastic work that there is no way I would have ever been able to get to if I was on my own.

The work behind the scenes that they have done, especially WTM for putting most of the pages together and supplying all of the pictures, has been amazing and I am truly thankful for. Not only that, but they’ve also been more than willing to pitch in on some content on this side to allow me to take a day off of writing.

Feel like we have so much more to come, we are just getting started.

Jack Brannigan triple

He struck out twice on Friday, but Brannigan also picked his first triple of the fall while going 1-for-4. Brannigan also walked, and scored two runs while playing shortstop once again.

The triple had an exit velocity of 97 mph, and according to Baseball Savant, would have been an home run in 10 of the 30 major league ball parks.

He’s only batting .207, but has creeped over .700 when it comes to his OPS.

Cleaner outing from Ercolani

19-year-old Alessandro Ercolani made his fourth appearance of the fall, and while it didn’t get off to the best of starts, he finished strong.

Walks have been a major issue for Ercolani so far in the AFL, and he issued another free pass to Jakob Marsee to lead off his inning, followed by a single by Nasim Nunez.

Three of the next four batters he would face were Top 100 prospects - Chase DeLauter, Kyle Manzardo, and Carson Williams.

He gave up a Sac Fly to DeLauter, struck out Manzardo, and got Williams to ground into a force out.

Ercolani got up to 97.1 mph with his fastball, and even though he didn’t get any misses on the eight swings against them, Peoria hitters only put three in play. His cutter, a pitch rated highly on Baseball America, picked up two called strikes on the three thrown overall.

Still not a clean inning, with some control issues still present (he hit a batter sandwiched between Manzardo and Williams), but certainly progress.