Pittsburgh Pirates Arizona Fall League: Three metrics that stood out

Some metrics that stood out from Pirates' prospects in the AFL.

Yesterday, I did a full recap on each player from the Pirates organization that participated in the Arizona Fall League, all eight.

Today, I wanted to look at some of the analytics we could take from their time there. The AFL is already an incredibly small sample size, so it’s easy to take many of the numbers they put up out of context.

That should come as a disclaimer for these, as not every game they played had tracking. Most of the second-half games that Salt River played didn’t, as they played on the road almost exclusively.

It seemed their field was the only one with tracking available through Baseball Savant, so once they wrapped up their home schedule (the first two to three weeks’ worth of games), there wasn’t much data to put together.

95th percentile exit velocity

The more data the better, as it gives you a better picture of what a prospect could be. Since Jase Bowen played in Greensboro and Altoona this past season, there wasn’t much data freely available on him.

It was just 35 batted ball events (BBE) that we got from him, but it was more than what we had during the season.

His 95th percentile exit velocity off of those 35 BBE was 105.5 mph, not great but also not bad.

For comparisons sake, and ironically enough, that number was identical to what Jack Brannigan put up during his time in Bradenton, and a tad higher than Cal Mitchell (105.1).

Brannigan, on the other hand, put up a 100.5 mph mark in the AFL, which puts him towards the bottom of the players we have available data for. We have a bigger sample size of data to go off of during the regular season (101 BBE vs 21), so it would be safer to lean towards what he did in Bradenton previously.

Carter Bins, on an even smaller sample size of 12 BBE, put up a 107.6 mph 95th percentile exit velocity that would put him right next to Henry Davis and Termarr Johnson.

Alessandro Ercolani Curveball

In a world that is already one giant small sample size, Alessandro Ercolani had the smallest.

He only threw 3.2 innings pitched, and struggled extremely with his control, walking 11 batters.

That being said, Ercolani only allowed two hits in that span, for an .167 batting average against.

It was his curveball that did most of the damage, picking up an 85% whiff rate on 14 total swings (12 were whiffs).

Ercolani was the youngest player in the AFL, so it’s not the biggest surprise that he struggled. To that much of an extreme is concerning, but there was also something good to come out of it.

Cam Junker Slider

There wasn’t too much to get excited about when it comes to the Pirates’ pitchers in the Fall League, but there were certain aspects of their games that were encouraging to see.

Cam Junker didn’t have as bad an AFL campaign that some of his base numbers showed, as really one bad outing will do you in.

His slider in particular flashed some solid numbers, picking up 13 whiffs on 31 swings, good for a miss rate of 41.9%.