The Week in Bradenton: Marauders Sporting a New Cast
Some relief meltdowns led to a difficult week
Bradenton continued to carve out playing time for 2024 draft picks, as one pitcher and five position players from the draft have joined the team. That’s in addition to Yordany De Los Santos, Jhonny Severino, Zander Mueth, and three other pitchers being promoted from the FCL Pirates.
The Marauders have been rotating players through their lineup, mainly juggling two categories of position players: the guys who’ve just joined the team and quite a few guys who are struggling to show they’re ready for Greensboro.
This latter has been a serious problem with the team’s hitting prospects, leading to a logjam of players in the Florida State League who just don’t look ready for the next level.
The Marauders’ position players at the start of the season were almost the same as the ones who finished last season there. Having nearly a whole group of position players repeating a low level like this is a sign of significant failures in scouting and/or development. Even at the end of the season, the problem continues. Ideally, the new arrivals would have replaced players who moved up, but the only one who did was Omar Alfonzo. The Pirates made room by releasing a couple of players and reassigning several to the FCL, which, of course, has finished its season.
The drafted players haven’t made a big impact yet. They have hit two grand slams, one an inside-the-park job when the right fielder slipped and fell on a routine single. The sample sizes, of course, make the stats completely meaningless at this stage.
Defensively, Will Taylor and Andrew Patrick both look like they can cover plenty of ground in center. Taylor had weirdly divergent scouting reports. Some said his football knee injury had reduced his plus-plus speed to average, while others said he’s still very fast. The disagreement is a puzzle because I’m pretty sure the stopwatch was invented a while ago. Patrick is reminiscent of Matt Gorski: a tall, athletic player with good speed. His approach at the plate may be pretty similar, too.
The two players moving up from the FCL have gotten divergent results, too, in a bigger sample size. Severino is hitting 281/349/509 through Sunday. Importantly, swing-and-miss issues, which were the big worry with him, haven’t materialized, as he has a 22% K rate, comfortably below Haines territory. De Los Santos, by contrast, is struggling at 149/298/170. The good news is that the massive contact problems he experienced with Bradenton last year aren’t the issue, as he has ten walks and 11 strikeouts in 58 plate appearances.
The Marauders had a rough week, going 2-4 against Dunedin. The hard part was that they led in three of those contests, only to have relievers come in and blow up the game. It was exactly one reliever in each game. (I’m not getting into names.) Bradenton got some good relief appearances, especially from Greiber Mendez on Thursday and Inmer Lobo on Saturday.
Mendez went three innings, allowing just a hit and a walk and fanning five. He was charged with one run, which scored when . . . the other guy came in. Mendez sits at 91-92 and keeps the ball low with good movement. He got 38% misses on swings in this game.
Lobo went four scoreless innings, also allowing one hit, with three walks and two strikeouts. I don’t know how things are going to work for him going forward. His fastball averages less than 87 mph. He throws a change and a low-spin slider. In this game, his outfielders spent a lot of time chasing down fly balls at the wall. That could be a big problem at Greensboro.
One pitcher from the 2024 draft made his debut. Seventh-rounder Connor Wietgrefe threw one inning in relief on Tuesday and went two innings in a start on Saturday. Wietgrefe is a lefty who throws from a pretty low 3/4 angle, as I think you can see in the photo. He adds a sweeping slider and, occasionally, a change. How well the change develops might determine whether he has a chance at starting.
Wietgrefe struck out the side in the relief appearance. There was one baserunner mixed in on a foul popup that the right fielder fumbled into fair territory. It was incorrectly scored as a hit. In the start, Wietgrefe fanned the first two hitters he saw, then gave up a home run. He allowed two more runs, both unearned in his second inning, and three hits overall.
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