I admit I was a little disappointed that BA ranked Adam Ottavino only the 15th best prospect in all of the Florida State League. After all, he was a first round draft pick and was among the league leaders in ERA (3.08), strikeouts (128), and innings pitched. (143.1) Honestly though, I wasn’t all that surprised. While Ott put up some impressive numbers, he does have his wrinkles.
Background
Most of you are pretty familiar with Ottavino by now. He was selected 30th overall in the 2006 amateur draft out of Northeastern University. He dominated for three years in college and was ranked by Baseball America as the 54th best player available in the draft. (Joba Chamberlain was ranked 12th…and was still available at 30 but his stock took a tumble due to injury concerns). For Northeastern he had a K/9 rate a little above 10 and a 2.5 K/BB ratio. Control was a bit of a problem for him, but nothing overly alarming. He caught Cardinal scout Kobe Perez’s eye when he faced the Boston Red Sox in an exhibition game during spring training, who cited falling in love with his mixture of confidence, stuff and aggressiveness. The overall reaction to his selection was met anywhere between tepidness to enthusiasm by most draft-niks.
Abilities
Most of you already know this, but for the sake of being thorough here goes—Ottavino throws a 90-94 MPH four seam fastball, though he can at times dial it up to 96. To go with that, he has a plus slider. He’s experimented with the sinker but junked it early in the season. Per an interview at VEB Ottavino felt a lot better about his change up, saying-
My changeup is the first thing. It’s 100 percent better than it was last year. I’m throwing it to righties and lefties now, and I really think that it’s a big weapon for me now.
Performance
His main issue is with control. He walked 10.2% of the batters he faces this past season, a rather high number. During the season, it seems like his control was come and go, as shown by the graph below-
The middle of the season he was in command, by the beginning and end of the season he was a bit of a mess. Another problematic issue for Ottavino was his K% rate declined considerably as the season went on-
He started off just dominating hitters in pure “fascist” fashion, towards the end of the season he was far too “democratic” for his own good, and it showed up in his month by month ERA. Could mean he was hurt, or just tired. I don’t know for sure, but it’s troubling.
Speaking of being “fascist” on the mound, another worrisome sign is that he rarely lasted deep into a ballgame. Out of his total innings pitched, only 12.3% of those innings were past the 5th inning. 3.8% of his innings were pitched in the 7th inning or beyond. That tells me that he could be trying too hard to strike guys out and is running up his pitch count. He admitted later in the aforementioned interview with lboros that the “pitch to contact” philosophy was hard to wrap his brain around.
I’ve discussed this with my coaches: The high fastball can be effective for me. I get a lot of strikeouts with it. And for me, a strikeout is the safest way to get an out. I know that I shouldn’t be shooting for strikeouts all the time, because that’s how your pitch counts get high. But there are certain circumstances where I gotta limit the damage right there, and I gotta go for the strikeout. That’s just inside me. It’s the way I’ve always pitched, and it’s tough to get away from that.
I’m one of the last people you’ll hear say that you should turn strikeout pitchers into finesse guys, but it is pretty clear by the numbers that Ottavino is a little too Mussolini for his own good. You could maybe infer that the league maybe eventually caught up to him, and weren’t fooled as often by his slider as they were earlier in the season. On the bright side, it does look like his changeup did indeed turn into an out type of pitch looking at his splits, he had better success striking out lefties then righties. (9.72 K/9 versus 7.28). In the previous year, he struggled quite a bit against southpaws.
Looking at the big picture, I believe Ottavino has a lot of talent to work with, but he doesn’t look like a slam dunk. The stuff is there, it’s a matter of him putting it all together and I have faith that he can. The proof of the pudding is in AA, we’ll see what happens. I think his ceiling is the highest of any starter currently in the system, save Jaime Garcia.
Thanks to First Inning for the graphs, and both FI and minorleaguesplits.com for the numbers.
Filed under: Adam Ottavino, prospect profiles | Tagged: Adam Ottavino, prospect profiles
erik
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fewgoodcards
roarke49
theredbaaron
i was also a little disappointed when i saw ottavino ranked all the way down at 15, but after you stand back and look at the list that is about as high as you can expect. he was the 9th ranked prospect in the league. there are 3 guys that you can’t even argue with, jake mcgee, wade davis, and johnny cueto are just flat out studs. ian kennedy was also drafted ahead of him, and pitched extremely well at 4 levels including the majors. carlos carrasco and chris volstad were named the top prospects in their organizations last year, so BA is going to rank them pretty highly (i would put ottavino ahead of volstad). deolis guerra is just a BA fave mostly b/c he is young and ottavino wasn’t going to be ranked ahead of him even though he has better stuff and better results currently. outman is the only one that is really debatable. his control problems are even worse than ottavino’s, but he is a lefty with 2 plus pitches.
i still don’t know how we didn’t draft outman. he was drafted the same year as nick webber out of central missouri st. you would think when they were there watching webber they might have caught a look of a lefty that can rush it up to 94 with a nasty slider.
i forgot to say ottavino was ranked ahead of brett sinkbeil who was drafted ahead of him last year, he was also ranked ahead of the $10 million man jeff samardzija.
Nice report…
With Ottavino I think I am suffering a bit from C. Lambert disease. He has nice stuff, but until he succeeds at AA I won’t be sold. I also hope that the change is there as he says. If so, he could be a really interesting prospect. I would say the ceiling is higher than Jaime, but the likelihood of reaching it is lower. Maybe a 9E vs. Jaime’s 8C (using McKamey ratings)…
You just have to love the FBall… When you look at pure numbers Norrick looks just as good if not better imho…
I’ve always like Ottavino, much more than I ever liked Lambert. I think his roller-coaster season this year was at least partly attributable to the battle over the 2 seamer. I can’t help but wonder what will happen to the 2-seamer battle now that Walt is gone and how that might affect Ottavino next year.
lawless…actually, mckamey gave ott a 8d going into this past season, garcia 8c. garcia has a plus curve and sinker, i wouldn’t say he’s behind in ottavino in terms of stuff. the high K+GB combo is a pretty nice recipe.
good call on norrick, their numbers are pretty close together. both have nearly as high of K%, BB%. norrick’s babip makes him look flukier, and ottavino gets more grounders. and ottavino is nearly two years younger.
i too fear the lambert-esque move to AA, but one thing to think about lambert is that he lost quite a bit of his stuff when he moved to pro ball. ottavino has maintained his stuff and maybe even added a tick or two to the fastball. sure he needs to work on his control, but you can get away with a little more when you are sitting 92-94 with movement like ottavino instead of 88-90 like lambert.
At what point does the age issue with Norrick go away? AA? AAA? The age issue to me is only relevant to the number of years you can be productive as a pro (which he’s a long way from worrying about that), the extent that your physical maturity is allowing you to dominate others and limits your improvement, and the extent your experience mental maturity does the same thing. For the last two, I think it is different for every player. Does anybody have any first hand experience (or even second or third hand for that matter) that indicate what role Norrick’s physical and mental maturity are playing in his success? Is it helping a lot or is it a non-factor?
Hopefully now that Walt and probably Tony are gone i’m interesed to see were the cardinals start going with starting pitching in the minor leagues. Also, hopefully we can give reyes another chance by letting him pitch the way he wants to. I’m hoping Ottavino will be able to focus on his strengths and maybe improve upon his 2006 numbers. If Tony leaves what will happen to Duncan?
I have wondered the same thing. If Tony goes but Duncan stays since he is under contract for next year. What does that mean for the young pitching? I have no idea myself.
I’m confused about the idea that Tony and Dave Duncan were dictating how our players developed in the minors.
On the one hand, we’re told that Walt lost control over the minors entirely, and had no say over anyone who wasn’t on the 40-man roster. So if it’s true that Jeff Luhnow was/is in charge of scouting, drafting, and development, then it must be Luhnow’s idea to put so much emphasis on the 2-seam fastball.
Conversely, I suppose it could be true that Luhnow’s policy was a nod to Tony and Dunc’s preference for sinking fastballs. Which would suggest, I think, that Luhnow had a line of communication with Tony and Dave that went around Walt.
Or maybe they communicated telepathically.
Anyway, until someone says otherwise, I’m going to assume the pitching policy is Luhnow’s preference and remains in place.
Two thoughts about Ottavino specifically:
A poster on another board, who called himself Redbirdinsight, described himself as someone involved in player development for the Cardinals in Jupiter. He struck me as genuine, and the board’s moderators vouched that he was what he said he was.
He said Ott’s problem wasn’t with the grip on his fastball, but on his inability to throw first-pitch strikes. He had high praise for Adam’s stuff, but said he hadn’t yet learned to pitch like a professional.
It seems to me that he’s still young enough to learn to harness his stuff, but I don’t know enough about player development to know if there’s a specific window of opportunity for pitchers to learn this, or if it’s an unpredictable learning curve. I know that Koufax guy took a while but eventually got the hang of it. Other guys, like Greg Maddux, seemed to be born with it.
One more thought:
Ottavino came out of Northeastern. I read a while ago that Northeastern’s baseball field is one of the most extreme pitching-friendly environments in all of college baseball.
I wonder if that affected his development.
I also wonder if Luhnow’s stats-focused staff took that into consideration when they drafted him.
lou–it is a severe pitchers park. per boyd nation, it was a 75 between 2003-2006…that’s just nuts. however, i’d be pretty confident the cardinals are aware of this.