Rookie pitchers. For long-time baseball fans, those words alone can cause the beginnings of a migraine. Tantalizing potential offset by frustrating bumps in the road that make you wonder what anyone sees in them. Unless you’re a 6’6” monster who throws 102 with command, you will have problems. Such is the reality of baseball. The important thing to do with these players is to keep the faith that the ceiling they display is attainable with time. We’ve got three pitchers with great traits on the docket today. Even if they’re not forces to be reckoned with yet, the possible futures in which they achieve that status are extremely visible.
We start with the one that likely has the toughest road ahead to being a great starter, despite having a foundation just as good as the others. Henderson fits right in with the new breed of pitching prospects who throw fastballs with surprising amounts of rise from a low release. He leverages his below-average height for a pitcher into an excellent shape for his heater. Getting low in his delivery allows him to release the ball at 5.2’ off the ground with a 3/4s arm angle at 33.1°. 17.2” of iVB from that height and angle is an unfair thing to do to hitters.
Even as the league adjusts to this kind of fastball, he’s got more going for him in this regard than a lot of the other pitchers who fit this mold. It’s a fastball somewhat similar to former Brewer Devin Williams. Henderson, having a similar fastball, bodes well in that regard. He’s already quite good at elevating it consistently, maximizing its potential.
That’s only half of the reason to believe in him, however. Henderson’s curse right now is that he’s a two-pitch starter. The reason I like his prospects is that both of those pitches are very, very good. Henderson’s changeup is of the airbender variety. As a whole, Henderson is kind of like a mini-version of Williams. I get that there’s a bit of a negative connotation to that right now, but I promise, this is a good thing.
His fastball-changeup combo likely guarantees a future for Henderson at the major league level. He already boasts solid enough command of both of them, with the potential for improvement considering how little experience he has. Whether or not he’s a reliever or starter is dependent on his ability to develop a third pitch. Most of what follows here is speculative. He’s only thrown 38 pitches that were not his 4-seam or changeup so far in his MLB career. A handful of cutters, sliders, and some “sinkers” that kind of just look like he didn’t get behind his normal fastball properly.
Gathering from his fastball spin activity and usage of an airbender, Henderson is pretty distinctly a pronator, which limits his options somewhat. I will say the few gyro sliders he’s thrown looked nice. They’re scattered all over the pitch map, but the shape is immaculate. Pure gyro break with an inch or less of movement in any direction, 9.6 mph off of his fastball. It’s a little on the slow side, but it would work in the context of his arsenal, assuming he develops the command of it. That’s the most obvious third pitch for him, though it does leave the question of what he throws to beat right-handed hitters. Rising fastballs, changeups, and gyro sliders, even good ones, are biased toward platoon success. He might need a real sinker or something with some glove-side movement to get right-handers out more consistently. That said, the fastball-changeup foundation is so strong that I think he could get away with using those pitches ~75% of the time combined. He’s at 88.6% at the time of writing. He doesn’t need much. Just one more trustworthy pitch pushes him into solid if somewhat volatile starter territory, two more pushes him into future ace talks.
Up next is a pitcher that I don’t consider to be a particularly brave choice to put here. A lot of you probably already have Zebby on a fantasy roster. If he debuted a few years ago, he’d be looked at as the second coming of Gerrit Cole.
Apologies for the massive table, but you see the similarities, right? Especially through the first three pitches. A pitcher with a solid fastball, devastating slider, and a good tertiary tier of pitches with a reputation for hitting his spots. What would have been an excellent fastball a few years ago now reads as good, but not enough to carry an arsenal on its own. Above average velocity and above average movement, but an ultimately somewhat generic shape is not enough to warrant 44.6% usage anymore. Thankfully, the type of slider he throws has aged better than the fastball has in the last couple of seasons. High-80s gyro breakers will never go out of style. The way he uses it is pretty close to optimal, rarely zoning it, opting to seek chases and whiffs instead. The drawback here is that this usage is an obstacle to getting consistent strikes, as you need to be in the upper echelon of inducing swings out of the zone. However, limiting the number of pitches in the zone also limits the potential of leaving one spinning in a bad spot and getting sent far into the night.
Zebby’s other pitches are more of a mixed bag than his reputation would suggest. His cutter is sometimes located well, but too frequently finds itself down the middle or high on the glove side of the zone. Those are hittable spots for a cutter. He needs to get those closer to the arm-side edge for called strikes against lefties, or off the glove-side to tie up lefties and maybe get some chases from righties seeking an outside heater. His changeup command is currently non-existent, which is unfortunate because it has a great shape. His curveball has the potential to be useful if he could locate it better, but too often it’s spiked in the dirt or left hanging.
The path forward is a bit tricky. He’s already doing a lot of things that I like in terms of building out an arsenal. The problem is that he isn’t locating anything other than the fastball and slider in a way that I like. Even then, the fastball has been slipping too low and finding itself waist-high far too much. It’s a small sample, but he’s in the 98th percentile for middle-middle frequency with it. The whole thing needs to be moved up. I do like that he’s shown a knack for hitting the high glove-side corner with it. That’s a great setup for his cutter and slider, as well as a good spot to get some called strikes with his horizontal movement.
It’s not particularly useful advice in this case. Zebby needs to improve the command of his third tier of pitches to take some pressure off his fastball. It’s simple, and it offers no real solutions to solve the problem; it merely identifies it. The good news is that that’s really his only obstacle. He displays a really strong arsenal of pitches in theory; he just needs to refine it.
Gusto has a surprisingly good one-pitch foundation. 94 mph fastballs that don’t have a standout, unique shape are not typically considered to be the backbone of a great arsenal anymore. Gusto’s fastball command is what elevates this pitch to what it is. Elevates is the key word here, as he’s shown an excellent ability to keep this pitch high and above the zone where it can miss bats. While it isn’t the most unique fastball ever, it is still a good one. His high arm angle, combined with an average release height and funky delivery, adds to the pitch’s deception, and it rises substantially more than the average pitch from the release height. It’s not quite an elite shape, but all of its elements combined push it toward that tier.
The good news does not stop there. Like Zebby before him, Gusto has a wide pitch mix that all flash solid shapes and just needs refinement. His curveball is excellent. The command is slightly above average, zoning it frequently and racking up called strikes, more often missing out of the zone than in it. He’s racking up chases due to how this pitch plays off of his fastball as well. More than the stuff, this pitch is great because it has potentially the very best fastball/curveball spin mirror and release match I’ve ever seen. This is huge for disguising the pitches and making it difficult for hitters to tell which is coming until it’s too late.
His cutter could work, in theory, if he would stop throwing it down the middle so much. It’s a solid bridge between the fastballs and breaking balls, and it could stand on its own with enough vertical separation from his 4-seam to function as a slider-ish sort of pitch to lefties if he wanted it to. He just needs to stop throwing them directly down Broadway.
His sweeper likely won’t grade well in stuff models due to it coming in at 82 mph with a foot of horizontal break, something outdone by a lot of pitchers these days. For the role it plays in his pitch mix, though, it should get the job done. He needs an out pitch for same-handed hitters, and this can do the job, assuming he can locate it well. This hasn’t entirely been the case yet. While he sometimes gets it where it needs to be, too frequently it lands in the low glove side quadrant of the zone, not far enough down or away from right-handed hitters to get whiffs. This is something I’d expect him to iron out with time.
At present, his changeup lacks a consistent shape, with varying amounts of vertical movement, but even at its worst, it’s a fine offering in theory. At its best, I like it a lot. While it lacks depth relative to its release height, it’s perfectly fine with how it works with his fastball. His sinker has a surprisingly good shape given his fastball, with substantial movement separation from it. He drops his arm slot a bit to achieve it, but with his delivery, I think that should be at least somewhat hidden. As has been the story with most of the non-primary pitches in this article, he needs to locate it better. Just filling the zone with no plan is not the best way to use a sinker. He has a legitimate weapon here to use against righties; it should pair nicely with the cutter and sweeper. He just needs to use it more optimally.
Gusto may run into the issue of having too many pitches to try to command at once. If any of them have to go in the interest of advancing the others, I’d drop the changeup. His fastball, curveball, and cutter are likely enough to get the job done against lefties once optimized. I don’t have any new pitch suggestions for Gusto; he’s already trying just about everything I would’ve thought of for him. Now it’s about finding what works.
Some Final Thoughts On Rookies
I’ve said something along the lines of “rookie pitchers are rarely finished products” before. This wasn’t wrong, but it was an unnecessary distinction. Pitchers, in general, are rarely finished products. They’re all constantly evolving unless they’ve reached a tier in which they are untouchable, and messing with what they’re doing right would be more risk than it’s worth. This can be a difficult thing to grapple with as fans. Even the best pitchers somehow frequently leave us wanting more. By the design of the game, they are going to fail sometimes. This is especially true for the ones that are new to playing at the highest level the sport has to offer. As ever, patience is a virtue. Granted, the amount of patience you’re willing to afford a pitcher is a judgment call for something like fantasy baseball. But in terms of just watching these guys do their thing as a fan of the game, we have to remember that every pitcher starts somewhere.
These guys are off to mixed starts. Henderson has looked great in a small sample, but is also probably not ready to be a full-time starter with his two-pitch mix. Zebby hasn’t quite found his footing since moving past AA last season, but shows obvious potential. Gusto started the year working out of the bullpen and hasn’t quite figured out how to get major league hitters out across an extended outing yet. All of these are normal paths for pitchers to take. We just have to give them the time to take them.
