The Cardinals have 4 AFL prospects who are already showing signs of improvement.
The St. Louis Cardinals sent 8 players to the Arizona Fall League this year with all 8 playing for the Glendale Desert Dogs, who are currently 2-3 prior to their game on Monday.
The 8 players the Cardinals sent are divided into 5 pitchers and 3 hitters with the pitchers being Ixan Henderson, Brycen Mautz, Alex Cornwell, Matt Svanson, and Trent Baker and the hitters being Thomas Saggese, Leonardo Bernal, and Nathan Church.
I already wrote a bit about each of these 8 players and my thoughts on them being chosen to go to the AFL. If you want to read that piece, you can do so here.
What I want to focus on today are early results and observations from the first 5 games of AFL action. You may not think that we can glean much information from so few games but these games have Statcast data and there are already some interesting things to note from the pitchers and the hitters alike.
Ixan Henderson is throwing a cutter
This is news because Ixan Henderson didn’t throw a single cutter in Statcast-tracked games with Palm Beach this year. Importantly, just to hammer this point home, he also didn’t throw a single cutter that was mis-classified as a slider. In all the Statcast-tracked pitches we have for Henderson, not one of them could be considered a cutter.
He may have started tinkering in his 6 games with Peoria but this is the first time we have pitch metrics for the new offering.
I will point out that Statcast still calls the pitch a slider but it’s very much not the typical Ixan Henderson slider. Henderson’s typical slider sits 79 mph with 0.5 inches of IVB and 12.8 inches of sweep. The cutter that he showed off in his first AFL outing, despite being classified as a slider, was averaging 86 mph with 7.5 inches of IVB and 1.5 inches of glove side break. That’s a cutter profile.
He only threw the pitch twice so we can’t really make any conclusions about its effectiveness but it’s fun to see Henderson toying with his arsenal a little bit. Interestingly, he threw both cutters against left-handed batters, which is a bit atypical for a left-handed cutter, but Henderson did have pretty heavy reverse splits this year so maybe he sees this pitch as something he can use in same sided matchups as well as opposite-handed ones.
What I want to see next is the arm slot he throws the pitch from. This matters because Henderson drops his arm slot by over 6 inches when he throws his sweeping slider and the slider is the only pitch he throws from that low of a slot. This is something that could really tip off upper level hitters.
So what I’m curious about is if he is releasing the cutter from the same slot as his slider so as to avoid the slider being identified so clearly out of the hand. Then he would have two pitches from that slot with one breaking 2 inches to the glove side and the other breaking 13 or more. That could create an effective 2 pitch tunnel while also keeping the hitter guessing a little bit when he sees the lower release point.
I don’t have the release point data yet so I’m only guessing as to what Henderson could be doing with this pitch but, as I said above, it’s exciting to see him tinker with his arsenal and I can’t wait to see how this new pitch develops.
Matt Svanson is throwing a cutter
I’ll start by saying that I’m a big Svanson guy. I think he has the potential to be a quality big league reliever and although his peripherals took a bit of a step back this year, I don’t believe in him any less. He’s always been a sinker/slide guy and has toyed with a changeup in the past but, for all intents and purposes, that’s not a part of his arsenal.
The two pitch mix gives him a relief-only profile but, lucky for him, both offerings are quality. His sinker will regularly sit in the 95-96 range with plenty of depth (6-10 inches of IVB) and a lot of arm side run (14-17 inches). That will play.
His slider has plenty of sweeping action, sitting around 12-15 inches, and hovers right around the 84 mph mark with 0-2 inches of IVB. Again, that’s a good pitch. You should notice, though, how horizontally-oriented Svanson’s arsenal is as sis sinker and slider can diverge by up to 33 inches.
His arsenal is also one that favors same-sided deployment as both sinkers and sliders tend to show pretty large platoon splits.
Enter the cutter.
The cutter serves two purposes for Svanson. It halves the horizontal divergence of his other two pitches and it gives him a pitch he can use against left-handed hitters.
The first point is important because by throwing a pitch with close to 0 horizontal break, he is effectively creating a bridge between his other two pitches which, theoretically, should create a more effective tunnel for his entire arsenal. Now instead of his a 33 inch gap between his two pitches, he’s looking at more of a 13-17 inch gap between his sinker and his cutter and his slider and his cutter.
The four cutters that Svanson threw in his first AFL outing had 7, 1, 0, and 2 inches of horizontal break. I think we can assume that Svanson isn’t trying to get 7 inches of cut with this pitch since it’s one that should hover between 0-3 inches in order to serve the two purposes mentioned above. On that specific cutter, Svanson probably got on the side of the ball too much and ended up with a grip and release somewhere between his slider and the new cutter.
The other 3 cutters, the ones with 1, 0, and 2 inches of cut, are what he should be aiming for. He will likely try to build some consistency with this pitch in the fall so that he can really use it extensively next season to help combat the large platoon splits he showed this year (.633 OPS vs RHBs, .940 OPS vs LHBs).
I’m a big fan of this development and given the movement profile and Svanson’s ability to throw the pitch hard (90-92 mph), I think this can become a viable pitch for him if he can gain enough feel to command it.
Brycen Mautz has improved his changeup
This is another huge development because Mautz’s changeup is/was, frankly, quite terrible. In the Statcast-tracked pitches we have from Mautz’s time in Single-A last year, we see a pitch that mirrored Mautz’s sinker far too much and was ineffective because of that.
On average, Mautz’s changeup was 6 mph slower than his sinker and only deviated vertically by 7 inches and horizontally by 1 inch. That’s just not a good profile for a changeup which is why it generated a whiff rate of just 14.1% and allowed a wOBA of .401
Those figures are bad for any pitcher but they’re especially bad for a more advanced college arm facing Single-A hitters.
This is why I’ve never been high on Mautz as a starting pitcher. The sinker/slider combination is good but his curveball is more of a get-me-over pitch and his changeup has never shown much promise.
But now we have some evidence that Mautz has continued to tinker with his changeup. Take a look as his pitch specs from last year compared to his pitch specs from his first AFL outing:
At the same velocity, Mautz’s changeup is now getting an an extra 3 inches of running life and 4 additional inches of IVB drop.
That’s huge because his changeup now has an extra inch or two of running life when compared to Mautz’s sinker and it now regularly gets an extra 10+ inches of drop.
It sounds like this is a pitch he has been working on throughout the season and especially in the second half so I don’t think this is a sudden tweak as much as it’s the result of continued tinkering. So perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that Mautz’s best month of the season was his final month, in which he put up a 3.24 ERA and 32% strikeout rate.
A viable changeup is huge for Mautz’s prospects going forward because it not only gives him a true 3rd pitch but it also gives him a way to combat right-handers, who OPSed .890 against him this season (compared to just .568 for left-handers).
Fixing those issues would give the lefty a chance to stay in the rotation long-term instead of moving to the bullpen and, as someone who has long thought Mautz profiles best as a reliever, that is exciting to me. This is a huge development for the former second round pick and I’m excited to see how his changeup fares this fall.
Thomas Saggese has a new max exit velocity
Thomas Saggese’s hardest hit ball came in the majors when he hit a ball 108.4 mph. That’s not particularly hard for a max exit velocity and it really highlights who Saggese is as a hitter. He’s someone who doesn’t have tremendous raw power but still gets to his power in game because he’s so adept at pulling the ball in the air.
While that scouting report is still true, it’s notable that Saggese recorded a new max exit velocity in just his second game in the Arizona Fall League.
In the first inning, Saggese crushed a double at 110.8 mph against Padres prospect Ryan Bergert. Not only does that represent a new max exit velocity, but it clears his old high by over 2 mph. That’s a huge improvement and it’s encouraging to see that Saggese has that kind of raw power in him, even if it only came against a Double-A pitching prospect.
Final Thoughts
I don’t have any updates on Nathan Church, Leonardo Bernal, Trent Baker, or Alex Cornwell yet but for only 5 games of action we’ve already seen quite a few encouraging tweaks from Cardinals prospects. Even though this isn’t the most exciting group of players to follow, the group is getting more and more interesting as we see the changes they are making.
It’s hard not to be encouraged by the additions of cutters for Henderson and Svanson in an attempted to cover some of their weaknesses and the same can be said for Mautz’s improved changeup shape. For Saggese, what I really want to see is better swing decisions but I can’t complain about him showing more raw power too.
Overall, it’s been a full AFL campaign already with plenty more to come.
Thanks for reading.