Nick Adenhart

High Impact Youngsters: Nick Adenhart

Edit: I learned this morning that Nick Adenhart tragically died in a car accident late last night. It’s sad to see such a promising career end so soon.

The Huffington Post also is reporting this.

The Los Angeles Angels and Oakland Athletics Game tonight was a big one.  It’s still only the 6th Inning, but I’m not too concerned with the score.  What I am concerned with is Nick Adenhart tonight, and Brett Anderson tomorrow.

In 2008, Baseball America ranked Nick Adenhart the 24th overall prospect. One year later, Baseball America ranked Brett Anderson the 7th overall prospect in all of baseball.

If either of these two guys were called up at mid-season, there would be Scherzer or Kershaw type hype.  Adenhart was called up late last year, and brought the fail pretty hard but we won’t hold that against him.

Adenhart is still going strong in the 6th inning, and has just been replaced by Arredondo which finalizes his line of 6IP, 7H, 3BB, 5K, and 0ER.

Adenhart has always been more of a tools guy rather than a numbers guy.  His strike-out rate has regressed slowly, from an 8.41 K/9 in A-Ball to about 6.80 K/9 in both AA & AAA. These numbers combined with a lackluster 3-4 BB/9 aren’t exactly screaming TOP-50 Prospect.

It’s Adenhart’s arsenal that saves him.  Adenhart was locating his fastball, and notching it up to 93mph.  On the night, Adenhart’s fastball averaged out at 91.5mph. His devastating curveball comes in at about 75-78mph, and his change-up splits the difference coming in at about 83mph.

Adenhart threw 61 of his 98 pitchers for strikes, which works out to a respectable 62 percent. While Adenhart walked 3 batters, walk-machine Jack Cust accounted for two of them. During both of Cust’s AB, Adenhart kept the ball painted around the corners, and at least a couple of the pitches could have been strikes.

What you should take from this game is that Adenhart kept his breaking pitches down, and was able to locate all three of his pitches.  With a kid like Adenhart, you’re going to want to concentrate on his walks and he couldn’t have faced a better team in order to showcase his improved control.

I’m not one to rush to judgment, but I loved what I saw from Adenhart tonight.  He’ll probably end up getting the W, and while the 5:3  strikeout to walk ratio doesn’t scream break-out, pitch fx tells a different story.

If I was in a deep league, I’d be taking a shot on Adenhart.  You might be able to wait another start before you pick up the kid, but if he posts another solid outing (lets say, 6IP, 2ER, 5K, 2BB) a line of 12 IP, 2 ER, 1.50 ERA, 10 K and 5 BB really starts to look appealing and you may have lost your shot.

Adenhart’s going to have some serious ups and downs, but he’ll get to skip Boston and the rest of his April will look like this: @Seattle,vs.  Detroit, vs. Seattle with the possibility of Minnesota rather than Detroit.

This schedule is perfect for speculating on a kid like Adenhart.  Seattle’s got a mediocre-to-awful team, Ichiro’s hurt, and they play in an extreme pitchers park.  Even if Adenhart has major issues locating, he shouldn’t hurt you *too* badly.

Hopefully one of the pfx guys does something up on Adenhart’s start, if not I’ll fire up the ol’ pfx database and throw up some graphs.