Prospecting

It should be no surprise that, due to most of my drafted pitchers being awful, I have a massive boner for young prospect arms.  I drafted one rookie and one guy that hasn't even seen MLB, and mid-season picked up two more rookies, a second year player, and Brandon Morrow might as well be a second-year guy, with only 250 innings on his arm in four seasons.  So it's with a mixture of anticipation and shame that I present Brad Lincoln, the Pirates top pitching prospect, who'll see his debut the day after Strasburg's coronation in the PIT-WAS series.

Let's get the ugly out of the way.  His career minor league ERA is 3.82, his WHIP 1.21, 6.9 K/9, and he's lost more games than he's won.  These are discouraging figures for a "top" minor league prospect. 

The upside is that he's been having a decent 2010.  3.16 ERA is a little high, but the 0.99 WHIP is what you'd want to see from a prospect ready to deliver in the majors.  Guys like Kris Medlen and Tommy Hanson had sub-1.0 WHIPs and matching ERAs with more strikeouts than room in front of your stadium seat to tape the K's to the wall. Strasburg needs no detailing. Hellickson has those numbers. Holland had those numbers. Brad Lincoln is at least in the neighborhood.

There is, of course, some devil in what details I can scrounge up.  Let's compare his 2010 with his 2009 campaign at AAA:

IP:  68.1   61.1
ERA:  3.16    4.70
WHIP:  0.99   1.38
BB/9:  1.8   1.5
HR/9:  0.9   1.0
K/9:  7.2   6.2

This tells one of two stories.  Either he had a remarkably unlucky 2009, or a remarkably lucky 2010, since I don't think the extra strikeouts account for that huge difference in ERA and WHIP.  Fangraphs says his BABIP in 2009 was .332, a little on the high side.  They don't have 2010, and neither does Baseball-Reference.

Personally I think he's probably having a fluky season this year, and despite getting to pitch in the NL central, he's going to get the same rude awakening Charlie Morton got.after his amazing 2008 in the minors and subsequent awful fifteen starts for the Braves, which he then repeated in 2009 (the AAA success and MLB misery) with the Pirates.  That doesn't mean I'm not watching with great interest, with Lackey burning a hole in my rate stats.