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=== You Won't Get Any Arguments About ... ? ===

 ... your suggestion that Mark Appel (rhymes with repel) is The Compleat Pitcher.  He checks off 100 out of 100 items on a scout's clipboard and is this year's "professional already" college pitcher. 

Appel is this year's Gerrit Cole, a guy who not only has a 92-98 MPH fastball, but who has three pitches, a very clean motion, command in this zone, a pitcher's body, you name it Appel ticks the checkmark.  He's got the stats, too, including 108 strikeouts vs 22 walks and only 3 homers in 13 starts.

 ... you won't get any arguments, either, that Appel has a weirdly hard time striking out hitters, relative to the stuff he has.  It's sort of like if you sent Edgar Martinez down to class A baseball and he hit .292 with 21 homers.  That's fine, but what's going on?  Why isn't he putting on a show?  That's the industry hand-wringing about Appel.

In this game, for example, Appel threw 113 "major-league pitches" and induced only 9 swings and misses.  Remember, you're talking about class-A level competition.

One theory is that Appel's motion is so clean that he doesn't deceive anybody with it; they see the ball too good outta his hand.  The industry is baffled for reasons that Dr. D can't quite understand; to him the problem isn't hard to see at all...

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=== What's Fresh About 'Im? ===

You're talking about an uber-sabermetric pick.  If you consider yourself a pure sabermetrician - nothing wrong with that - we'd cheerfully direct you to Mark Appel's green room, pre-interview.  Third door on the left.

If you fly by your instruments, not your instincts, then it is players with K/BB ratios that you want.  Baseball is about the strike zone.  The scout in you may fret about why the results don't quite match the tools, but after all Mark Appel is running 10K's a game and walking 1+.

College pitchers with great K/BB ratios are the Billy Beane way to go, and Appel is the colleg-est pitcher out there.  You might feel your stomach do a slow roll to the left, but your head and your slide rule are certainly feeling clear-eyed, bushy-tailed and good to go...

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It's not unusual to hear that Mark Appel is hitting 95, 96 miles an hour ...in the ninth inning of the game.  Stop, take a breath, and tell me how many ML pitchers do that.  I'm saying, give me the number of them.

We're not saying he's Alexi Ogando; his FBv would probably be like 93.0 as a rookie, good for 10th in the league or something.  We're just saying, don't undersell the fastball.  Appel's stuff is pretty electric.

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