Welcome to the Robles fan club.
I've been calling him the next Erik Bedard for a while now. He's short, so he's undervalued. If someone like, say, Dan Cortes would throw in the mid-90s with a great changeup and an improving and potentially deadly curveball, he would be the #1 pitching prospect in someone's system. Oh, wait, Cortes was...and without the ability to control anything he throws.
Robles has his control issue days, but most of his control problems this season came in a month of working on mechanics, not as a general rule.
April: 9 K/3.5 BB (perfectly fine for a power pitcher)
May: 10.5 K/4.5BB (borderline with the BB but still 2.35:1 control)
June: 8.5 K/6BB (cue mechanical work that threw him off the wagon)
July: 9 K/1BB (wait, what?)
He's gonna have his walks. Most power pitchers ARE 8-9K /3.5 BB guys. Bedard? 8.8 K/ 3.6BB. A career ERA+ of 121 says that the lefty power FB/Curve/Change pitcher can work better than most skillsets out there.
Robles will have Bedard Disease in that he strikes out a lot of guys but can take a number of pitches to do it. That means his outings might only go 5 or 6 innings, and the fact that he seems to wear out at 100 pitches also limits his top-end.
I can live with that. He hasn't yet gotten tired as the SEASON goes along, and he will have his games where he doesn't get tired and mows down the lineup forever. But just look at his by-inning stats this year and you'll see what happens (sample size alert).
1st: 8.9K / 3.5 BB
2nd: 10.3 K/ 2.3 BB
3rd: 10.3 K / 3.6 BB
4th: 10 K / 3.7 BB
5th: 6.9 K / 8.5 BB
6th: 8.7 K/ 4.8 BB
Good in the first, KILLS in innings 2-4, hits a wall in the 5th. If he's still going in the 6th it's not terrible.
Over his career, it's basically the same sort of story. IF he's going past the 5th, he's decent, but he's a 5-6 inning pitcher. Again, there are worse things. The guy has a ridiculous arm, and the fewer pitches he can throw in the beginning of games the better he'll be as a starter. If he can get weak contact instead of no contact (and can get better fielders behind him) then he can stay a starter. The need to strike everyone out is a power pitcher's strength, and his weakness. As Robles matures, I'm curious to see if he can save his Ks for when he needs em and get some 10 pitch innings to let him go later.
But I try not to pre-judge my talent. We moved Soriano to the pen because he only had one weapon (that FB) and after 4 innings guys could catch it. Mauricio has 3 potential weapons. Those who want to move Robles to the pen have apparently forgotten that he's worse against lefties than righties, so you'd need to use him as something other than a lefty specialist - and since there's nothing WRONG with his mechanics that would force him to the pen, let the kid start.
As a true power pitcher who has made it to AAA at the age of 21, he's got the best non-Pineda starting arm in our minors. Let him use it, until he proves his starting capabilities one way or the other.
~G
The stuff, as PBNW reports:
Robles is not a big man (listed at 5’10?, 205 lbs), but gets his fastball up there in the mid-90s, and has a nice changeup and a decent curve. He came out hard, with his fastball clocking in at 93-95 MPH with a couple at 96 and 97 in the first. The changeup was registering around 85, and the one curveball I noticed was at 77.
(For those who haven't been to Cheney, it does have a pretty good radar gun up on the scoreboard.) Obviously 96 and 97 fastballs in the first inning, near September for a 21-year-old, that's bigtime velocity for a young lefthand pitcher. The last pitch on the first vid is an overpowering FB well located, leaving the hitter no chance.
Remember, for lefties you add +2 mph -- LHP's are overrepresented in the baseball population and therefore cut from less-specialized cloth. Hitters are used to seeing a slower FB from lefties. So, mid- and upper-90's from a lefty? That's rough. How many 95 lefties do you see who are not effective? ...much less those with plus changeups...
...................
The arm action is sometimes okay and sometimes superb ...if you watch the hitters in these two vids, they aren't notably in between, despite the -12 mph difference between the FB and change. In part, that's because those two hitters were simply defending the strike zone.
Robles looks, in those two vids, like a work in progress, simply in that the offspeed stuff frazzes in and out. And you can see the hitters adjust to the offspeed more comfortably than they should, given his stuff.
Jon Lester-, maybe CC Sabathia-type raw velocity and offspeed stuff, the kind of stuff those guys had when they were 21. Minor complaint: a guy like Sabathia gets much more downward bite on his pitches, being bigger and coming over the top more. We'll have to see how the low release point affects things. But there are tough lefties, like Santana and El Sid, who make it work from lower down.
Robles is definitely a golden boy.
.
Cheers,
Dr D
Comments
http://www.mynorthwest.com/category/mariners_blog_articles/20100815/Will...
Comments are from Carl Willis (who was the minor league pitching coordinator and is now the MLB pitching coach -- I need a scorecard)
Highlight 1, re Pineda: "This is a young man that we don't foresee coming to the big leagues and being a number 5 starter or long reliever, this is an impact individual that is going to be at or near the top of the rotation so we are being very careful and taking into consideration his innings and his feelings and we are doing our best to make the right decision."
----Pineda will come up more like a Felix than a Feierabend -- good sign.
Highlight 2, re Robles: Robles has earned the promotion but still has room for improvement in his already good command. He called his fastball "tremendous."
----I do think it will take more time to figure out how Robles helps the most, but he's going to have an MLB role of some sort.
Highlight 3, re Cortes: At 6'6 with a fastball that tops out at 100 mph Cortes could be an intimidating reliever. His struggles with command are less exposed in the shorter role and Willis is happy with what he has seen in the switch.
----Cortes in the pen goes 100?!
Z's nuclear arsenal of throw-ins and odd-chance pickups (Lueke, Cortes, Wilhelmsen) is starting to look like a potential monster pen (assuming all 3 have moved past their prior indiscretions).
Pitching options in 2011:
Pineda: 9.6 K /2.1 BB, 2.79 FIP, #1-2 starter potential.
Lueke: 14.1 K.1.8 BB, 1.49 FIP, closer-in-waiting
Cortes: 14.2 K/2.8 BB, 1.16 FIP (as reliever), closer-in-waiting
Varvaro: 10.2 K/ 4.6 BB, 3.24 FIP, potential set-up man
Pitching options in 2012:
Robles: 9.4 K /4.0 BB, 3.98 FIP, #2-3 starter potential (or the greatest swingman evah)
Paredes: 10.4 K / 3.1 BB, 2.34 FIP vs lefties (12.6 / 3.7 in 2009) - LOOGY
Wilhelmsen: 9.5 K/1.6 BB, 2.54 FIP in low minors (set-up man in '12, longer for starter)
That's not counting guys like Richard (8 K/2.5BB in relief this year at HD and Tenn), Cleto (surviving HD with 7.5K/3.4BB as a starter), Vasquez (6.3 K/ 1 BB in 3 stops) etc who are more like 2013 options, or middling starters in 2010 like Hensley whose arm is better than his results and might benefit from a move to the pen in a year or so if starting doesn't work out.
There are at least a half-dozen pen arms that we drafted this year (Pryor, Burgoon, Snow, Kesler, Bischoff, etc) who have rapid bullpen potential as well and could get into the mix in a couple of years.
We have interesting arms. We've had to suffer through watching this fairly toothless pen in 2010, but 2011 won't be like this. Not if some of these guys get the call and do what they look very able to do.
~G
:- O
And hadn't noticed the similarities in body type, even mechanics, until you mentioned. One of your best calls that, b'wana.
How quick was it that you called Robles as the key to the Wash deal? Was that same day?
But am trying to decide if he actually equals Felix Hernandez as a prospect. Maybe not, but he's as close as it gets.
:homersimpsonvoice: The word "awesome" gets tossed around a lot these days...
Yeah, same day.
http://www.marinercentral.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=2989&view=findpo...
I called him immediately the best pitching prospect in our system (because Pineda was out with the forearm/elbow injury and there was no way to know how he would recover). I thought he was the # 2 starting pitching prospect in the Tigers' system. The rumor at the time was that Scott Elbert was on the table previously from the Dodgers and we took a much lesser deal for Robles.
Elbert: 10.4K/5BB, 7 hits per 9.
Robles: 9.8K/4.6 BB, 7.3 hits per 9
Both are power lefties. Elbert's control has gotten worse as he gets to higher levels. I'm fine with the power lefty we got, thank you very much. To me it looks exactly the same now as it looked at the time: Jack asked for a starting pitcher immediately and got one in French to be a placeholder in the rotation, and then he got a potential #2 from Detroit for 3 months of Washburn.
I dunno if Robles will work out or even stay with the org (he has to be making himself into quite a trade piece by now on the market) but so far so good. He could be a lefty Clint Nageotte, or he could be special. I'm still firmly on the "special" side of the equation.
~G