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Sandy - Raleigh's picture

Radke sounds like the best "upside" comp for Fister.
The downside comp is probably someone like Kirk Saarloos.  (His career minors numbers at the Cube are screwed up currently due to some major gaffe loading the 2009 data).  But, at age 23, in AA, he had an 8.9 to 2.3 (and a sick 0.1 HR).  He moved to AAA that year and posted an impossible 10.7 to 1.1 K/BB with a 0.6 HR rate.  The rest of his career has been sliced and diced between AAA and spot-starting in the bigs (with nominal success).  Against MLB hitters, his stellar minors numbers morphed into 4.4K, 3.3BB, 1.1HR. 
The thing I like most about low-walk guys is that I believe these are the guys most naturally capable of repeating a motion.  If you can repeat motions, then that opens the door to learning new pitches quickly ... so even if initial success isn't immediate, I think low-K guys are more naturally capable of ADJUSTING their games to prevent hitters from zeroing in on their weaknesses. 
The high-K, high-walk guys, Nomo, Kerry Wood ... I think these guys have great difficulty when their trains jump the track.  The low-walk, low-K guys are "perceived" to be barely hanging on, where the least drop in K-rate can end their run, (Wash is an example).  I think the high-K, high-walk guys are actually in a similarly precarious position, because they have lower adaptive skills, even though their "stuff" may be higher value.
I haven't done any formal study, but I get the sense that the low-walk guys who succeed for awhile, then go thru a bad spell, seem more resilient.  They add a new pitch (flipper), or something else that gets them back to where they were, (but rarely beyond).  While, the stuff kings seem to have a much harder time recovering from dips in performance.
 

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