This guy I think is the next rotation piece after Fedde. I think that with his development, and getting a full year out of Soto and Kieboom, the team's minors will end up turning out more MLB regulars than it currently is projected to do.
I saw his most recent start (Saturday). He was good. Lots of worm-killer grounders, no deep counts, no walks, lots of guys off-stride, mixed his pitches well. Gave up a couple reasonably long flies (some very wind-aided, one of which went out) on high fastballs, but otherwise he looked good.
Velocity was a question mark, as the stadium gun was quite obviously malfunctioning. Eyeballing it, it looked like low-90s on the fastball, which sinks pretty hard, with the offspeed stuff coming in at least 7-10 mph slower. The bios list him at 6'2," which I don't think he is, but his legs are extremely thick - looks like Roark, just a bit smaller. If he's like that every (or most) times out, he should be in Harrisburg by mid-season.
I expect him to get to AA pretty quickly and then september call-up this year
September seems unrealistic to me. He only threw 24.1 innings last year and has a TJ in his history. He was clearly on an innings limit on Saturday, coming out after 5 despite being quite sharp and not having thrown many pitches (I didn't count, but probably no more than 60 - really). That suggests they're trying to stretch him to cover as much time as possible before shutting him down, but he probably won't last the full year.
