Sleeper Pitching Prospect Red Sox Style

The Boston Red Sox have done a great job over the past several years drafting and developing excellent young pitchers. Clay Buchholz, Justin Masterson, Jon Lester, and Michael Bowden have all come through the Red Sox farm system, and are all poised to help create perhaps one of the most talented and deepest young pitching staffs in the majors. While most teams would be ecstatic to have such talent in the wings, the Red Sox are quickly restocking their minor league pitching pool.

One of the up-and-coming young pitchers for the Sox is a young man by the name of Stolmy Pimentel, a 19 year old right hander from the Dominican Republic. Though young and inexperienced, Pimentel has 4 pitches, including a 94 mph fastball, a very good changeup, a curve, and a sinker in the making. At short season A ball in 2008, Pimentel averaged 8.7 strikeouts per 9 innings, while allowing just 2.4 walks and a WHIP of 1.08. With a career ground ball rate of 49%, the development of his sinker and curve should help him keep the ball on the ground more often, as well as create more headaches for hitters over the years.
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One More Sleeper for 2009 Yankees Style

I was reading over the list of the top 30 pitching prospects that Project Prospect recently released, and while I thought it was a pretty solid list, I thought they left out one very important prospect that has also failed to appear on almost every other prospect list that I've seen so far.

While a lot of young pitchers drafted in the 2007 draft have received most of the fanfare, in 2008 Jairo Heredia -- a very talented but unheralded international signee in the Yankees farm system -- made a very strong case for himself to be included in the discussion of elite young arms in baseball. Below is a list of several young pitchers that appeared on the top 30 list at Project Prospect, the ranking they received, their 2008 stats, and finally the 2008 stats for the Yankees new young stud.


Of the pitchers included in the above list, I think Bumgarner is the only one that Heredia can't currently compete with. Otherwise, he posted very competitive numbers all around at A ball, and did so at a year or 2 younger than all of the other pitchers on this list. While I can't really say that he's absolutely better than any of them, I do feel like he obviously has equivalent talent and he deserves to be mentioned along side the other pitchers. Leaving Heredia off of just about every major top 100 prospects list seems like a mistake to me, and I think we'll see him rise quickly up the ranks over the next year.

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