Which young MLB starters who recently debuted are best set up for success?

The cupboard is currently being ransacked. As their original options go down due to injury or poor performance, teams are rifling through their minor-league options and giving the kids chances. It’s a fun time of the year, ripe with opportunity — but also the reality that every new young starter won’t go on to become a star.

Picking the ones who’ll thrive isn’t easy. If you look at successful starting pitchers today, they come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. There are many different ways to be successful.

But past research into young starters who’ve recently broken out suggests that good building blocks include:

• One hard pitch (fastball or slider) the pitcher can command
• One hard pitch with at least average stuff
• One secondary with clearly above-average stuff

Other aspects could be luxuries. It’s nice to have multiple fastballs and multiple pitches for command. It’s probably important to have a secondary pitch that works against righties and lefties so that you aren’t a sinker/slider beast who just can’t get lefties out. This is where the nuance comes in.

But if we look at all the young pitchers with fewer than five starts under their belt, we get a list to start with.

Player	Team	Stuff+	Location+	Pitching+
Jack Leiter	TEX	111	95	99
Mitch Spence	OAK	102	107	107
Keider Montero	DET	101	106	107
Landon Knack	LAD	101	95	96
Nick Nastrini	CHW	101	85	86
Christian Scott	NYM	101	97	100
Spencer Schwellenbach	ATL	99	107	105
Jonathan Cannon	CHW	98	103	100
Robert Gasser	MIL	97	102	99
DJ Herz	WSN	96	95	97
Roddery Muñoz	MIA	96	98	95
Jared Koenig	MIL	94	106	103
Gerson Garabito	TEX	92	97	96
Adam Mazur	SDP	91	92	93
Hurston Waldrep	ATL	88	81	86
Carlos Rodriguez	MIL	85	102	100
Cade Povich	BAL	85	99	96
Andrew Thorpe	CHW	81	105	100

There isn’t a single pitcher who easily clears all three bars we’ve set above, so there’s a possibility that this list won’t produce a top starter. That isn’t to say that this group is useless — there are some tiers of talent even within. Every good list needs to be sorted further (and here’s a custom list that you can play around with if you want).

Two with worrisome warts

Jack Leiter, Texas Rangers

The stuff is there for Leiter, as he has a plus fastball and two good breaking balls to pair with it. The flaw is obvious, as he’s carried poor scouting grades for command, high walk rates in the minor leagues, and now a poor Location+ grade that continues to underline the issue. With Location+, though, we can get a sense of the scope of the problem. It’s only been 209 pitches, but a 95 Location+ is very bad. Here’s how starting pitchers who have shown a 95 Location+ with 200-plus pitches have fared over the past three seasons:

• They’ve put up a collective 4.94 ERA
• They’ve averaged ten starts per person
• 30 percent are now relievers
• 30 percent are currently in a starting rotation

The hope is basically that he’s a Blake Snell or Ryan Pepiot — pitchers who’ve ironed out some early kinks and still don’t have top-shelf command, but generally out-stuff their problems. It’s not impossible, but the numbers say it’s at best a one-in-three shot.

Hurston Waldrep, Atlanta Braves

Here’s a Waldrep comparison based on pitch movements and release points alone that is equal parts sobering and uplifting:

This, from Alex Chamberlain’s pitch leaderboard, shows that Waldrep’s fastball is a dead ringer for Keaton Winn’s in every way except Winn has an additional five inches of wiggle on the pitch. They release from very similar heights with poor extension toward the plate and merely OK vertical movement. The extension undoes some of the good in their average fastball velocity, and recent research suggests that 96-plus mph is required for a heater to reap great gas rewards.

Winn is far from an established pitcher so this isn’t necessarily definitive, but it probably does throw some cold water on Waldrep’s upside, as there’s nothing remarkable (in a good way) about his fastball, and even Winn’s slider and splitter look slightly superior due to being harder, with more drop.

Two who could be complete

Christian Scott, New York Mets

While no pitcher satisfies all three requirements perfectly, Christian Scott probably gets the closest.

• He located his fastball and slider at above-average rates
• His slider would rank in the top 15 among starters in Stuff+ if he qualified
• His four-seam fastball Stuff+ (89) was not as bad as it looked when compared to the average starting pitcher’s four-seam (92)

He could have more ride on the four-seamer, but it’s a decent two-plane fastball with average velocity, so it’s not as much of a problem as some of the fastballs thrown by the starters on our list today. When he was last in the big leagues, all four of his pitches had a 20 percent whiff rate or better. If he can push the velocity or the ride at all in the coming years, there might be another level, but if there was one player on our list today who seems like he’s got everything he needs for continued success, it’s Scott.

Mitch Spence, Oakland Athletics

Is a cutter a fastball or a slider? Yes. It’s both. But in Spence’s case, his cutter is his most-thrown pitch, it’s only 2 mph softer than his sinker and he uses it in counts that suggest he thinks of it as his primary fastball. That’s good, because compared to other starting pitchers’ cutters, it has exactly average stuff, which means he can also be counted as satisfying all the requirements we set forth, just in a slightly unconventional way. He commands his sinker better, but he only uses it sparingly against righties. He placed his slider well, though, so at least he has two (sometimes three) options when he’s pressed for a strike.

With the low strikeout rates and only decent ground-ball rates, it looks like your opinion of Spence may hang on this pitch, particularly against lefties.

Spence struck out Vinnie Pasquantino twice on this same pitch in that game, so it’s done some work. But it’s also a pitch with the sideways movement of a sweeper that’s allowed a .404 slugging against lefties so far, so it may be an awkward out-pitch against lefties. Because his curve and change are not great offerings (right now), this is currently the most important question about a decently high-floor starter on the A’s.

Two who might just make it

Cade Povich, Orioles

The four-seam fastball almost landed Povich on the worrisome warts list because it’s not good. It has less ride than most four-seamers and sits 92 mph, a full two ticks below league average. Stuff+ hates the pitch (73) and that lines up with the FanGraphs scouting grades (45 present value), but he’s managed to locate it almost exclusively at the top of the zone and (so far) out of the happy zones (.190 slugging against).

If you’ve read this far, the caveat for Povich will be of no surprise: His cutter looks decent, and he featured it more heavily in his second start. That pitch has more vertical and horizontal break than the average cutter, hums along at a decent 88 mph, and though it’s been hit hard so far, has better underpinnings for future success. The best news for Povich is a decent mix of three secondary pitches: an above-average sweeper, a big slow curveball, and a changeup that doesn’t have much to speak for it movement or velocity-wise but hasn’t allowed great contact so far (.200 slugging).

Povich got a 45 current command grade and a 60 future from FanGraphs, and there’s a gulf between those numbers. If he succeeds, it’s as a command-and-mix guy who throws just enough four-seamers and cutters to keep the batter guessing. This is not the profile of a pitcher who will overpower hitters with any of his pitches. It’s also worth pointing out that the league is getting better and better at hitting sweepers, which might not be a great thing for this starter, as that pitch grades out the best of all of his offerings.

Not only does more sweepers most likely mean more mediocre sweepers, but the game is itself one big training device, the more hitters see something the more they are trained to hit it (or not swing at it as the case may be). https://t.co/oTXUxfXZuc

— Eno Sarris (@enosarris) June 11, 2024

Jonathan Cannon, White Sox

As a foundation, Jonathan Cannon does not have hard heat to fall back on, despite the name. Instead, he’s got a good combo of plus-movement sinkers and sweepers that should make him murder on right-handers. His sinker and sweeper break 14 inches in opposite directions, and his sinker has almost ten inches more drop than his sweeper, so it’s a strong place to start.

But what will he do against lefties? Modeling numbers say the changeup could be viable (107 Stuff+), but he’s allowed .850 slugging on the pitch and doesn’t seem to have great command of it. His four-seam has three inches less ride than the average four-seamer, and the models hate it. Maybe, like Spence above, the cutter will rescue Cannon. At 89.4 mph, it’s hard. It looks like Cannon can command it in on lefties and as a dual-nature pitch, he could use it both as a fastball and also as an out-pitch.

He might still be looking for a great secondary pitch against lefties, at least until his command of the changeup increases or he shows off a curve. Still, you can’t ignore that good sweeper/sinker combo at the top of this arsenal.

Best of the rest

All three of Keider Montero, Landon Knack and Spencer Schwellenbach have good fastball/slider combos as foundations, but the latter two have better fastballs and are therefore better bets. Among the three, Schwellenbach’s curve and Montero’s curve might be tied for the best third offering, so if there was an unofficial ranking of these three question marks, it starts with Schwellenbach at the top. … Nick Nastrini’s command came as advertised by his minor-league grades and scouting reports — he might still end up in the pen after some frustrating stints in the rotation. … Robert Gasser probably would’ve ended up in the “complete” bin, but he’s not set to return this season from injury, and being a sinker/sweeper guy as a lefty is even harder than as a righty because of platoon splits, which is probably why he ended up using the changeup more often (and getting soft contact instead of strikeouts).

(Photo of Christian Scott: Jim McIsaac / Getty Images)