Prospect Spotlight – Sean Gallagher

This week’s prospect spotlight will focus on Sean Gallagher, an exciting young right-hander whose domination of the Florida State League recently earned him a promotion to AA West Tennessee. For now I’ll just focus on his High-A stats, as not a lot of conclusions can be gleaned from the handful of innings he’s pitched at AA. We’ll come back to him later in the season to figure out how well he handled the adjustment.

Looking at Gallagher’s numbers it’s easy to see why the Cubs bumped him up a level. He was quite a bit better than both the typical FSL pitcher and the typical 21 year old throwing in high A. (At this point I should note that the rather arbitrary method I identify player ages may produce some weird results. Rather than getting too complicated I’m simply defining a player’s age as [Year of Season – Birth Year]. This is particularly “unfair” to Gallagher as he technically won’t turn 21 until the second to last day of the year, but the cutoff date had to be set somewhere and I decided to keep it as simple as possible.)

As far as Gallagher’s K, BB, and HR rates are concerned there’s not much to tell. Each remained fairly constant during his stay at Daytona. One thing I did note – at the request of forum moderator Serena – was the ratio of swinging to looking strikeouts Sean recorded. About three out of four (76.0%) of his Ks were of the swinging variety. The ratio for all High A pitchers currently stands at 72.8%, not a big difference.

Important Note: Taken by itself, pitch sequence data for levels below AAA cannot be trusted as accurate. I’m not sure why, but MLB chooses to omit a lot of pitches from those levels. Even worse, the pattern of omissions is not random, so you can’t just pretend you have a smaller sample size that’s still representative of the whole population. That being said, comparing a player’s stats to other players at in the same league/level may prove illuminating. The absolute number may not mean much, but if a pitcher’s contact percentage is 10% lower than the league average it’s a pretty good bet he’s getting batters to swing and miss pretty often.

With those caveats out of the way, let’s analyze the above table. (Oh, and for those of you who don’t speak my special abbreviation language, the columns from left to right: Pitch Count, Take/Swing ratio, Contact Percentage, Percentage of Pitches in the Strike Zone, Percentage of Pitches in the Strike Zone Swung At, and Percentage of Pitches out of the Strike Zone Swung At.) You can see what I meant when I said a single number by itself doesn’t mean much. Sean’s got a good K rate, but if he really was missing bats nearly half the time it would be close to 19 K/9 than 9 K/9. Still, I’d say it’s a safe bet that he induced swings and misses quite a bit more often that the typical FSL pitcher. It also looks like he did a good job of keeping the ball in the zone and of getting hitters to flail at bad pitches.