It’s a minor league tradition as old as the minor leagues themselves: every year, every organization has at least one pitcher in A-ball go from seemingly a complete unknown to posting great numbers. Every time, there’s a scramble for understanding in the fanbase. Is this guy legit? Does he have good stuff, or is he just a polished pitcher outsmarting the undisciplined bats of low-minors competition? Will he be a fast mover? How does he compare to the more heralded arms in the system?
There are a few such pitchers in the Athletics organization in 2023, but perhaps none have had as striking a statistical entrance into prospect intrigue as righthander Jose Dicochea. Dicochea wasn’t all that low a selection in the draft–he was picked in the eighth round in 2019 out of an Arizona high school–but his ERAs in his three minor league seasons since were 10.38, 11.05, and 9.64. Admittedly, all were in relatively small samples–first his post-signing Arizona League time in 2019, then a few weeks at the start of the 2021 season in Low-A before he tore his UCL and had Tommy John, then the final few weeks of the 2022 season rehabbing and getting back to Low-A–but one could also easily read that inexperience (and injury history) as a troubling issue for a pitcher who clearly needed time to develop to rise from whatever struggles had befallen him and move toward any destination remotely proximal to the major leagues.
But Dicochea’s third try at the Low-A level this year has not only already been more lasting (26 innings, already a career high!) than his previous efforts; it’s also yielded statistical growth that may strike some as stunning. He’s allowed just 16 hits, six runs, one homer, and nine walks while striking out 35 of the 104 batters he’s faced. He had one tandem start where he came in in relief on May 3 where he struggled to adapt to the tandem role and fought his command before settling in; otherwise, he’s been just about untouchable.
So, of course, cue the questions from the first paragraph.
I will get to answering them in due time, but Dicochea’s particular odyssey may raise an additional one in your mind: How did he go from a career 10.44 ERA (including 12.39 in Low-A) to a 2.08 figure this season? Since he’s been around in pro ball for a while, if we’re going to figure out how “legit” his emergence is, we need to have a sense of where he has emerged from, and how he’s done the emerging in the first place.
I wasn’t following baseball much in June of 2019, when Dicochea was drafted. It had been four years since I’d gone to a minor league game or written anything about baseball, and I was pretty much checked out on the whole thing. But I still poked around to see what the A’s were doing every now and then, out of curiosity–if I wanted any sports fix in the summer, it would have to do–and I recall checking in on the draft and thinking it was kind of neat that the A’s took four high schoolers–the since-traded Marcus Smith (3rd round), the since-released Jalen Greer (5th), Dicochea, and his current Stockton teammate T.J. Schofield-Sam (12th)–in the top twelve rounds. The A’s previous few drafts–headlined, of course, by the Kyler Murray debacle–hadn’t seemed to go particularly well, and I thought that, in the abstract, taking a swing on a few more high-upside high schoolers might be a welcome change of philosophy. The last time they’d taken four or more high schoolers in the top twelve rounds before that was 2012, which was probably the best A’s draft class this century, so hey, why not?
Dicochea then proceeded to get hit around to a 10.38 ERA and even 14/14 K/BB ratio in Arizona that summer, tempering whatever enthusiasm the abstract idea of taking a high school pitcher in the eighth round might have generated. I remember sometime that season seeing if I could find any video of him, and finding this:
That video, apparently shot between Dicochea’s junior and senior seasons of high school, didn’t exactly provide much to go on–there’s a note that his fastball was 91-92 mph in the description, and we can see his delivery. But just off of those two pieces of information, I thought it wasn’t too hard to construct a pretty clear explanation of why the then-18-year-old had struggled in Arizona, because what the heck is going on with his arm in that motion? If you play MLB The Show, you know that despite the generally good animation in the game, some pitchers’ motions are not exactly rendered realistically: the arm rotates around an impossible axis or suddenly jumps from one position to another in a way the human body simply cannot allow. That stutter in the back of the arm action, where Dicochea goes from having his arm locked in place perpendicular to the ground to suddenly extending into that elongated position pointing back toward first base, looks like one of those glitchy deliveries come to life, and one of the strangest approaches to throwing a baseball I’ve seen a pitcher have. It seemed to be a very, very challenging motion to have any consistency with.
Even aside from the arm action’s complicated pacing and its overall high-effort look, there was also the matter of its extended length, which would be enough to create possible challenges repeating by itself, even without the stutter. Further, in addition to (perhaps, because of) the challenges the arm action creates, we can also see Dicochea really struggling with consistency in his stride in that video–he struggles to get around his front side at times, with his weight getting way too out front. Anyway, low-90s velocity–as he was advertised to have–simply does not create enough margin for error to allow a pitcher to have bigtime mechanical inconsistency and still find a lot of success in Rookie ball, especially on top of whatever other raw elements a teenage pitcher new to pro baseball might have, and so in that context, Dicochea’s struggles in 2019 make sense.*
*Of course, that video is from 2018, so for all I know, he looked different in Arizona in 2019 and the struggles could be due to other reasons, and I’m sure it’s more complicated than what I’m saying based on extremely limited information here. I’m just saying that that limited information gives some context that does help us understand where Dicochea was in his development around the start of his pro career.
Damning as that all may be, we hear all the time about professional organizations working to “smooth out” the mechanics of their raw teenage pitchers, so it would be reasonable to expect that Dicochea would gain more consistency over time. He looked to have a good pitcher’s frame in the video above, and he could easily fill it out (spoiler: he has) and gain more command of what he’s doing and make some inroads. But, as I’ve said before, the arm action is the basic way a pitcher throws a baseball, and you generally don’t want to mess with that too much. If the weird arm action was such a big problem, then what could Dicochea and the A’s do for him to make real progress?
By the time I started to actively watch A’s minor league baseball broadcasts in the early summer of 2021, Dicochea had already put up his 11.05 ERA and seen his season end due to the UCL tear. Nevertheless, I did note that his peripherals in his 14 ⅔ innings were actually pretty good–he struck out 23 of the 74 batters he faced, walking 8–and so out of curiosity, at some point late that summer I pulled up some video of his 2021 debut, the only game where he didn’t allow an earned run that season. Does he still have that wacky arm action? What does that look like when he’s going well? I thought.
I watched the outing, and even knowing that Dicochea had continued to struggle otherwise, I came away with a very different impression than I had in 2019. I think I can illustrate why with one pitch and one fact. Here’s the pitch:
There are two things that really jump out in this video (and were, of course, further clarified by the outing as a whole). First, Dicochea could obviously spin a breaking ball. The curve here has good shape, depth, and finish, and he showed in this particular outing that he had some feel for finding the zone with it. It had the look of a plus offering. He also had a slider which I wasn’t as impressed with, but showed promise. And a changeup that looked half-decent, too, while we’re at it, so there was both an out pitch and the makings of a deep arsenal.
But second: if you want a really good visual illustration of what “smoothing out” a delivery looks like, it’s hard to think of a better one. And note: he still has a hitch in the arm action, so it's not as though the A's totally overhauled the way Dicochea throws a baseball. But everything else is so much cleaner. Dicochea is bigger and stronger, he gets down the mound very well, and his athleticism is quite evident in his motion. His posture is a lot better throughout the delivery, and the A’s had him convert to pitching exclusively from the stretch (this particular pitch has a runner on base, but he was stretch-only anyway, and it’s the same with the bases empty, as you'll see later), which gave him just one timing pattern to sync up the arm with. The motion is quite simple apart from the arm stutter, or whatever we want to call it, and so it’s the one quirk in an otherwise graceful motion. Dicochea looked to be a good enough athlete to potentially repeat this delivery.
Oh, and the one fact? Reportedly,* Dicochea was throwing 94-98 mph before the UCL tear.
*I can’t recall where I first heard this at the time and couldn’t track down any tweets or notes about his velocity being there that still exist today, but I have confirmed with sources that I’m not misremembering: he was bringing the heat in 2021.
So, to recap, then, we’ve got a guy who was throwing very hard, showing a potentially plus curve, two more pitches with potential, and good athleticism and fluidity on the mound just after his twentieth birthday, striking out 31% of Low-A opponents in his small sample at the level. Sure, the ERA was bad, but the California League is a high-offense environment and it was a small sample. Dicochea had a lot of tools to work with, and despite knowing that he wouldn’t be back on a mound for a long time, I thought he was perhaps the organization’s best-kept secret and a potential breakout candidate whenever he was healthy again. He came in at #37 on my 2022 Midseason Top 50 and I wanted to put him higher: as I say in his blurb there, I felt like ranking the then-21-year-old with the career double-digit ERA currently on the shelf with Tommy John surgery at #37 was the conservative play, even as I didn’t see his name appear on other A’s top prospect lists. But, hey, it made some sense to wait until Dicochea was healthy, back in form, and actually getting outs with reasonable efficiency before really stuffing him way up the list, despite all the positives he seemed to bring.
As noted, Dicochea made it back fairly quickly, making his 2022 debut in the complex on August 12 and proceeding back to Stockton on August 26 to make three abbreviated starts. I watched one and wasn’t impressed: he basically only threw his fastball and slider and was having the typical post-TJ command woes (he walked nine batters in 5 ⅔ frames in Stockton across those three outings). I figured it was probably mostly just rust and caution, so I didn’t really view Dicochea much differently. All things considered, the fact that he got any mound time at all in 2022, and presumably had a relatively normal offseason, was a huge positive. Nevertheless, he came into 2023 with a lot to prove, and with the system deepening with the 2022 draft and offseason acquisitions, he ended up being the last player cut from my preseason top 50. Again, I felt like that was still a really conservative ranking, though, and noted on the Stockton preview that Dicochea had the skills to even move all the way up into the top 10 over the next couple of seasons if things broke right.
Of course, 2000+ words of backstory aside, I didn’t bury the lede here: things are breaking right, at least statistically. What the backstory does is show that though statistically, Dicochea’s emergence may seem to be “from nowhere;” it actually looks to be the logical conclusion of the form he showed back in that 2021 debut. A guy with great arm strength, feel for spin, and athleticism is eventually going to dominate A-ball opponents, right?
It probably seems like I’ve spent all this time telegraphing that Dicochea has picked right up in all of those aspects here in 2023, and though there is definitely a fair bit of continuation from that form, the pitcher who has taken the Cal League by storm this year does differ from his 2021 self in a few important ways.
First, with all of my focus on it earlier, let’s zoom in on where Dicochea’s mechanics are now. Here’s the first pitch from his most recent milb.tv start, at Modesto on April 26:
You might have noticed in the 2021 video that, though the stuttering arm action was still there, it was noticeably less dramatic than that 2018 video; Dicochea’s arm didn’t lock into that vertical position the same way and then jut out dramatically. Now, the stutter still exists, but it’s more a little quirk than a huge feature of the motion; you almost wouldn’t even notice it if you didn’t know what it was a remnant of. We might also note that the landing looks to be a little on the stiff side, though Dicochea does get solid extension, and the landing stiffness is a bit of a tradeoff for him being tall at release and thus getting a fairly high release point despite eschewing a truly overhand arm slot. Other than those features, Dicochea retains his athleticism and simple, fairly compact delivery. Again, the fact that everything outside of the arm action is so simple and athletic, and the arm action has both been somewhat cleaned up and incorporated well into the rest of the motion, is such a good example of “smoothing out” a motion done right. And hey, so far, so good on the command front: Dicochea is running a career-best 8.7% walk rate, which as noted earlier is only that high because of the one tandem outing that he struggled to throw strike in for his first 25 pitches.
Let’s proceed to take a look at Dicochea’s stuff. Contrary to the scant 2022 video evidence, he does indeed still have four pitches, and they’re the same four as before: fastball, curve, slider, change. Let’s start with the fastball, which remains Dicochea’s bread and butter:
Those are the empty swings it forced in that outing in Modesto, and you can see that, like a lot of four-seamers, it seems to do most of its damage up in the zone. That was generally the case in his other milb.tv outing in Fresno two weeks earlier as well, though Dicochea also has spent a lot of time working the pitch east and west in the middle third of the zone for called strikes effectively, only turning to these more vertical looks when he’s hunting empty swings. That helps give the fastball more effectiveness on those occasions when he’s throwing it high, because usually that marks an eye level change for the hitter. Perhaps relatedly, Dicochea has managed a groundball rate north of 50% despite the fastball not really profiling as a groundball pitch.
The bad news, I suppose, is that Dicochea is not yet throwing as hard as he was in 2021. He’s mostly been 91-94 this year, touching 95 on a few occasions, so we’ll have to see if more velocity returns this summer. Even if he’s just averaging 93, though, the pitch has good firmness, and it’ll show good carry at times and good running action at others, though its life doesn’t seem particularly consistent overall at present. It does seem to jump on hitters well, though, perhaps aided by Dicochea’s delivery, and has elicited a swinging strike rate of 15%, CSW% of 36%, and strike rate of almost 70% on just under 60% usage in the two 2023 starts on video. It’s certainly playing so far.
I’m not sure the fastball is going to work all that well on 60% usage–a level that, as of this writing, only four qualified MLB starters are currently eclipsing–all the way up the chain unless the upper-90s velocity comes back, but that’s where the other pitches come in. He can really spin a curveball, right? Here are a couple from April 11 in Fresno:
It’s still a very fun pitch to watch. It arrives in the mid-to-upper-70s, perhaps not quite hard enough to qualify as a true hammer. But his fastball and arm slot are just vertically-oriented enough to tunnel fairly well with it, Dicochea has some feel for it, and it still retains enough depth when he throws it high that it can fall in for called strikes after hitters give up on it.
I think the curve could still become a plus pitch in time, especially if Dicochea’s velocity ticks up; if the fastball is back to averaging 95, then maybe the curve is 79 and reducing hitters’ margin for error even on his slowest offering. What’s interesting, though, is that I picked those video examples from the Fresno game because he barely threw the curve in the more recent outing in Modesto. He only threw three, all fairly late in the start.*
*Coming back from TJ, it seems as though Dicochea’s being kept on a strict 5-inning, 75-or-80 pitch max, whichever comes first, so given how effective he’s been at breezing through 5 innings, there’s not as much of a third time through the order for him, where you’d probably expect to see a broader pitch distribution. He threw 13 curves in the Fresno game, so 16 of the 145 pitches across the two outings, total.
That’s not because there’s any particular reason for Dicochea to distrust the curve, though, I don’t think. It’s simply because he trusts the slider more.
The curve is perhaps more visually fun to look at, but it’s hard to fault Dicochea for the more slider-heavy emphasis. It’s a much tighter breaking ball, working mostly 84-86, and it still gets really nice depth while running away from righties effectively. And just as Dicochea isn’t quite a ¾ slinger who thus jeopardizes the curveball’s effectiveness, he’s also not quite an overhand guy, and his fastball looks to tunnel reasonably well with this breaking ball shape as well. Of the 22 I’ve seen him throw in the two video starts, seven have drawn swinging strikes. It’s worth noting that he’s only put six of those 22 in the strike zone, though Dicochea seems to command it well to that lower gloveside area that sliders usually work so well in. We’ll see if it can be effective in the zone, but if the curveball can do some of the in-zone strike-stealing, maybe the slider won’t need to be deployed in the zone all that often.
The fact that Dicochea has two good breaking pitches to work off of the fastball is obviously nice already, but he’s also got this thing:
The changeup arrives in the low 80s, giving Dicochea a fourth distinct speed and offering good velocity separation from the fastball. It’s his least consistent offering at present, at least in the two starts I’ve watched, as the arm speed and feel for release aren’t always 100% there, but this is again where you have to consider that we’re talking about a pitcher with well under 100 innings thrown since he was 18, so minor inconsistencies are more likely to be ironed out with more reps. At its best, the pitch really can dive under bats with late explosion, and Dicochea seems willing to throw it to righties, meaning that he can be a four-pitch guy to batters from both sides of the plate.
So in thinking about Dicochea’s stuff overall, I’m left with a somewhat different overall picture now than what I might’ve anticipated his breakout might look like before the season. Instead of the righty being a vertically-oriented fastball/curve flamethrower, he’s currently more of a complete four-pitch pitcher who sits around 93 and actually might throw the curve the least out of his quartet of offerings.
There are some pluses and minuses to that new identity. As discussed earlier, the fastball seems to play reasonably well at this velocity, and the quantity of solid offspeed offerings give Dicochea the option to reduce the fastball usage more and more as he advances if it doesn’t continue to meet solid results. The version of him that showed up on video in 2021 probably offered more front-of-the-rotation upside to dream on, but also bore a lot of relief risk, whereas Dicochea’s command and arsenal development since then seem to point much more heavily in the starter direction even as the velocity backs up a to a good distance away from Mason Miller territory.
The velocity still bears watching going forward, though. If Dicochea’s heat rebounds back into the upper 90s, the completeness of the rest of his skillset would make him a real candidate for the top pitching prospect in the system whenever Miller graduates, but he’s also in a velocity range now where additional erosion would potentially cut into a lot of his upside and render him more of a finesse pitcher, putting much more stress on the command side of the equation.
Given how little pro pitching experience Dicochea has, the fluctuation in his skills, and the newness of his statistical success, there is still a lot of volatility present in evaluating him. Nevertheless, he’s shown a promising skillset for a long time and is clearly actualizing it into performance this year despite the inexperience, and he looks to be ready for higher-level challenges in the near future. Dicochea’s stock isn’t in the organizational top ten yet–how could it be after just over a month?–but it’s climbing into the top 25 area, and he’s quickly becoming one of the most notable starting pitching prospects in the Oakland system.
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