Though the A’s 2022 draft class was well-regarded in the immediate aftermath of the players’ selections, one aspect of the team’s minor league system that it did not seem particularly poised to address was starting pitching. Oakland used their first four selections–rounds 1-3, as the team had a supplemental second-round pick as well–on position players before finally taking two pitchers, Jacob Watters and Jack Perkins, in rounds 4 and 5. The organization only signed one more pitcher–Texas A&M’s Micah Dallas–until the twelfth round. Thus, though four of Oakland’s draftees came in in my preseason Top 25 prospects, none of them were pitchers; partially as a result, only nine of the organization’s top 25 prospects–and two of the top eight*–dwell on the mound.
*One of the top seven now, if we were to update for Ken Waldichuk’s graduation earlier this week. That’s Mason Miller, of course, and then the only other top 10 pitchers are Freddy Tarnok and Gunnar Hoglund, both currently injured.
But I say starting pitching in particular above because, while Watters and Perkins were both seen as having strong stuff for their draft spots last season, both of them were seen as being most likely to slot into relief roles professionally because of persistent college command challenges. Watters walked 79 batters in 94 ⅔ innings at West Virginia, while Perkins walked 87 in 131 ⅓ between Louisville and Indiana; partially due to both pitchers’ difficulty throwing strikes, they each made more college relief appearances than starts. Solve those issues, the thinking was, and then maybe they could start, at which point Oakland might be getting excellent value relative to where Watters and Perkins were selected.
Like most 2022 draftees, these guys barely played after signing last year. Perkins actually led the A’s class with a whopping ten professional innings, all but one coming in Stockton. They went well! He faced 33 batters and struck out a third of them while allowing only seven to reach base; only two of these were via the walk, which was especially nice to see. Nevertheless, as with most draftees, the 2023 season opened with me essentially in blank-slate mode when thinking about these guys.
Still, particularly in thinking about Perkins, I thought there were some specific things to look out for as far as command is concerned. To get a sense of what we’re looking at, here’s his first pitch as a full-season professional pitcher last season.
What you can see here is that Perkins has a quick arm, and his delivery in many ways is pretty compact and simple. But the thing that struck me when I watched some college video of him upon his drafting was that his arm gets in this* position:
*For what it's worth, it does seem like this screenshot from Stockton is actually a little less extreme than the linked video above from 2020, where the arm action looks more rigid in the back.
Or, rather, it’s not so much the position itself that is troubling. It’s more the fact that his arm is so quick and explosive in moving from that position to release that it creates some stiffness in the arm action while also being a movement pattern that doesn’t really synchronize well with what the rest of his body is doing.
Folks in pitching development will often tell you that arm actions don’t get easily “fixed.” They represent the fundamental way a pitcher’s body approaches the task of throwing a baseball, and thus, alterations are, in a way, messing with the fundamental athletic attributes of the player. You see, from time to time, pitchers make significant changes successfully–Lucas Giolito has been a prominent example–but it’s a fraught sort of project, and it’s usually better to try to find other mechanical patterns that can accommodate the arm action rather than overhauling the arm path itself.*
*By and large, anyway, and despite my proclivity for long tangents, I'll resist the urge to go into some overwrought exploration of mechanical considerations here. It's hardly my area of expertise, anyway, and "don't change the arm action" is more of a sanity-check axiom than rule, as evidenced by Giolito and others.
In reviewing tape of Perkins from his amateur days, there’s considerable evidence that’s what was tried. In particular, intermittently between his time in high school and his first two years at Louisville, he was striding over toward third base in his motion, which gave his arm a wider horizontal rotation path that reduced the “suddenness” of it and gave it more (perceived, at least) fluidity. But striding off-line like that can create its own issues with release consistency, and Perkins walked a ton of guys with that motion, so it just seems to have solved one problem and created another. Thus, by the time Perkins arrived at Indiana for his senior year, he was striding on-line with the plate, and though the resultant arm action (as we see in his 2022 pro footage) was abrupt bordering on awkward, his walk numbers did improve somewhat, though he still issued 47 free passes in 83 innings.
So the big question for me entering 2023 was if the A’s could come up with a (maybe even literal!) path forward with Perkins’ delivery. It took me all of one batter in his 2023 debut to be quite encouraged on that front.
That’s Perkins’ explosive fastball, which reaches 97 mph and sits around 94 with good carry. But do you see the difference? It’s pretty subtle, all things considered, and I actually spent much of Perkins’ five innings trying to fully verbalize what the change was, but immediately I thought Perkins’ delivery had the potential to create significantly fewer problems than its previous iterations.
Here’s a comparison of 2022 and 2023 which clarifies what exactly the difference is.
They changed his arm action!* It’s shorter, so it doesn’t quite extend back into that quasi-stabbed vertical position behind him. We often associate shorter arm actions with more violent mechanical looks, but in this case, the arm is moving more fluidly and looks more in sync with the rest of the delivery.**
*The thing that’s nice about this is that because it’s a pretty subtle change all told, it probably doesn’t quite rise to the level of altering the fundamental way he throws a ball, while still providing for a lot more possible repeatability. It also, like most shorter arm actions, probably still provides some deception (albeit, so did the previous version).
**I don’t like to speculate about mechanics and injury, but for what it’s worth, it also looks a bit less stressful on Perkins’ elbow. He had Tommy John in college.
So, like I said, one batter in, I was encouraged that the motion looked cleaner* and thus might allow for more mechanical consistency (and thus, the possibility for Perkins to remain a starting pitcher). But there are plenty of pitchers with clean-looking deliveries who don’t repeat them (and plenty more with more unorthodox motions that nevertheless prove workable for the particular pitcher), so as nice as the theoretical possibility might be, the onus was (and still is) on Perkins to prove it can make a meaningful difference in his ability to command the baseball.
*I like to think I have a pretty thoughtful approach regarding mechanics, but I’m also aware that my knowledge of them has limitations–I’m not exactly a biomechanics whiz (I do seem to manage to get all those Driveline “Does Skeleton A or Skeleton B throw 95 mph?” tests on Twitter right, for whatever that’s worth, but that's about as far as it goes) or pitching trainer or anything. So I always try to mentally tamp down on any initial enthusiasm a mechanical change might garner until I see what results it seems to be producing.
It’s all of one outing, and it took place in a frigid Midwest League opening weekend in which the league as a whole hit .182/.287/.256, but Perkins threw five hitless innings in his High-A debut with just one walk and six strikeouts. He breezed through his outing in just 57 pitches, 39 of which went for strikes. By my charting, 32 of them were in the strike zone, with just four being “waste” pitches way out of the zone (he yanked two fastballs off to the glove side and missed well above the zone with two others). I’m sure hitters will have a better chance against him in more favorable conditions for swinging a bat, but the fact that Perkins’ command seemed dialed in throughout the outing provides a very positive initial result for the delivery tweak.
The other question, with or without the delivery change,* is how Perkins’ stuff looks now, after a full offseason of being a professional pitcher. You saw the fastball earlier, and it looked crisp, sitting in the mid-90s as it usually had in college and eliciting ten whiffs in nineteen swings, half of which were in the zone. As Perkins is just 6’1”, he’s able to get some upward plane with the pitch and get some chases up, though he primarily worked with more of an east-west approach in this first appearance.
*Honestly, especially with, because you want to make sure that the delivery change doesn’t erode the stuff. I remember Melissa Lockard’s stories of how the A’s staff used to try to get Tyson Ross to throw bullpens with a longer stride and his fastball would immediately back up to like 75 mph.
Perkins’ go-to secondary has long been his big-breaking slider, which arrives in the low-to-mid-80s with good two-plane snap.
The pitch certainly has bite to it, and Perkins showed the ability to land it for strikes in this opening outing. It’s sharp enough to miss bats but also big enough for batters to give up on and take for surprising called strikes at times, though all three whiffs it generated (on thirteen sliders/eight swings) were out of the zone in this opening outing, so I’ll want to see more evidence it can also miss the bat in the zone before we can fully look at it as an out pitch. Still, for a recent fifth-rounder who sits in the mid-90s, it’s clearly a quality second offering.
It’s the third pitch area where we start to get into the other questions with Perkins, though they actually aren’t about whether he has a third pitch that’s any good. He does.
You’ll notice, though, that that’s not the typical “third pitch,” a changeup. It’s instead a hard, short cutter that sits around 90 mph that plays to the glove side against both lefties and righties.* It has a very distinct look from the slider and sits comfortably in between the fastball and slider velocity bands, giving hitters from both sides something else to think about. There weren’t many lefties in the opposing lineup in this outing, so it’s unclear how he’ll split up the cutter and slider usage against them, but the pitch has some promise. Because it’s so short, it’s not going to wow on film,** and Perkins only threw five of them in the outing, but it seems to have the makings of a quality third offering.
*The nice thing here is that the slider might have enough length to it to still retain some utility to the arm side as a backdoor to lefties/frontdoor to righties pitch. Otherwise, he’d basically just have the fastball over there, because the cutter won’t do anything in that area. **And none of them really did much notable in this outing, so I don't have a great clip of it to show you. He did get weak opposite-field contact on one, but that wouldn't show the shape of the pitch well.
It’s going to need to be one, though, because Perkins doesn’t throw much of a changeup. I think this is a changeup?
If it is, it’s the only one he threw out of 57 pitches.* He threw a couple of them in Stockton last year, so he definitely has a changeup in his arsenal, but it doesn’t play a significant role right now and thus increases the pressure on the cutter to turn into a go-to secondary offering against lefties.
*Again, not many lefties in the opposing lineup, but even then, it’s telling he didn’t throw a single one to a righty.
How Perkins handles lefthanders from both a stuff and results perspective thus bears a lot of close watching in the coming weeks, and it might be the biggest priority right now in his development. Still, the fact that we might already be there instead of what projected to be an extended battle with the strike zone provides an encouraging note to begin the A’s 2023 minor league season on. I said in my season preview podcast episode that the production of the 2022 draft class was going to be pivotal to the Oakland minor league system maintaining and/or improving upon its recent gains, and if Perkins can maintain his newfound mechanical cleanliness, throw consistent strikes, and wield either the cutter or changeup to lefties effectively, the explosive fastball-slider combination could carry him up the ladder as a starter and mark at least one important mid-round success story in Oakland’s drafting for the second consecutive year.
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