Best of BP 2025: Change (In the House of the Fly Balls)

A couple weeks ago I posed the question: How much should I care that the Angels were the team that drafted Ryan Johnson? I—as I often do—maybe circled around it some without answering. The broader question—how much does org context matter for prospects—is one we’ve struggled with over my decade on the BP Prospect Team. The answer is “obviously, it matters,” but how do you bake that into an evaluation or a ranking?

Nine years ago now,  I wrote the 2016 Mets prospect list. For the purposes of this exercise, please do not look past number one. I threw a 60 on his slider (I’d say future, but he was in the majors and making playoff starts the previous season) with this note:

“Like most Mets pitchers under Dan Warthen, he has started to play around with a hard slider (the vaunted “Warthen Slider”). It’s not as far along as his rotation mates, but he has the right armslot for it, and the developmental track record here is excellent.”

We have pitch-level data for the 2015 regular season. Matz threw 11 sliders that year and got zero whiffs on it. He’d throw it more in 2016 with an improved shape—more depth—and improved results, but it tended to make his arm hurt intermittently and he’s been primarily a sinker/change pitcher since 2019 or so. He’s underperformed his top-10 national prospect ranking from that offseason, but he’s been broadly a number four starter, just not the shape I would have guessed (outside of the obvious durability concerns). He also ended up not being the shape of pitcher the Mets were trying to develop in that era, but I certainly let org contact guide my slider projection at that point. And he was throwing it, I wasn’t conjuring it from thin air.

The best argument about being team agnostic with regard to evaluations, is org context can change quickly even if you stay in the same org. Dan Warthen was gone from the Mets 18 months after I wrote Matz’s blurb. Dave Eiland came in and the emphasis on sinkers and changeups spread beyond just Matz shortly after. And of course players can get traded. The Rays clearly made a point to target Jackson Baumeister, Brody Hopkins, and Ty Johnson in trades last season. Smarter pitching dev teams pick players from organizations where they are under optimized all the time, just as they target college arms from schools that aren’t as up on modern pitch design or usage. The only constant for pitching prospects is change, and development is never linear.

We like to say that prospect lists are a snapshot in time, so I thought it might be useful to take a look back at some of our old prospect reports on another Mets pitcher having a good start to 2025 to see what, if anything, we can glean.

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Griffin Canning, RHP, New York Mets

The Angels rapidly moving college prospects to the majors is nothing new. Canning was a second-round pick of the Halos in 2017 and was starting in the majors by April 2019. That’s not that aggressive a path for a PAC-12 starter, and he did throw 113 good innings across three levels in 2018. But we didn’t get a ton of shots at ranking or evaluating him. Canning didn’t pitch after the 2017 draft, although Wilson Karaman noted in his write-up on the Angels list that he was a potential first-round pick except for health concerns. After his fullish 2018 season we wrote this while ranking him as the 56th best prospect in baseball: “durability and health concerns may yet limit him to a mid-rotation outcome, but he does have better stuff than the usual mid-rotation starting profile.”

Canning came up in 2019, and pitched mostly to the scouting report. He got above-average whiff rates on both his breaking balls, and while his heater got hit hard when it got hit, it did run a 22% whiff rate. The next five seasons were often marred by injuries—here come the health and durability concerns—but generally speaking, when healthy he missed bats with his secondaries, and his fastball got hit hard. He started throwing his changeup more in 2023 and 2024 for some reason—it’s average, but unremarkable—but always led out with the fastball. The Angels are pretty traditional with regards to how they want their starters to pitch, and Canning ended up with such a generic four-pitch mix that Jarrett Seidler called him “Joe Random Pitch Mix.” He was dealt to Atlanta in return for Jorge Soler (and more importantly, Jorge Soler’s contract) and was non-tendered shortly after.

At this point Canning looked like a busted mid-rotation prospect. You could probably blame injuries some, a bad pitch mix some, a bad fastball some (we know a lot more about fastball shape and the like than we did in 2019). If we were ranking 2019 Canning in 2025, he would not be a Top 50 prospect because of how generic the stuff profile was. If you can’t find a plus pitch, how sure can you be that any will end up even average?

Then the Mets signed him to a major-league deal for real money. At the time I didn’t think much of it. They needed to sign a lot of pitchers, and Canning has been fourth starterish in the past and was likely willing to pitch out of the pen at this point. And hey Steve Cohen can afford a few million for a punt, it’s cheaper than bailing out Gamestop anyway. The Mets didn’t just throw Canning into the mixer though, they made two significant changes. One, they told him to throw his slider more—it had always been his best pitch—and two, they improved said slider, giving it more vertical action at the same velocity. They also got a positive tweak on the fastball shape, but he deploys his fastball as a secondary pitch now, and it’s generated more strikeouts than the slider, because hitters don’t expect it in two strike counts. He has above-average stuff now, and looks the part of a mid-rotation starter (granted that is the 2025 version where you don’t want him seeing the good hitters a third time, not the 2019 version). Sometimes it really is a long-term value list. And sometimes you just need to get off the Angels, but org context isn’t everything either. We have to change our evaluation context.

Canning having a tweaked breaking ball and pitch mix isn’t a surprise insomuch as it was going to be necessary, but there had to be something to unlock. Whatever our pitch grade projections were for Canning, the underlying basis for them was feel for spin. He ran above-average whiff rates on both his breaking balls even when he was posting 5+ ERAs in the majors. It’s not really a surprise he found a workable breaking ball to be his primary offering even if it’s not exactly the same one he threw as a prospect.

It gets weirder when you look at pitchers like Paul Skenes and Jackson Jobe adding pitches even after making the majors. Jobe himself is a completely different pitcher now than he was on draft day—that’s another major component of Jarrett’s Annual essay—but the fundamental good pitching prospect traits are still present in his arsenal. Skenes accidentally finding an elite splinker in a spring pen session isn’t projectable or predictable, but it’s also not a surprise that an elite arm speed guy who already made huge stuff jumps year-over-year as an amateur found an effective arm-side grip pitch. He was probably going to sooner or later, whether it was a splinker, splitter, or kick change.

Is this an argument to divorce our evaluations from discrete pitch grades to a more holistic evaluation of the player’s underlying traits? Not as such. There’s just going to be more of a public/private information gap for some of this. And you still would prefer they have shown the 11 sliders at some point. But it’s worth noting teams—at least the smart ones—aren’t targeting the four potential above-average pitch, good college performers like Canning as much as they used to.

If the ultimate puzzle is figuring out who will get major league hitters out, we have to at least acknowledge the path to doing so isn’t as simple as water and grow, or a grade jump of command and changeup. It’s not seeing five good sliders out of 20 from behind home plate and telling yourself “well in a few years he’ll throw more of the good ones.” There’s in fact probably an underlying reason he threw 15 bad ones. It’s not just looking at the projectable Texas prep arm that for $1.5 million in the third round and betting on the 20 pounds of good muscle. But we aren’t pitching coaches either and I can’t just say “give him a bridge cutter” or “that slot is better for a sweeper.” We are on a perilous knife’s edge on the outside as public evaluators now, as organizations grind down smaller and smaller developmental advantages. It’s not merely throw your best pitch more (although that certainly worked for Griffin Canning), but rather do you even have your best pitch yet?