Nats hope Georgia's Wilcox is around again in this draft

The No. 23-rated prospect in the MLBPipeline.com top 200 is a familiar name to the Nationals. The club drafted right-hander Cole Wilcox out of high school in the 37th round in 2018.

Wilcox comes at you with a fastball that can reach 100 mph and has the potential to get to 102 mph. University of Georgia baseball coach Scott Stricklin said that fastball has been the lethal pitch that has got everyone talking about Wilcox.

"Obviously, he is very talented," Stricklin said. "He is a big, strong prototypical right-hander power pitcher at 6-foot-5 and 240 pounds. The fastball is going to click up to 100 mph. The thing that separates him he is more than just a power guy. He is a guy with a slider that he can throw for a strike. He can throw it for a strikeout pitch. He has got a really good changeup that he can use against left-handers and he can throw those pitches at any time.

"He is more than just a hard thrower. He is a pitcher as well. He is a very good athlete. He was a great high school basketball player. He has got makeup off the charts. He is just one of those kids that checks every box - really intelligent, he's a great student. He is a student of the game and he is a competitor. So he checks all the boxes and certainly going to make someone very happy."

Stricklin said Wilcox has worked since his freshman year at locating the fastball. His command and control of this valuable pitch has helped his other pitches become more effective too.

"The biggest improvement that he has made from freshman year to sophomore year is just the command of his fastball," Stricklin said. "He could always throw a changeup and he could always throw a breaking ball. It's the consistency of it. As pitchers grow and mature, the consistency of their pitches get better. The thing he has improved the most on is the location and command of his fastball. He has been able to throw it to both sides of the plate. He has got a lot of life on his fastball. His fastball really bores in hard to the right-handed hitters. It makes it really uncomfortable for them.

"In high school that pitch would get away from him sometimes and he'd hit that right-handed hitter in the hip just because he didn't command it as well. He has just really firmed up the command of that fastball and that has opened everything else up."

As far as the mental side of the game, Wilcox was tough on himself when he struggled with the fastball on arrival in Athens. He could rely on the pitch in high school, but a few collegiate batters got hold of it, and it rattled him.

"Just look at his freshman year as a great example of the kind of mentally strong kid that he is," Stricklin said. "It didn't start out very well. Here's a guy throwing in the upper 90's mph and hitting 100 mph, and was getting hit a little bit. That was tough for him to handle but I never saw him even close to giving up. There was some frustration, but he would get angry and work harder. Then it started to come around and he had his best outings at the end of the year when a lot of kids maybe would have folded. He just competes and he's a winner. He wants to win for his teammates. I think the pitch-to-pitch thing for him has gotten better because of a little bit of a struggle that he went through early in his freshman year."

Stricklin remembers the first time he got a chance to see Wilcox pitch in person. The 20-year-old went to high school in Chickamauga, Ga., and grew up a big fan of the Bulldogs.

"He committed really early on, right after his freshman year in high school," Stricklin said. "The first time I saw him he had just finished his freshman year and I saw him in summer ball. It was 90 to 91 mph then. He was a big, strong, very mature kid at the age of 15, and he wanted to come to Georgia. When I first saw him my first thought was 'Oh, that's great, but he's too good. That's a first-rounder.' That's what a first-rounder looks like when he is 15 years old. He just kept working and kept getting better and he was a first-rounder. The way I look at it, he was a first-rounder in high school but he decided he wanted to come to college."

Being so good at pitching can make some guys pretty proud of themselves. But Stricklin said Wilcox was not one to brag about his exploits or believe he should be treated differently than anyone else because he was a great baseball player.

"There is absolutely no cockiness about him," Stricklin said. "There is a confidence to him. But he is the most humble, nicest kid you've ever met. He is a 'Yes sir, no sir' kid. He is a learner. He is a pleaser too. He wants to get better. Our pitching coach, Sean Kenny, says when they work together he wants to get results and he wants to show his coach that he is getting better. He is really easy to coach.

"When you have a kid that is that talented, that hard-working and is that coachable, it is a coach's dream. Him and Emerson Hancock, we have got two of those guys. Coach Kenny comedically calls them aliens. They are from another world. You just don't see guys that are that talented, that are that humble, that hard-working and that coachable. It's really hard to put all those things together, and we've got two of them."

Wilcox has made a name for himself and has moved up draft boards because of it. Now the Nationals hope he is still around when they get a shot to pick at No. 22 in the first round. If he is, you can bet the Nats will go for him again.