Discussing pitching prospects, 20-game winners and more

Orioles pitching prospect Kyle Bradish is ranked among the club's top 10 prospects on lists from Baseball America and MLBPipeline.com. He is rated No. 8 by MLBPipeline.com and No. 9 via Baseball America.

This week, FanGraphs.com topped that, ranking the right-hander No. 7 when it released its list of the O's top 45 prospects. The outlet puts a 60 grade on his fastball, which tops in the 97 mph range, and a 55 on his curveball. As I have noted numerous times in this blog, FanGraphs also noted Bradish has had a bit of a velocity increase on the Orioles watch.

This is a pitcher I wrote about again in this entry this week. For me, he flies under the radar somewhat for someone considered a top 10 O's prospect. On the one hand, a lot of pitching discussion about the Orioles centers around the young arms we have already seen at least for some big league starts, in pitchers like Zac Lowther, Dean Kremer and Alexander Wells. There is also talk of a potential ace that is already here in lefty John Means and the one that could be coming soon in righty Grayson Rodriguez.

Somewhere admid all that is Bradish, acquired with three other right-handers in the December 2019 trade that sent Dylan Bundy to the Los Angeles Angels.

When the Orioles acquired Bradish, he was ranked No. 21 on the Angels top 30 prospects list. Now he is ranked as the Orioles' third-highest-rated pitching prospect, after Rodriguez and DL Hall.

Bradish began last year at Double-A Bowie and threw 13 2/3 scoreless innings over three starts to begin the season. He was quickly promoted to Triple-A. With Norfolk, he went 5-5 with a 4.26 ERA over 86 2/3 innings. He allowed a 1.431 WHIP and posted a 4.1 walk rate and a strikeout rate of 10.9. He did allow a batting average on balls in play of .335 and recorded a 43.3 groundball rate while with the Tides.

There are some in the organization very high on the potential for Bradish. We should get to see him in the bigs for the first time sometime during this coming season.

About those longballs: Also recently in this space, I presented this entry on Means and how moving back the outfield fences could benefit him maybe as much as anyone on the Baltimore staff.

He was 6-9 with a 3.62 ERA last year, but allowed a career-high 30 homers. Means was more likely last season to allow a homer than a walk. His walk rate was 1.60 per nine innings while his homer rate was 1.84. Of the 64 runs he allowed in 2021, 45 came via a longball.

In fact, among the 96 pitchers in Major League Baseball that threw 120 or more innings last year, Means was the only one to issue more walks than home runs.

They had four!: We also recently wrote here about the 1971 O's season, a year when the team had four 20-game winners. Jim Palmer, Dave McNally, Pat Dobson and Mike Cuellar all won 20 or more. Now it is hard to see the entire sport produce that many 20-game winners in just one year.

Going back to 2015, MLB had two 20-game winners for all 30 teams that year, three in 2016. There were none in 2017, when no one won more than 18 games, two in 2019, none in the pandemic-shortened 2020 season and one last year, as Julio Urías of the Los Angeles Dodgers went 20-3. You have to back to 2012 for the last time there were four combined 20-game winners in the majors.

Feel free to comment on any of these recent stories/discussions here or any other O's and baseball topics today. Heck, throw in your Super Bowl picks as well.