For the longest time, baseball roster building was based so much on what players had accomplished in their careers to date. That’s still a huge factor, obviously, but with the ability to monitor player performance and potential in so many different, advanced ways these days, roster building has increasingly begun to lean more on identifying players with elite skill potential, even if the results haven’t been there too often in the past.
That brings me very quickly to this, courtesy of MLB.com’s Statcast:
Not ERA, not FIP, not walks, not innings...just pure, unadulterated arm potential. And if there’s anything we’ve noticed from the way the Driveline crew has begun revolutionizing the Cincinnati Reds pitching development, velocity and spin are two of the larger driving factors.