For some reason, I got in on Ljay Newsome on nearly the ground floor. It happened mostly when he put up 129.2 innings of 3.61 FIP in Clinton in 2017 as a 20-year-old in A-ball. That’s not the most impressive, but the more I looked at Newsome, the more fascinated I was. He was a 26th rounder in 2015 out of the delightfully named Chopticon High School, a little school in the middle of nowhere in Maryland (Mechanicsville has a population of just 1,765) that is also just 50 miles from the nation’s capitol. At the time, Newsome didn’t project for much—not quite cracking 6 feet, his fastball correspondingly couldn’t crack 90, and without any kind of a dynamite secondary you couldn’t really see him cracking a big-league bullpen.
40 in 40: Ljay Newsome
