Diamonds In Single-A: Nick Hagadone

Welcome back for another Diamonds in Single A article.

I know it’s been a long time since my last column, but the hope is that at least every other week this spot will focus on some of the younger players in the Indians farm system. Before the hiatus I was focusing on the players the Indians received in all of their deals. This week I will focus on Nick Hagadone, the main player we received for Victor Martinez.

Nick Hagadone was a first round pick of the Red Sox in 2007 out of Washington. He was a closer for Washington in college, but the Red Sox were trying to stretch him out to see if he could start. In Hagadone’s second year in the minors, he was injured after only 10 innings and required TJ surgery. This did not stop Baseball America from ranking him the number 2 prospect in the Sox’s entire system in spite of only having pitched a told of 35 innings of professional baseball in two years.

We haven’t seen a lefty like Nick Hagadone in the Indians minor leagues since CC Sabathia came through the system. Hagadone is big—6’5”—and throws hard. His fast ball sits in the mid 90’s and has hit 98, and it also has good late life. He also has a mid 80’s slider that should be a plus pitch that shows real bite. His change up is a pitch he is working on and is in the low 80’s.  Since he was a closer in college he didn’t need to work on the third pitch as much so that’s why it’s behind his other pitches.  There is still a lot of talk at this point as to what Hagadone’s future holds, with some seeing him as a possible front of the line starter and others envisioning him as an all star type closer. Essentially, his future will mostly be decided by how well his change up develops.

Here is a look at Hagadone's stats over his three year professional career, though 2008 was so limited because of the arm injury that it does not provide any real insight.

Year	Age	Lev	ERA	G	IP	WHIP	H/9	HR/9	BB/9	SO/9	SO/BB
2007	21	A_ss	1.85	10	24.1	0.904	5.2	0.4	3.0	12.2	4.13
2008	22	A	0.00	3	10.0	1.100	4.5	0.0	5.4	10.8	2.00
2009	23	A-A_adv	2.80	17	45.0	1.111	5.2	0.0	4.8	11.8	2.46
3 Seasons			2.16	30	79.1	1.046	5.1	0.1	4.3	11.8	2.74

Provided by Baseball-Reference.com: View Original Table
Generated 11/2/2009.

The first number that jumped out at me was the big old zero in his home run rate for this year. It’s pretty impressive for someone to be out for a year with Tommy John surgery and then come back and no one is able to hit him hard. If you take his home run rate for his entire minor league career it is .1, which means he would give up a home run every 10 games, or a grand total of 3 over a 30 starter season. To compare, the best I saw for any pitcher in the majors was a tie between Kershaw (LA) and Carpenter (STL) who each gave up only seven all season.

The second number that jumped out were his WHIP’s from each season. Both were phenomenal and would have been good enough for 8th best in all of baseball. There would maybe be some concern over the big drop in strike out to walk rate and the rise in walks, but at this point I would be inclined to blame them on rust. The reports on Hagadone say he has excellent control, and control is the last thing a player gains back after TJ surgery because it usually takes time to get the feel back. If the drop were to continue into next season there might be an issue for concern, but as long as his WHIP stays low it’s hard to say at this point that he is walking too many players.

Hagadone’s numbers, while impressive, just don’t tell the entire story, though. When you see the dominance in the numbers it makes it hard to forget he didn’t touch a baseball for a year. In his three years at Washington he only made seven starts and then he spent his entire first season of pro ball slowly getting turned into a starter, with even better results. He comes back the next year and continues to excel but then gets hurt, and before he can have surgery has to wait for a leg infection to clear. He finally comes back and is still promoted before the year is done.

Hagadone has dealt with injury, changes, and frustrations and still continued to excel so much that he forced the Indians to promote him. There is little doubt that he is still a raw pitcher—he is still working to become a starter and working on adding a 3rd pitch—but he has the arm and the drive to be something special. From my perspective he is the most exciting arm in the Indians minors league system, and even if he fails to develop a change up then at worst the Indians should be left with an all star closer for years.

Hagadone, like Bryan Price and Alex White, seems to be the new direction the Indians are driving their system to: power arms that if they fail as starters should at worst be excellent additions to be the pen going forward. It makes me think the Indians are as sick of pen issues just like the rest of us.

Posted in: Nick Hagadone