The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of: Tom Milone

Many popular opinions of pitching prospects are formed from general scouting reports. While these reports are invaluable resources, they can’t always be trusted. Hundreds of minor league hurlers are credited with “mid-90′s velocity,” but very few MLB starters actually have that grade of heat, for example. It’s incredibly frustrating to hear about a pitcher with “a mid-90′s heater and plus curve,” only to have him come up to the big leagues and show a fastball that averages 90.5 mph and a slider.

When a pitcher come up to the majors, we can finally get a foolproof reading on what exactly his arsenal is comprised of, thanks to the great Pitch F/X system. In this series, I analyze just that–the “stuff” of recently-promoted MLB pitchers. Now that they’ve achieved their big league dreams and thus factor directly into the MLB picture, it’s high time that we know exactly what these guys are providing.

This time, I’m taking a look at Nationals starter Tom Milone.

Tom Milone certainly held a ton of intrigue to many analysts at the time of his callup this September, as he spent most of the season putting up a strikeout-to-walk ratio that wouldn’t look out of place in a Curt Schilling statline. Milone walked just 16 batters in 148 1/3 innings in Triple-A and struck out a whopping 155 batters. Scouts insisted he was a finesse hurler who wouldn’t be more than a back-of-the-rotation starter in the bigs, but numbers like that at the highest level of the minors are certainly tough to ignore.

Milone’s made three starts for the Nationals, covering 15 2/3 innings. He’s showcased an efficient approach (just over 15 pitches per inning), and has shown that the low walk rate in Triple-A is for real (just three walks). The strikeouts (9) aren’t there as much, but we’ll see how that plays out as he settles in.

In any case, the point of this series is to look at pitchers’ arsenals, so let’s do it!

No, this lefthander is not a flamethrower. He’ll vary the speed of his fastball, and will throw it anywhere between 84 and 91 mph. He’s averaged a shade over 88 mph thus far with the pitch, which has some life up in the zone.

That’s certainly not a power fastball, but Milone utilizes a deceptive delivery to help it play up, and honestly, lefty starters can very easily survive with a fastball in the upper 80’s. Here’s a list of MLB lefty starters that throw slower than Milone:

Chris Capuano
Chris Narveson
Eric Surkamp
Dana Eveland
Brian Matusz
Dontrelle Willis
Ted Lilly
Jason Vargas
Paul Maholm
Dallas Braden
Wade LeBlanc
Zach Duke
Bruce Chen
Mark Buehrle
Jeff Francis

There are a number of very successful pitchers on that list, to be sure.

Like Giants starter Eric Surkamp, who I profiled last week in this series, Milone has faced a disproportionate number of right-handed batters–60 of the 65 players he’s faced have swung from the right side of the plate. This season, 29.31% of batters against lefthanded pitchers have been lefthanded, and while some of that can be attributed to left-on-left relief matchups, there’s little question that Milone will face a higher number of lefties in the future.

In the mere 19 pitches he’s thrown to lefties, however, Milone never put one on the inner third of the plate, so while it’s a ridiculously small sample, it does seem that he likes to pound the outer half to lefty batters. Against righties, the picture is a bit more muddled:

There are some encouraging signs here. There’s a large cluster of dots all along the outside corner, and another bunch right at the knees. It’s easy to see, from looking at this graph, why Milone walked under a batter per nine innings in Triple-A and has continued to throw strikes in the big leagues.

Milone has started 38 of the 60 righthanded batters he’s faced with a fastball. 27 of those 38 (71.1%) have gone for strikes, and a whopping 19 of those (50% of the total fastballs) have been strikes looking. Just to put that in perspective, let’s compare to the standard-bearer of all control lefties, Cliff Lee. Lee’s thrown 400 first-pitch fastballs to righties, and 253 (63.25%) have gone for strikes. Then, 151 of those 253 have been looking (37.75% called strike rate). While Milone’s got a much smaller sample, his results are clearly better.

Milone throws both an 82-85 mph cutter/slider hybrid and a 70-76 mph slow curve. He seems to play with the speed and break on both pitches to give batters different looks. It’s tough to get an airtight read on their effectiveness without seeing more of what he uses the breaking pitches for against left-handed hitters, particularly since most of his curves to righthanders are merely chase pitches. He does work the harder breaking ball in on the hands of righthanders, suggesting he treats it more as a cutter than a slider.

Milone’s best pitch, however, is a changeup from 78-81 mph, with so much run and sink that Pitch F/X often calls it a two-seam fastball. It has six inches of sink and almost four inches of armside tail relative to his heater, which makes it very tough on righthanded batters. This is also where his pristine command comes into play–just look at the precise location on these pitches:

Okay, he’s not quite that incredible. Those are just the changeups that Pitch F/X classified as two-seamers. The correctly-identified changeups weren’t quite as exact:

Still, if we look at the 57 changeups in total, we’ve got one or two pitches that were too low to be chased, and a few that found their way into the middle of the plate, but an unbelievably high number of down-and-away pitches within an inch or three of the edges of the zone. Given that the pitch is moving all over the place and coming from a deceptive delivery, that makes it a definitive plus offering. It should come as no surprise that 42 of the 57 pitches (73.6%!) have gone for strikes, and nine (15.8%) have been whiffed at.

Since he’s got the changeup to neutralize opposite-side batters and the deception to hide the ball from his fellow lefties, it’s tough to find a real weakness in Milone’s game despite the lack of a “wow” factor in his fastball and breaking stuff. A flyball pitcher who pounds the zone, Milone brings Ted Lilly to mind when his entire profile is considered. In fact, with a better changeup and better control than Lilly, Milone could even be better than that. He should join the already-established Stephen Strasburg and Jordan Zimmermann to give the Nationals a dynamic front and middle of the starting rotation, and with Brad Peacock (who I’ll be looking at in the next couple of weeks as well) right behind Milone, Washington could have a rotation basically on par with the other NL East powers in the very near future.

For more on the Nationals, check out District On Deck.

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