Atlanta Braves Top 100 Prospects: #46 Keith Curcio
Keith Curcio Scouting Report
More from Tomahawk Take
- Atlanta Braves 2012 Prospect Review: Joey Terdoslavich
- Braves News: Braves sign Fuentes, Andruw’s HOF candidacy, more
- The Weakest Braves Homers Since 2015
- Atlanta Braves Sign Joshua Fuentes to Minor League Deal
- Braves News: New Year’s Eve comes with several questions about the 2023 Braves
Curcio is listed at 5’10 and 170 pounds, which looks right when you see him. He is a left-handed hitter and a right-handed thrower.
Hitting
His start at Rome was tremendous. I make a comparison to Prado later, but the comparison that really stuck in the time in Rome was Mookie Betts due to the size and the way he was recognizing pitches and driving them in a way that defied his size while also displaying blazing speed, though not exactly tremendous base stealing. Then, after his promotion to Rome, the pitch recognition took a serious dive. He especially struggled with recognizing pitches on guys who had a solid hard breaker or change up that matched with top end velocity and could disguise it well.
His approach to me seemed to get a lot more pull-happy and seemed to focus on attempting to force the issue in the power department during his time in Carolina. He was focused on hitting line drives in Rome, and he had 11 base hits in only 40 hits, so he was doing quite well generating that power, but the real key was he was staying back and attacking the best pitch of the at bat, which allowed a 14/12 BB/K ratio. Instead, during his time with Carolina, he had a 29/61 BB/K ratio. That’s not a terrible strikeout rate by any means, but his walk rate was below 7%, which is too low for a guy at the top of the order.
Fielding/Base Running
Curcio isn’t a guy that will ever win a major league gold glove, but he’s also a guy who I never saw in bad position. He seems to have a good instinct on the defensive side of the ball, regardless of it was in center, left, or at second last season in the games I watched. He’s not got a cannon for an arm, but he can make accurate throws from anywhere in the outfield, so arm strength doesn’t hinder him. I noted that he made all the plays you should make in left and center, but nothing beyond that, and he really never had a play at second in my viewing that would have challenged his range like that.
Curcio’s base running was seemingly bi-polar. He would go through stretches where he would easily make great routes from first to third on routine outfield singles and pick up extra bases on throws back to the infield, things an excellent base runner does. And then he’d seemingly follow that up with a stretch of games where he’d be picked off or get caught napping on an easy fly ball to tag up on. After catching him in Rome a few times and seeing good base running games, I was caught off guard by the poor base running I noted in looking deeper into his season. He’s also not exactly the greatest at reading pitchers, but all that said, he has blazing speed, so he is absolutely a threat at all times to take an extra base, and that’s always going to disrupt a pitcher’s frame of mind.
Next: 2016 outlook
Video
Keith Curcio 2016 Outlook
Curcio caught a lot of eyes with the start of his 2015 season, but one of the things that happens frequently when you talk with fans is that they remember how a guy started up to a certain point, and then they assume that level of performance to have carried forward. Curcio certainly didn’t carry it forward, most notably at the plate with the plate discipline. That said, coming into 2015, if anyone would have told me that Keith Curcio is someone I would have considering where he fit within the Braves future, I’d have thought they were nuts, so he did do something to show that he’s worth considering going forward with the big league club.
Next: Braves Top 100 Prospects Updated
One of the great things within the re-made Braves scouting and development department is identifying a guy’s skills and how to best use those skills early in his career. Curcio showed enough for Braves brass to believe he could be valuable in a utility role, and if he can get his pitch recognition skills back to what they were with Rome, he could have some Martin Prado type of value for the organization going forward. He is a guy who played both infield and outfield in college, so the multi-position thing doesn’t terribly distract him.
I’d expect to see spring determine his starting spot, whether it be in Carolina to keep working on that pitch recognition or to Mississiippi to keep moving up in the system if he shows improvement in that area during spring.