Atlanta Braves top 100 Prospects: #55 Mauricio Cabrera

Scouting Report

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In wanting to get a good look at Cabrera, I took a look at two games from each full month of the season, catching 10 games. In those 10 games, Cabrera threw 13 innings, with a 7.62 ERA, 2.00 WHIP, and 10/18 BB/K ratio.

Cabrera is listed by B-Ref as 6’3 and 230 pounds. He’s certainly all of that, and he looks quite thick on the mound. He has moved to pitching exclusively out of the stretch. He has a slow, steady motion, with a knee lift with a glove lift, but then he explodes to the plate with an arm slot below 3/4 but above side arm. He really looks to be slinging the ball toward the plate, holding his arm high and extended through the motion until release.

Cabrera’s well known for his fastball, which has ranged up past triple digits, but he also utilizes a slider and a change up. The fastball really runs with minimal movement. The issue is that Cabrera has neither command nor control of the fastball. The slinging motion of his arm leads to him sometimes getting on top of the ball from that arm slot and sometimes “flinging” the ball nearly sidearm, even though the release point seems to stay consistent. That inconsistency in his arm motion within the pitch motion really does him no favors in commanding the fastball. Going through Brooks Baseball to look at his heat map will show exactly that. Cabrera has the two highest frequency of pitches thrown in the upper left part of the zone and the lower right part of the zone with pitches scattered all over the zone.

The slider is his bread and butter second pitch, though what I found interesting is the velocity range I saw the pitch. He had a pitch clocked at 85 in one game and two batters later, the same break came in at 72. That’s an incredible range in velocity for the pitch. He does seem to have good location on the pitch, getting consistently on top of the pitch to throw it consistently, from the same arm slot as his fast ball, but never with the “flinging” motion you see sometimes in the fastball. He did not throw many of these in the AFL for review on Brooks Baseball, but in the games I saw, it has a nice straight break and sometimes will run arm side toward the toes of the right handed hitter.

Next: 2016 outlook

The AFL was definitely where he was working on his change up, as he threw 22 change ups versus 7 sliders. During the season, the ratio was about 4 sliders for every 3 change ups, so to have the ratio that skewed in his AFL data really is intriguing. The change up also is susceptible to the flinging motion in his arm, and therefore, also has the same command and control issues. His AFL heat map looks like he really used the late break of his change, which does have some splitter motion to it, to pitch down to the arm side mostly with the pitch (10 of 22 pitches in the bottom three boxes of the 5×5 Brooks Baseball zone). If he could use the pitch in that way, I could see it becoming much more effective, but his command issues with it has led to that pitch really getting hit hard.