Atlanta Braves top 100 Prospects: #55 Mauricio Cabrera

Atlanta Braves Right Hander Mauricio Cabrera

Who Is He?

The Braves signed Cabrera out of the Dominican Republic in 2010. He started in the Dominican Summer League in 2011, making 19 appearances, 9 of them starts, throwing 52 1/3 innings with a 4.30 ERA, 1.43 WHIP, and 24/36 BB/K ratio. His control needed work, but the pure velocity drew definite notice.

The Braves brought Cabrera state side to advanced-rookie Danville in 2012. He made 12 starts, pitching 57 2/3 innings, posting a 2.97 ERA, 1.18 WHIP, and 23/48 BB/K ratio. He climbed up a ton of Braves rankings. John Sickels ranked him #6 in the system, as did Baseball America, while Baseball Prospectus rated Cabrera #4 in the Braves system.

Cabrera threw for his full-season league with Rome in 2013. He made 24 starts, throwing 131 1/3 innings, posting a 4.18 ERA and 1.44 WHIP, but with a notably poor 71/107 BB/K.

The Braves moved the 20 year-old Cabrera to high-A Lynchburg to start 2014, and the control finally caught up to him, with a simply putrid performance. He was even sent to the Gulf Coast League team in an attempt to get him right. Overall, he posted a 5.73 ERA between the two levels over 22 appearances (5 of them starts) spanning 33 innings. He posted a 1.46 WHIP and a 21/31 BB/K ratio.

Next: Cabrera's scouting report

Cabrera was moved full-time to the bullpen in 2015. He started the season with high-A in Carolina and finished with Mississippi. His numbers were uninspiring, posting a 5.59 ERA and 1.59 WHIP over his 36 games and 48 1/3 innings with a 35/53 BB/K. His velocity was eye popping, but the fastball was often straight. The Braves sent him to the Arizona Fall League, and he turned heads with the fastest pitches of the entire league, topping out at 102mph. His numbers, however, were still poor in the AFL with a 6.17 ERA and 1.80 WHIP over 9 appearances and 11 2/3 innings with a a 7/15 BB/K ratio.

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.