Atlanta Braves Scouting Report on Outfielder Ray-Patrick Didder

Scouting Report

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Didder is listed at 6′ and 170 pounds. He’s a right-handed thrower and swinger. He may be up to 185ish, but he still is quite lean in his frame, with long arms and legs for a guy only 6′ tall.

Hitting

At the plate, Didder gets up on the plate, and his high hit by pitch rate lets you know that he doesn’t back off that spot at all. Didder has a closed stance with a very quick set of hands, but he also uses a long swing. I honestly believe there’s a TON more power in that swing if he would want to access it as his swing is extremely hand-heavy right now. I had heard a lot of that last offseason about Didder, and I noted this year that his home runs (and you’ll see one linked below) that when Didder can engage his legs with his quick wrists, the ball absolutely rockets off of his bat. I could see him being a guy who hits 15 home runs per season, but it will take some work on his swing to get there.

In his current approach, he shows good recognition, but due to his position in the box, lack of leg involvement in his swing, and the length of his swing, he struggles to really generate the bat speed to get to hard breaking stuff inside. His current position in the leadoff spot may not encourage the organization to really work with him on his hip/wrist coordination as much, but if they did, it’d be incredible the way Didder could leap forward in offensive production.

Base Running/Fielding

These are the two areas in which Didder excels. In fact, if anything, he may be a bit on the over-confident side as far as his base stealing is concerned. I did note that he took off frequently in spite of a very good defensive catcher behind the plate, and I did think in two games I saw that he was “pushed” to force the issue once he got to first, so there could be some push there from management to use his speed beyond what would lead to high success rates on the bases.

Didder goes from zero to full speed as fast as anyone in the system, and his top end speed is among the 3 or 4 fastest in the entire organization, including the major leagues. His ability to go first to third on a single is unmatched in the system, in my viewing. He’s also able to tag up on ridiculously short fly balls and still advance.

Then we get to defense. Oh, the defense. Didder willingly made the move over to right field when Ronald Acuna was healthy this year to allow Acuna to play his more natural center field, though I would seriously suggest that Didder is the better defender. However, Didder has an absolute cannon for an arm, perhaps second only to Connor Lien in the entire system, and it was flashed many times over this year as he totaled 20 assists this season, 19 of them from center field, which is absolutely insane! He played 99 games in center and 30 in right this year while Acuna was out for much of the season.

The ridiculous thing about Didder defensively is the incredible read he has on the ball. For a guy who has been playing the outfield full time for only two seasons, he has much better reads on the ball than many guys who have been full-time outfielders since their drafting (heck, he’s worlds better than Mallex Smith right now). I don’t throw around 80 grades on defense/arm easily, especially in the outfield, but Didder is a pure 80 on both. This is a guy that will win multiple Fielding Bible awards as a major leaguer if he can hit enough to make it to the bigs.

Video

Next: Future outlook