Atlanta Braves Scouting Report on LHP Jacob Lindgren
Scouting Report
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Size/Delivery
Lindgren is listed at 5’11 and 210 pounds.
Lindgren throws exclusively out of the stretch as a reliever. He tucks his shoulder and even looks a touch toward the second baseman before then exploding toward the plate.
Lindgren throws from a 3/4 arm slot. He has an arm cock behind his back as he comes to the plate, and that allows his arm slot to be in consistent placement, however, because he explodes so violently toward the plate, Lindgren has gotten off in his landing spot, which causes him to have his hips triggered before his arm has come through the motion, putting extra stress on his arm to generate velocity.
He does use his legs well in general in his delivery when he’s going well, and he generates most of his velocity from his his lower half.
Pitches
Lindgren works with a fastball/slider mix. His fastball sits in the low- to mid-90s, touching 97-98 at its absolute peak. The fastball has some excellent movement, especially low in the zone with some hard late sink.
He does tend to get more of a cut action to the pitch from the belt up on the fastball rather than the sink, though I did note that he rarely goes up high intentionally, so a lot of that could be movement created from his delivery being off.
The slider is possibly the best pitch, a truly wicked wipeout slider that comes in around 82-85 MPH. In my viewings of his 2015 and 2016 games, he had a number of sliders where he would take off a few MPH as well. The pitch didn’t bite as hard, with a bit more slurve to it, however, the change in velocity really threw off hitters, and I don’t know that I saw the pitch thrown without getting either a swing and miss or weak contact.
Next: Future outlook