Scouting report on Atlanta Braves top prospect Ian Anderson (RHP)
After recently watching Atlanta Braves top pitching prospect Ian Anderson in person, we give our full scouting report on the right-handed pitcher.
The Atlanta Braves third-ranked prospect by MLB.com pitched in my hometown recently and I was able to watch Ian Anderson pitch first-hand.
Ian Anderson was drafted out of high school third overall by the Atlanta Braves in the 2016 MLB Draft. That was the Braves highest pick in the MLB Draft since taking Mike Kelly second overall in the 1991 draft.
Obviously, with a player being taken that high in the draft there are a lot of expectations on the 21-year-old righty.
Many inside the organization believe he could be the best Braves pitching prospect of all, and that he could one day lead the rotation.
He’s already worked his way up to Double-A after posting a career ERA of 2.80 in 283.1 innings with 331 strikeouts and a WHIP of 1.25.
With that in my mind, I had to take the chance to get my eyes on Ian Anderson when he played the Birmingham Barons.
We don’t get a lot of opportunities to see players in the Minor Leagues, and even so, you can tell a lot more about a player when you see them in person.
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Let me set the stage for this game as not every game is the same. And let me just say up front that I realize this is a very small sample size to judge a pitcher — much less a 21-year-old.
The opponent for Sunday (May 19) was my hometown Birmingham Barons. And as much as I love my Barons, they are not having the best season.
Coming into the game on Sunday they were just 17-25, and they have one of the worst offenses in the Southern League with a team batting average of just .228.
However, there are several top prospects from the White Sox organization on the Barons roster in Laz Rivera (#17), Luis Basabe (#7), Luis Gonzalez (#10), Gavin Sheets (#18), and Blake Rutherford (#9).
They also have the White Sox’ second-ranked prospect in Luis Robert on the Barons, but he didn’t play on Sunday.
The game
Ian Anderson entered the game on Sunday with a 4.04 ERA in 35.2 innings pitched with 47 strikeouts and 28 walks.
That high walk rate is obviously concerning, but that’s not who Ian has been in the past and that’s not who he was on Sunday as he didn’t walk anybody over 5.2 innings.
Here is the entire line for Anderson: 5.2 IP, 7 hits, 0 walks, 1 earned run, and 5 strikeouts.
One thing that really stood out for me in this game was all the flyouts. I’m not sure if that is the norm for Ian Anderson or if this was an outlier, but 10 of the 17 outs he recorded were in the air.
He obviously got five outs via strikeouts and just two groundball outs.
This could also just be the approach of the Barons hitters. It seemed like they were trying not to fall behind in the count as they swung at a lot of first pitches.
With the launch angle craze in the game, it worries me a little that Anderson might be relying on flyball outs.
Anderson really breezed through the first five innings outside of a two on, two out jam in the second. He only had two 1-2-3 innings, though.
It looked like the righty started to run out of gas in the sixth inning. He entered the inning at 85 pitches and after getting the first two batters of the inning out, he was at just over 90 pitches.
Yermin Mercedes, the Barons best hitter and clean-up hitter, then got a single off Anderson. The next batter, Gavin Sheets, followed with a 7-pitch at-bat that ended with a single off the shortstop’s glove.
Mercedes and Sheets were a combined 4-for-6 off Anderson in this game.
Anderson was given one more chance to get out of the jam, but after that long at-bat with Sheets, he gave up the game-tying hit on the first pitch of the at-bat to Rutherford and then was pulled.
The arsenal
As much success as Ian has had in the Minor Leagues so far, he’s really just doing it with two pitches.
He features a very good fastball that sits in the low 90s, and he compliments that with a plus curveball that he’s not afraid to throw in any count.
Other scouting reports I’ve seen say that Anderson sits 92-94 MPH with his fastball and that he can bump it up to 96.
The radar gun at the Barons ballpark is always 2-3 MPH slow and it consistently had Anderson at 88-91 MPH. That leads me to believe he is most likely sitting 91-93.
The roster lists him at 6-foot-3 and 170 pounds, and that 170 might be generous. As he fills out that frame I expect him to add a few MPH to his fastball.
His curveball is a legit 12-6 curveball and there weren’t many good swings on that pitch. I think that’s why a lot of Barons hitters swung early in the count because they didn’t want to fall behind and face his curveball.
The pitch that will determine whether or not he’s going to be a middle or top-of-the-rotation pitcher is his change-up.
There is very little doubt that Anderson will make it to the big leagues with his fastball and curveball. As mentioned, both are advanced offerings, and we’ve already seen what Max Fried has been able to do with those two pitches.
But I wouldn’t quite put Anderson’s curveball in the same category as Fried’s just yet.
If Anderson is going to stick at the top of the Atlanta Braves rotation for a long time, he has to develop a usable change-up.
And from what I saw on Sunday, his change-up is nowhere close to being usable. He probably threw it less than 10 times in this game, and I only saw one that was good, and he got a strikeout with that change-up.
Most of the time he bounced his change-up in the dirt and you could tell the hitters really didn’t respect that offering.
The projection for Ian Anderson
Again, this is just one start and is a very small sample size for Ian Anderson. But I was not blown away by what I saw on Sunday.
Part of this is because of what I heard about Anderson before getting my eyes on him. Like I said, most people consider him to be the top prospect of the group and a potential ace.
I’m not going to sit here and say after seeing him in person once that he can’t do all of that, but in this particular start, I didn’t get that impression.
And some of this is probably skewed because of my perception of an ace. I generally think of someone who is overpowering hitters.
However, as we’ve seen from Mike Soroka, that doesn’t always have to be the case. While Soroka has a fastball that he can blow by hitters, he relies on weak contact in the zone.
That is what I saw a lot of from Anderson on Sunday, which is not a bad thing, just not what I was expecting.
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When I think about it, Anderson had the feel of Soroka on the mound with the arsenal of Fried. When you combine those two attributes from those two pitchers, that certainly paints Anderson in a positive light.
As I already talked about, there are two things I need to see from Anderson before I consider him a potential top of the rotation pitcher.
I’d like to see him learn to command that change-up. It is a good pitch, it just seems like he has no feel or command for it right now.
And I’d like to see him bulk up to 190-200 pounds and see if he can’t add a little more zip to that fastball, which has some natural run to it already.
What I saw from Ian Anderson made me believe he can be a middle of the rotation starter with a ceiling as a number two.
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But there is certainly some room to grow for him to become that potential ace that we thought he could be for the Atlanta Braves when they drafted him third overall.