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Farm Futures (3/9/09)

Maybe the most interesting thing about yesterday’s 7-2 Rangers victory over the Cubs was that Texas sent 22 year old lefty Derek Holland back out for a third inning of work. With so many arms battling for innings in this camp — especially, as Evan noted yesterday, in the bullpen – the decision to give two-plus frames to a kid who is not supposed to be a candidate to break camp with the big club was quite remarkable.

After putting together one of the greatest seasons by any Rangers minor league pitcher in memory, there’s no doubt that Holland is coming. The only question is how soon. Yesterday may have been an early hint that he may be moving up to the front of the line to step into the Texas rotation when one of the five starters goes down.

Since surrendering a pair of homers (and fanning two) in one inning during his first appearance of the spring last week, Holland has allowed one run on six hits and a walk in 4.1 innings since. And even throwing out the first game, that’s the worst stretch of pitching Holland has delivered in more than a year.

Holland went 7-0 with a 2.40 ERA and an 8.36 K/9 in 17 starts for Clinton. Then he moved on to the extremely hitter-friendly Cal League and was even better, going 3-1 with a 3.19 ERA, and fanning 37 while walking only five in 31 innings of work. You just don’t see pitching prospects tear through the Cal League like that very often. But it was in Frisco that Holland’s stock really shot through the roof.

In four starts against Texas League hitters, Holland erected a 0.69 ERA, punched out 29 while walking just six in 26 frames and held the opposition to a .163 batting average.

And his fastball started lighting up the Dr. Pepper Ballpark gun at 98 mph.

So how did Holland shoot from anonymous to star prospect? “There’s a lot that goes into that,” says Rick Adair. “He was 88-92 when he came to Spokane [in 2007]. We thought maybe he’d turn into a 92-93 mph guy eventually. We certainly never thought we’d see anything like 98. But everything we did with Derek worked and that’s really a credit to him. He’s got tremendous baseball intelligence. He understood from the very beginning what he was doing. You’d ask him a question and he’d give you a good answer. He understands pitching and his own body extremely well.

“He’s very consistent not only in his approach to pitching and his preparation, but in his delivery. Every pitch, every game, in every situation, he looks the same. He worked extremely hard. He’s extremely competitive. Every now and then, somebody just comes along,” said Adair — who paused to correct himself. “Actually, I’ve never seen somebody improve so much, so fast in my time coaching. How do you not get fired up about a guy like that?”

Holland is a power lefty who drives his lively fastball to both sides of the plate and seems to have a good feel for his changeup which he uses sparingly, but effectively. When I saw him, he was consistent with an 80 mph slurvy slider (which is to say, it doesn’t have a ton of bite) and all three pitches look exactly the same coming out of his hand.

The Ohio native uses his whole body to generate power and repeats his delivery as well as any Frisco pitcher I’ve ever seen. He gets remarkable hip separation that allows him to generate power from both his torso as well as his legs. Our friends at Baseball Time in Arlington asked noted pitching instructor Dr. John Bagnozi about Holland’s mechanics last fall and Bagnozzi was impressed with what he saw, saying that “in the launch phase [of his delivery], he is letter perfect.”