Scouting Andrew Oliver with PITCHf/x

The Arizona Fall League started up and there will be PITCHf/x cameras turned on in Surprise and Peoria, ARI. Tigers 2009 draft pick, and one part of the Big Four they signed to over-slot deals, Andrew Oliver has made his debut under the bright, uh, lens of the cameras. Before that though...

Andrew Oliver is probably best known for his battle with the NCAA over representation and the MLB draft. On the diamond, he's a lefty with a good breaking ball and low-to-mid 90's fastball. From the left side, what more can you want, really?

PITCHf/x data and graphs abound, after the jump.

First up, we're going to go with the average release points:

He comes from a pretty standard position for a left-hander. Oliver is 6-foot-3, 212-pounds according to his Oklahoma State bio. Judging off of this, he is a 3/4-release pitcher, but not terribly low. Having not seen a clip of him pitching in a while, I'm guessing he's a drop-and-drive pitcher coming from a 3/4 angle.

Here's his total release points:

 

 

Pretty sporadic. Though, this is his first "official" outing since signing, so that's to be expected -- he's working the rust off.

How did that sporadic release point translate into results in terms of the strike zone plot? Take a look:

Um. Yeah. Pretty spread out. He worked away from right handers despite facing a pretty even split between RHB and LHB. He got a couple of strikes at the knees that were looking and a got one swing through on his fastball on the inner-half from Austin Romine and one more up at his eyes.

Here's how he attacked left and right-handed hitters in terms of pitch selection:

 

He didn't throw change-up to a lefty and was even in his slider and change-up usage versus RHB's. He was mainly working off his fastball, though.

And finally, here's the pitch flights:

We're working with such a small sample here, that it's nothing to read to into. Couple his first real work outside of any instructional league work with the fact that he had a college season that ended in the spring, and you've got a lot of noise in the sample. In this particular outing, his slider seemed to be a sweeper of sorts. Both his change-up and fastball looked straight and there wasn't a lot of separation between his change and fastball, either. 

We're working with just a 29 pitch sample. So there are NO conclusions drawn. Only a tiny, tiny peak into the things he could bring to the table. His fastball was 93, change-up 85 and his slider 83. Though the sample is minuscule, it is nice to get any sort of PITCHf/x data we can from someone as hyped and big part of the Tigers future. He's a top 5 prospect moving forward in the system, so it's fun to have some data on him.