The Baysox are back in Bowie after a couple weeks on the road, so that means another installment of Pearls from the BAAy. Friday’s game featured a delayed start thanks to a quick thunderstorm washing over the area, which I was honestly grateful for since it let me linger a bit longer with my kids for board game night at the American Legion. During the rain delay, we got treated to some Akron RubberDucks players throwing a football around in the outfield – one was throwing pretty impressive darts out to about 30 yards. Fridays are also free ticket night for schools for reading, so about a thousand screaming kids chased around a giant beach ball during the delay. This is why we love minor league ball.

Unfortunately, Travis Bazzana was absent from the Akron RubberDucks’ line-up after suffering an injury during Wednesday’s double-header. The team called it “right side soreness” – if that’s an oblique injury, it’s likely to result in some missed time during what’s been a fine but unremarkable first full pro season for the first overall pick in last summer’s draft. The Baysox’s best bats, Enrique Bradfield Jr. and Creed Willems, were also absent.

Bradfield remains on the injured list with a hamstring injury and Willems simply had the night off – his beautiful flowing locks could be seen catching for Baysox pitchers warming up between innings, and he came back on Saturday and Sunday and clubbed his fifth and sixth home runs of the season. Creed will almost certainly feature in a Pearls from the B-AA-y this season, but for now let me say briefly that he is developing into a hitting prospect for whom the bat may actually play even if he fails to stick as a catcher.

Ultimately, the game ended 3-0 Baysox with just nine hits between the teams, so hardly an offensive barn burner. The most remarkable thing about the game on Friday was that it was Nestor German’s AA debut. So let’s jump right in and take a look at German...

Nestor German (RHP, BAL)

5.2 IP, 4 H, 0 ER, 2 BB, 6 K, 21.8% CSW

German, a 23 year-old drafted in the 11^th round out of Seattle University in 2023, has emerged from obscurity into true prospecthood over the last year. Here’s what Chris had to say this offseason, when he ranked him 8^th among Orioles prospects:

Chris called it here. The cost may still be on the ground floor – free in many leagues – but it won’t be for long. What I saw on Friday night was a mature, athletic pitcher with an advanced arsenal that should be ready for a spot in the Orioles’ increasingly dire rotation sometime in 2026 and is easily one of the better pitching prospects I’ve seen come through Bowie since 2020. He pitched an excellent game on Friday night, with only a couple of blemishes from bloopy plays.

Let’s start with the fastball. Unfortunately, the stadium radar gun wasn’t functioning last night, but to my eye it was in the mid-90s. German’s athletic overhead delivery gives the fastball additional spin and makes it look violent. He is able to locate it extremely well, and this clip shows it at its absolute best. Facing down Kahlil Watson, a left-handed former 1^st round pick who’s occasionally jumped onto top prospect lists, German absolutely smokes him with a fastball that Watson swings well under.

German’s secondary offerings do something I like quite a bit in a starter, which is to step down movement and velocity in each pitch in the arsenal. This makes it easier to disguise any given pitch.

As the first step down, German throws a high-80s gyro slider and/or cutter with a movement pattern that differentiates it from the fastball (I’ve seen sources say he throws both, but it was difficult to tell from the eye test, so we’ll call this one pitch). He throws this mostly to right-handed batters, often as the first pitch of an at-bat. I like that as a tactic, since it opens the rest of the arsenal.

As the second step down, he throws a mid-80s splitter. This may actually be his best pitch in terms of raw movement, though he seems to struggle to command this pitch more than the others.

Finally, he throws a curveball right around 80 that has more vertical movement. He locates this really well and gets good spin on it, though it’s a pitch that works more as the sum of the parts of his arsenal than as a standalone awe-inspirer.

The clip below is an entire at-bat against Jake Fox. I chose it because I feel like it shows German working his whole arsenal to strike a player out. He uses the fastball early in the count, but later plays with the breaking stuff and ultimately Fox isn’t able to solve the German riddle.

On top of all this, German fielded his position well on a few occasions, including hustling to get a difficult bunt and put out a player at first. I tend to value two things in prospects. First, raw athleticism. Second, attention to details. German passes both tests with flying colors.

Now, before you think this guy’s flawless, I do want to point out a yellow flag that cropped up Friday night. Sixteen of German’s 78 total pitches came after he had already found a 0-2 count. This happened five times out of 23 total batters faced. Two of these at-bats ended in a strikeout, but only after six or seven pitches, one ended in a walk after six pitches, and the remaining two ended in singles after four or three pitches. That may point to a concern about lacking a put-away pitch, as he generally tried to entice a third-strike chase on those 0-2s with an outside breaker but it was usually laid off. But that may have simply been a sample size issue. It’s something to keep an eye on.

German is someone I’d be easily targeting in any league that rosters 100 prospects. I’m not sure he’s the Orioles’ best pitching prospect because I have yet to see Michael Forret or Braxton Bragg in live action (and Bragg’s stats right now are pretty difficult to argue after tossing another gem on Sunday) but I like what German does more than Brandon Young, who’s already debuted with the Orioles. To my eye, German’s on a supersonic trajectory to be a Major League regular by next season, and there’s mid-rotation upside here.

Seemingly having recognized that he might in fact be an asset to the big league club sooner rather than later, the organization seems determined to preserve him, pulling him at 78 pitches on Friday. In fact, he has yet to go a full six in his professional career, and Friday night was his record for batters faced thanks to some single-pitch at-bats.

I’ll note Prince George’s County Stadium was swarming with regional scouts compared to a usual Friday night, to the point where those guys became veritable Green Berets, maneuvering to find a clear line of fire for their radar guns that avoided the swarm of oblivious preteens who just wanted to hang out with their friends. I doubt those scouts were there to see Kyle Dernedde or Adam Retzbach. Those kids may not know it yet, but they may have gotten to see something special on Friday. Nestor German might just be a gem. Go and get him for your fantasy team before someone else does.

Austin Peterson (RHP, CLE)

6.0 IP, 0 ER, 3 H, 3 BB, 5 K, 23.8% CSW

German may have been the talk of the town on Friday night, but Akron’s starter is a good prospect in his own right. Austin Peterson, a 9^th-round pick out of UConn in 2022 who’s been kicking around AA the last two seasons, is a classic Guardians pitching prospect – a command specialist without overwhelming stuff. But the command is very, very good. The 0 ER is a bit misleading; he gave up two runs after a throwing error on a bunt by the catcher, Cooper Ingle, that I thought was a bit unfair to Ingle.

Chris ranked him 27^th in the Guardians organization this offseason. This is what he had to say:

Once again, I think Chris nailed the scouting report. Including Friday’s game, Peterson has pitched to a 1.40 ERA and 0.828 WHIP in 38.2 innings this year at age 25, again sporting a 31 percent CSW across 8 starts.

I’ll admit, I was a little worried I had been bamboozled with all the talk about Peterson’s command in the first inning. He walked two batters, increasing his season total by half again from four to six in that inning alone. (He’d add another before the end of the night, leaving his total at seven). But despite the walks, you can see how strongly Peterson commands his pitches throughout the rest of the night. His fastball is hardly overwhelming, but to the eye it plays up because of Peterson’s long frame and big extension, and its velocity is at least out of the zone of heavy worry. Most importantly, though, it’s a point-and-click offering, going wherever Peterson wants it to. Here, he uses varying fastball locations and his secondaries to earn a strong strikeout against Hudson Haskin, polishing him off with textbook high heat after delivering him lower pitches earlier in the at-bat.

His secondaries also have the same quality. Watch this at-bat against Adam Retzbach, where he continually frustrates the batter with the location of his breaking balls. I’ll note that the slider and the curveball seem to be more differentiated than Chris suggests they were last season, with some heavy horizontal movement.

Peterson works quickly, with a pitch tempo in a range that would be around some of the fastest starting pitchers in the MLB like Luis Severino and Spencer Schwellenbach. This doesn’t necessarily correlate with success, but it may help fluster some batters, and it certainly doesn’t impact his ability to put his pitches where he wants them.

Peterson feels like a Guardians pitcher. Assuming he stays healthy, it’s more a matter of when, not if, he gets a call to Cleveland. Parker Messick and maybe Will Dion seem like the only non-debuted pitchers ahead of him in the organization. He doesn’t have ace-level stuff, but we’ve seen guys like this play up when they get the call, and sometimes a high marble floor is worth more than the beautiful fresco ceiling.

Zach Jacobs (RHP, CLE)

2.0 IP, 1 ER, 1 H, 2 BB, 3 K, 32.6% CSW

Speaking of beautiful fresco ceilings, the RubberDucks brought out Peterson’s inverse to relieve him. Zach Jacobs, a 23-year-old who was an 18th-round pick out of UC-Riverside in the same draft as Peterson, is basically his polar opposite. Jacobs throws from a low arm slot, and he features two main pitches: a sinking fastball that sits around 94 with good glove-side run and a low-80s slider with absurd horizontal movement. These pitches look similar out of his hand and go in totally opposite directions. He also throws a mid-80s change-up with a similar movement profile to the slider and occasionally mixes in a high-70s curveball that has a more traditional movement profile. He threw 44 pitches in one game in AAA this year, so we actually have some Statcast data for him.

That Statcast data is eye-opening. He spins his slider at 2,705 RPM on average, which would put him around the top decile of MLB pitchers. It moves an absurd 17.4 in. gloveside, which would rank first among MLB pitchers this year who have thrown 100 or more pitches... by over half a foot. The only comparable slider with AAA Statcast data this year is Lance McCullers, who when healthy has one of the nastiest sliders in all of baseball, and Jacobs gets more vertical movement on his.

My eyes crossed like a cartoon character when the ball came out of his hand. I don’t know how batters deal with a pitcher with a movement profile like this – when Jacobs is landing his pitches, he might be close to unhittable. Certainly, Luis Valdez agreed with me after this at-bat, embarrassing first because he swung nowhere near the pitch, and then adding insult to injury by failing to break his bat over his knee.

Given that Jacobs isn’t appearing on top prospect lists, though, you’ve probably surmised there are some blemishes. First, the Guardians haven’t tried to stretch him out to be a starter. He’s gone only five full innings once and has never faced more than 17 batters as a pro, and topped out at 66 pitches last season. He did have two complete games on his college resume, but that was a long time ago. They don’t seem to be fully committed to the idea of giving up on him as a starter, but at this point it seems highly improbable he’s going anywhere but the pen.

Why? Because he cannot command his pitches. He walked 20 percent of the batters he faced last season and is up close to that this season. He hits guys. He comes close to hitting guys. Worse, his command is so bad that it severely deflates his ability to work strikeouts, and he gives up loud contact because he sprays his fastball all over the place and sometimes hangs his slider. That might occasionally work for some pitchers who can get up around 100 on their fastballs, but you can’t live like that at 94 with below-average extension.

Anyone with a raw arsenal like this is worth keeping an eye on, and it’s not impossible that Jacobs could make a career. I’d be more intrigued if he was younger, because it would require significant gains in command to make it work and the pedigree isn’t suggestive that there’s something untapped. But who knows, maybe someone will invent a player splicer and we can smash Jacobs and Peterson together and create a Hall of Famer.

Douglas Hodo III (OF, BAL)

3-4, 2 1B, 1 2B, 1 R, 2 RBI, 1 SB

Those of you who have read my writing know I’m really intrigued by players with weird, outlier profiles, and Doug Hodo III is exactly that. Hodo was drafted out of Texas with the first pick of the 6^th round in 2022 and has toiled away in Delmarva and Aberdeen before getting a taste of AA late last season. In Bowie this season he’s batting .230 with four home runs, and has stolen eight bases. He’s always taken a lot of walks while striking out at a rate in the mid-20s.

Why is he an outlier?

When you plot the percentage of swings that Hodo has taken on pitches he’s faced this year against his rate of contact on those swings alongside qualified MLB batters, Hodo appears in a sector occupied by only a single MLB bat: Juan Soto. Hodo swings at only 35 percent of pitches he faces and makes contact on 80 percent of his swings. He whiffs on a minuscule 7 percent of pitches. Now, Hodo is hardly Juan Soto – he’s not even two years younger and has only just made AA. There’s a fine line between selectivity and passivity, and the deciding factor is usually quality of contact.

Hodo’s four home runs were tied for the team lead through Friday night, before Creed Willems went on a spree over the weekend, and what he showed on Friday suggests a player who knows how to pick his pitches. He was involved in all three of the team’s runs, scoring one and driving in the other two. Of the three hits he collected on the day, two came on the first pitch of the at-bat. In the below clip, he hits a little opposite field blooper off Peterson that scores runs. That’s followed by him punishing one of those aforementioned hanging sliders off Jacobs for a double. This doesn’t look like a passive player to me.

Hodo’s a toolsy player with a unique approach. Ideally, he’d have a higher batting average than he does, and that does make you worry a bit about the quality of contact. Unfortunately, he’s been pretty consistently a .250 hitter since his college days, but the on-base skills can fill in some gaps. An athletic player with an outlier skill who can play plus center-field defense is certainly worth watching in an organization where the future of the outfield is still an open question.