It’s the final prequel in the trilogy of RoboScout ‘soft launches’ as April concludes and short season leagues begin next Friday. Now as sample sizes start to reach more reasonable sizes, we’re beginning to see the names start to settle in in the rankings. Interestingly, even though it’s been around four weeks, there hasn’t been much week-to-week volatility, speaking to the relative “stability” of RoboScout.
A lot of these players could find themselves on Top 100 lists or, for upper-level players, soon called up to the majors.
Low-A Pitchers (min 5 IP):
| Rank | Name | Team | Robo | RoboCast |
| 1 | Jonah Tong | NYM | 94 | 100 |
| 2 | Quinn Mathews | STL | 85 | 94 |
| 3 | George Klassen | PHI | 85 | 94 |
| 4 | Matt Wilkinson | CLE | 100 | 93 |
| 5 | Santiago Suarez | TBR | 79 | 88 |
| 6 | Adam Serwinowski | CIN | 76 | 86 |
| 7 | Charlee Soto | MIN | 83 | 83 |
| 8 | Jarlin Susana | WAS | 70 | 82 |
| 9 | Yujanyer Herrera | MIL | 85 | 82 |
| 10 | Thomas White | MIA | 75 | 81 |
The big pitching performance of the week came from the man affectionately known as “Tugboat.” Guardians righty Matt Wilkinson racked up 15 strikeouts in only six innings of work, yielding one walk and no hits. Despite his 20.1 innings of a 48% strikeout-minus-walk-rate at age 21, which is reasonably age-appropriate, he drops to fourth for the level when Statcast metrics are folded in. His fastball is very flat from a lower release slot, but he only averages 90 mph on his four-seam and two-seam fastballs.
The rest of his arsenal is a changeup that is only five mph slower than his fastball(s) with four inches of vertical separation and five inches of horizontal separation, and a solid slider that sits 79 to 81 mph and has nine inches of sweep, which, compared to the armside run of his fastballs, provides a delta of nearly two feet of horizontal movement. Interestingly, Royber Salinas was the last Low-A pitcher to post a strikeout rate greater than 55% in his age-21 season (minimum 10 innings) in 2022. Now with Oakland, Salinas’ build was also viewed skeptically.
Cardinals 23-year-old lefty Quinn Mathews is a new entrant at the No. 2 spot. Mathews’ 16-strikeout complete game performance for Stanford in 2023 was overshadowed by the fact that he threw 156 pitches. Whereas our NCAA data shows him averaging 91.5 mph on his fastball in 2023, he’s now 94 to 95 mph, touching 97 mph, and is proving to be nearly unhittable to Low-A batters. He struck out 13 batters out of 18 outs in his last outing.
Of course, take a 23-year-old college pitcher succeeding against hitters who are, on average, two years younger than him with a…