On Wednesday, Nov.2 we will release the Data Driven Top 1000 Prospects List exclusively on our Patreon. For the first time we will be including a version for pitchers this year. The Data Driven Top 1000 puts a prospect's skills on a 20-80 scale, and uses a weighted average of their skills to grade them as an overall prospect on the 20-80 scale. For pitchers, the formula includes age, level, ERA, xERA, zone%, in-zone whiff rate, chase rate, CSW%, groundball rate, popup rate, and line-drive rate. This is meant to be a supplementary tool when scouting to highlight undervalued players, not a scouting substitute.
On the Data Driven Top 1000 Pitching Prospects, the top starting pitcher is predictably Eury Pérez. However, when we include relievers there is a number of unheralded names near the top of the list. The #1 prospect with at least 40 innings is an NL East reliever who sits at 95 MPH with his fastball and averages over 22” IVB. However, the prospect I want to look at today is an unheralded name that has some of the most fascinating stuff in the whole minors. Meet Evan Gates of the San Francisco Giants, a UDFA out of North Carolina A&T just one season ago.
Total Domination
Evan Gates was dominant by any definition of the word this past season as he posted a 1.95 ERA and an xERA to match that. The undrafted free agent went all the way from Low-A to AA in his first professional season and dominated at every stop. He struck out 32.7% of batters while walking 8.9% and showcased what the Data Driven Top 1000 has as the second best batted ball profile in all of the minors behind only one AL West arm. He missed bats in the strike zone at an elite rate, got chases at an elite rate, and he found the strike zone at an above-average rate.
With results like those Gates posted in his first season, you would expect him to have outlandish stuff. Except, Evan Gates was an undrafted free agent, and that wasn’t some fluke. He didn’t perform at all at a weaker college, and his stuff didn’t grade out highly according to any stuff models. That has not changed since he was drafted. None of his stuff has seen much improvement in quality, it’s just performing better.
Bad Stuff?
Evan Gates tops out at 94.6 MPH with his fastball. That is barely better than the MLB average for a reliever and it is Gates's max. He sits 90-93 MPH on the fastball and that plays down slightly due to him only getting 6.1’ of extension. Surely he must have elite movement then? That is not the case either. Evan Gates has above-average ride at 18” IVB but it’s nothing special- especially relative to the velocity. He has no horizontal movement as well. Outlier release? Not really that either. He has a 6.2’ release height with a 1.6’ horizontal release.
Despite what is at best average shape, Evan Gates has a 32.7% CSW with his four-seam fastball. The MLB average fastball is at just 27.8%. Gates is in the 91st percentile of four-seam CSW amongst all minor-leaguers this year. His fastball has been extremely dominant, in spite of what is objectively bad shape. How?
The cutter is slightly better on paper than the fastball. He throws it at 90 MPH with 11.8” IVB and 1.6” inches of cut. The pitch is below-average according to Stuff+ coming in at just a 92, but it also gets great results. He has an above-average 30.1% CSW and a fantastic .297 wOBAcon. Why?
The breaking ball rounds out his arsenal and is his most used pitch. It also happens to be the one pitch that Stuff+ considers above-average with it grading out as a 106. He throws the breaker at 85.1 MPH which is good velocity for a slider, and he has fantastic depth as he averages -3.9” IVB. As you might expect, the slider gets great results. How great? Um, it’s arguably the most dominant pitch in all of baseball. Majors and minors both.
The slider has a 42.8% chase rate. That is in the 98th percentile of all breaking balls at any level this season. The slider has a 50% whiff rate. That is in the 92nd percentile of all professionals with their breaking ball. He has a 41.8% CSW. How good is that? 95th percentile. Oh, and Gates has a .235 xwOBAcon which is the 16th best of any pitch to record at least 60 batted balls this year in any level above rookie ball. That is in the 99.5th percentile of all players at any level. It’s one of the best pitch-to-contact pitches in the game, and it’s also one of the top strikeout pitches in the game. Not bad for a pitch that is only 6% better than the average slider.
Bad Command?
Surely, it must be 80-grade command that is giving Evan Gates so much success with what is below-average stuff. Right? That would make sense, but I’m not even certain that Gates has average command. He throws strikes but there are still some walks, and throwing strikes isn’t the same as having good command.
The best place to throw a pitch is objectively the shadow zone. Pitches in the shadow zone have the highest chase rate of any location to throw a pitch at 44.9%, and the lowest in-zone swing rate at 61.1%. Pitches in the shadow zone also have a .327 wOBAcon, compared to a .404 in the heart of the zone. Objectively speaking, there is no better place to locate a pitch than in the shadow of the plate. Good command to the shadow zone can make even mediocre stuff play at a high level.
That is not why Evan Gates stuff performs at a high level. The average MLB pitcher throws the four-seam fastball in the shadow zone 43.5% of the time. Evan Gates? He throws just 36.1% of his fastballs in the optimal zone. He throws the heart fastball where it’s hard more than the average player, but only barely. Gates doesn’t fail to find the shadow zone though, he fails to locate the fastball entirely. He kind of just blindly chucks the fastball over the plate, and as a result, his heatmaps are a bit of a mess with no detectable patterns. So why does the fastball work, if he’s not command it to the most effective spots?
The cutter command follows the same patterns. He throws just 32.7% of cutters in the shadow zone compared to the 43% of the average MLB cutter. He instead opts to throw 41% of cutters over the heart of the plate- nearly double that of the MLB average one. His command is a little more tight with the cutter over the plate compared to the fastball, but it's still not anything special.
The slider is once again Evan Gates saving grace. He has what is probably slightly above-average command with the slider. He throws the slider 1.1% more in the shadow zone than the average major leaguer does. The slider command is fine and helps the slider play up, but does it really explain the slider being the most dominant pitch in all of baseball? Not to a sufficient degree.
The Tunnel Stack
If Evan Gates has below-average stuff and below-average command then how can he perform at such a high level? The answer boils down to the fact that all three of his pitches tunnel perfectly off of each other, and it allows every single one of his pitches to play up to an absurd degree. Pitch tunneling occurs when two pitches have similar movement patterns so hitters can’t differentiate between the two pitches until it is too late. For a more complete breakdown on the subject, I strongly recommend you read this article.
Evan Gates throws his fastball with 0” of horizontal movement in either direction on average. He throws his cutter with just 1.6” of horizontal movement. He throws the slider with the most horizontal movement, and it is still just 2.1”. For all intents and purposes, those pitches have identical horizontal movement. Hitters primarily perceive tunnels based on horizontal movement, so having the same movement makes them look almost the exact same to the hitter.
The lack of horizontal separation that Gates offers has no precedent at the major league level. The two pitches with the most distance separating them in the four-seam and slider have just 2.1” of separation. There are zero pitches moving to the gloveside in the major leagues with less than 2.1” of separation from the primary. This is something we only see with changeups. The least separation between a four-seam and breaker is just 3” by Drew Rassmussen between his four-seam and cutter. This is the most separation any of Gates pitches have from each other. If we compare the slider to the cutter then he is shattering every notion of what reasonable separation is. The complete lack of horizontal separation absolutely enhances the deception, and makes it hard for hitters to correctly guess what pitch he is throwing.
The slider and curve have the same spin rate and velocity so it is very likely they are the same pitch that is just sometimes classified differently due to a somewhat inconsistent shape.
It goes deeper than just having identical horizontal movement on all three pitches though. They also have nearly identical horizontal pitch locations, The four-seam is the only pitch that is thrown to the armside with a -0.14 PlateX, the slider is in the middle at 0.02 PlateX, and the cutter is the farthest to the gloveside at 0.14 PlateX. There is just under 3.4” separating all three of his pitches. It's not just the movement that makes his pitches look the same, but the locations too. His locations aren’t that tightly packed, and he does miss at times, but on average his locations are all overlapping, as are the movement profiles.
The lack of horizontal separation really emphasizes the impact of the distinct vertical movement profiles of each pitch he throws. His fastball is thrown with 6.6” more vertical movement than the cutter. The cutter has 15.7” more IVB than the slider. The three pitches look the same out of the hand but when the slider plummets out of the zone, the fastball hangs up, and the cutter is left closer to the middle.
This is both reflected in movement and locations as he located each appropriately. The fastball is thrown at 2.82’, the cutter at 2.46’, and the slider at 1.85’. Those distinct locations along with plenty of velocity separation let the movement gaps play up even further. They all look like the hittable fastball or even a cutter, so they all get lots of swings only to result in whiffs when the pitch is not what the hitter expected it to be.
The Overpowering Fastball
The fastball is actually, believe it or not, an elite swing-and-miss offering within the strike zone. He has a 30.6% in-zone whiff rate this year which is in the 96th percentile of all professional baseball players in the United States. He gets so many whiffs because hitters see the slower slider that he uses as the primary and they come out of an identical tunnel. As a result, he gets a lot of hitters to swing under the high heat, and even when they swing in the right location, it’s usually timed to a hanging slider so they are late on the pitch. As an extension of this, Evan Gates has a .330 wOBAcon against his fastball which is over a full standard deviation better than the average fastball.
Believe it or not, the fastball is actually the best pitch in Evan Gates's arsenal at getting the hitter to not swing at strikes. He has just a 61.4% Zswing on the fastball, the lowest of any of his pitches. He does this in what is the most unconventional manner possible. The lack of in-zone swings actually comes on the fastball in the upper third where he has just a 45.8% ZSwing. That is a 99th percentile take rate on fastballs in the upper third. The average fastball gets more swings in the upper third than they even do down the middle. Evan Gates again breaks the mold. Why does he get so many takes? It’s the same reason as everything else. Elite pitch tunnels. The fastball when located above the usual location stack looks very distinct, but because hitters are used to looking for pitches to break down, they don’t swing at the high fastball as it looks like it will miss high.
Will it Work?
There has never been a pitcher like Evan Gates who has found success in the big leagues. There has also never been a pitcher like Evan Gates in the minor leagues who haven’t found success. Gates is truly one of a kind, and that makes it hard to know if his style of pitching can translate to the highest level.
He has below-average stuff and below-average command. Common sense says that he won’t find success in the major leagues. However, common sense also said that Evan Gates couldn’t have posted a sub-2 ERA this year. We have seen players be solid major leaguers with poor stuff and average command before because they have elite tunnels. Zach Plesac is the most notable name, but players like Chris Flexen and Cal Quantrill also are in this mold to an extent. (All three are sub 95 Stuff+ and sub 101 Command+). Finding success without stuff or standout command is possible with exceptional deception and pitch tunnels.
I’m not entirely confident in it, given that we’ve never seen the tunnel stack that Gates throws at the MLB level before, but I think he’s a major league reliever. Gates has a unique look that is hard to gameplan for, and I don’t think the tunnels will perform significantly worse at the higher levels, even if the slider gets slightly less chases. The pitches performance makes sense on paper, even if this is all theoretical conjecture if it works. I wouldn’t bet on Gates being a closer or anything in the majors, but I think he’s likely serve as a quality reliever for a few years. He’s also even more useful in a postseason environment because of how easy it is to abuse certain matchups with a pure tunnel arm like this.