North Shore Tavern Mound Visit: Thomas has obstacles to overcome

There may or may not be a major league Rule 5 draft this year. JJ Cooper of Baseball America has reported that the expectation is there will be one once a new collective bargaining agreement is put in place, but there’s no timetable for that new CBA. Will it likely happen? Sure, but that’s not a guarantee.

If and when the Rule 5 cycle resumes, Tahnaj Thomas will likely be one of those players who garners some interest across the league. The 6’4” right-hander is considered one of the Pirates better pitching prospects, being ranked as their No. 11 prospect in Baseball America’s midseason rankings and No. 7 on FanGraphs list. FanGraphs is particularly high on him, ranking him as the 90th best prospect in baseball.

It makes sense that the more analytical outlet is high on him. His fastball averages 95 mph, can flirt with triple digits occasionally and has some good horizontal run. The slider gets good spin (averaging roughly 2,400 RPM) and, according to what Thomas said the Pirates’ analytics people told him, he got a whiff on over half of the swings against it last year. As a throw-in bonus, he has large enough hands to throw a circle change, though it’s a show-me pitch. Overall, it’s a good collection of peripherals that could be applied into game situations.

Thomas came over to the Pirates in the Erik González trade with Cleveland in 2018. While the scouts banged the tables for González, the analytics people did the same for Thomas. 

“Tahnaj is a freak of an athlete,” pitching coordinator Josh Hopper said at Pirate City at the organization’s pitching development camp. “Maybe one of the most freakish athletes we have around, and that’s a pretty bold statement considering what we were talking about. He’s a guy that you see him just in his shorts, and you didn’t know if you walked into Dick’s Sporting Goods and the Under Armour model is standing over there in the corner. He just does things explosively.”

So why didn’t he have his contract selected last month? Because he’s a project, and the Pirates are banking that other teams are going to view him as too raw to roster a Class A pitcher for a season.

Being without a minor-league season in 2020 impacted every young pitcher, it had to have hurt Thomas more than most. He did not start pitching until he signed with Cleveland in 2016. He appeared in just 24 games before being traded to the Pirates after the 2018 season. After making a dozen starts at rookie level with them in 2019, he made the jump to Class High-A Greensboro in 2021. 

There, he showed occasional flashes, but finished with a 5.19 ERA over 16 starts. For someone who has never pitched a full season, this was the closest he had come. But to get a true feel for how that season went, we need to divide it in half, because that’s basically what happened to him.

Tahnaj started the year in the Grasshopper’s rotation, but was unplugged so he could focus on him mechanics, which had gotten out of sync.

“I felt like my timing was off,” Thomas explained at Pirate City. “I was drifting down the mound too fast. We started to try to work on getting on to the backside and really stay balanced over the rubber and then drive down the mound instead of just drifting.”

Ben Spainer of Baseball Prospectus captured some video from behind home plate of Thomas’ second start of the season on May 13. It was one of his better outings of the year, going four shutout innings while allowing two hits, three walks and striking out eight. Despite the strong stat line, it’s easy to see how inconsistent his mechanics are. The first pitch in Spainer’s reel is the most telling, with Thomas having a very noticeable hitch at his hips in his delivery.

While watching video for this Mound Visit, that hitch pops up periodically when he’s working from the windup, but it changes from pitch to pitch. Sometimes it’s one flinch, sometimes two, sometimes it’s a straight shot forward. It may be deliberate to mess with the hitter’s timing, or it might be a symptom of the timing issues Thomas said he had.

In late-June, Thomas was unplugged and spent about a month working on his mechanics to help with those timing problems. I pulled two starts he made against Winston-Salem last year. The first was in June, before his shutdown, and the other was in August. This way we can get a consistent camera angle on him to see how that motion changed. (Greensboro’s games are not broadcast on television or streaming.)

It’s a pretty striking change. Both videos start fractions of a second before he starts his motion:

The most obvious change is it’s a lot quicker. There are certain movements Thomas hits but it’s all done more fluidly. To roll through some other ones: His glove is placed higher and it comes down as he starts his motion. It looks like he’s moved a little towards the third base bag on the rubber. The arm slot has changed, going lower while pulling back. And his step towards first base after the delivery is less profound. And while that hitch was still there, it seemed less pronounced.

It’s still very much a work in progress. At the development camp, he had a session on the mound after doing long toss where the ball flew out of his hand well. Hopper was excited and asked what he was doing. Thomas said he was throwing like he did from 220 feet away in long toss from the rubber.

“He said, ‘I’ve heard it before, but this time I listened,’ ” Hopper said. “It’s been really neat. I think he’s starting to get a great feel.”

But did these in-season changes work? It’s obviously a small sample size, but in the first half of a season, before the change, he allowed 25 walks over 25 innings. In 35 ⅓ innings in his second half, that number was reduced to 10. His ERA was still ugly (5.35 in the second half, 4.97 in the first), but being able to stay in the zone more is only a good thing. He has the stuff to get whiffs. 

How often he gets those whiffs is yet to be seen. His slider was shaped more like a cutter in the second half of the season, according to an analyst, though it didn’t see a drop in spin even though it got about an inch and a half less horizontal movement. Thomas’ fastball has some natural cut to it, so a cutter might not be enough for a true secondary offering. His curveball disappeared in 2021, and the changeup is something he’ll only dust off a couple times a game. 

That basically makes him a fastball-cutter pitcher. That’s fine, but almost everyone with that profile goes into the bullpen.

The 2022 season is going to be pivotal for Thomas, regardless of if he is taken in the Rule 5 draft by another club or stays with the Pirates and presumably advances to Class AA Altoona. There is a clear need for high-upside starting pitching, but Thomas hasn’t put together a full season’s workload, let alone the results to backup his peripherals and prospect status. Whether he sticks as a starter, transitions to a reliever or is potentially lost is yet to be seen. He seems to be headed in the right direction in terms of his body movement, though.