BRADENTON, Fla. -- At just 21, you can’t really call Quinn Priester a veteran, but this is his third spring training and his fourth season as a pro. There aren’t too many people in Pirate City who can claim that.
You also can’t fault anyone eager for the top 100 prospect and 2021 Class High-A East League pitcher of the year to advance and get to the majors. It’s not like he’s lagging behind. He’ll make the jump to Class AA Altoona this year, and a midseason promotion could very well be in the cards too.
Until then, he has some mistakes to make.
“It’s just fun when you get out here and you’re able to go through some of the mistakes again,” Priester said on what he learned from last season and how he’s applying it to spring training. “Just be like, ‘Oh, I did that already. I already know that happened last year.’ I know what the correction is. Those failures that I had I worked through.”
“It’s like, ‘Yeah, that sucked, but it sucked in a good environment, right?,’ ” he continued shortly after. “If Matt Fraizer takes me 400 feet, it doesn’t matter here. No one is gonna remember that home run I gave up here. But now I know, ‘OK, that changeup can’t be belt high, or that fastball can’t be left belt-high in. It’s gotta be up or have some cut to it or whatnot.’ It’s an awesome environment to make mistakes. Obviously I’m not going out there trying to, but when they come up, it’s not a bad thing.”
That’s Priester. Back in December, he talked about how he recognizes that “there are going to be eyes on him.” He and Roansy Contreras are the team’s two biggest pitching prospects, and Contreras made a cameo in the majors at the end of last season and will get a longer look in 2022. Priester isn’t there yet, even if he wants to be.
When working with him this year and asking him questions, pitching coordinator Josh Hopper often tried to limit Priester’s answers to five words. If he did a drill or was reflecting on a game, he didn’t want Priester to say he was feeling A. and B. and C. and so forth. How did he feel? Simplify it.
As the year progresses, Hopper saw Priester mature, both as a pitcher and as a person.
“I think he tried to be the 28-year-old version of himself for the longest time,” Hopper said at the team’s pitching camp in December. “He finally got comfortable in his own skin and felt like he belonged and realized, ‘I stand out for a reason. But I’m still developing.’ I think he finally got comfortable being the 20-year-old version of himself instead of trying to be somebody he wasn’t, yet.”
In the instructional league in 2020, Priester wowed scouts with the gains he made during the shutdown. There was buzz that perhaps he could emerge as one of the top pitching prospects in the game in 2021. That didn’t quite happen. Priester had a good season, but he dropped from Baseball America’s No. 58 prospect to No. 88.
80-grade spring training tweet: 20 seconds of Quinn Priester playing catch pic.twitter.com/ICXXqaWeNA
— Alex Stumpf (@AlexJStumpf) February 21, 2022
Priester lost a little ground on the prospect list, but gained something more valuable in 2021: A new pitch. After struggling for years to find a slider, he found a grip in June of 2020 throwing outside.
He started throwing it in games last season, and talking to one National League analyst, it has become quite possibly his best pitch already, being described as major-league ready despite being new.
It’s a quality pitch, but he still has to know how to use and tunnel it. He started getting that feel for it last year.
“[The slider] is gonna play best down the middle of the plate, looking like a fastball until it’s not,” he said. “So I don’t try to overcomplicate it. Throw it down the middle, let it break because it’s gonna break.”
That’s only one of two plus breaking pitches Priester has. The other is the curve, which has developed from an 11-to-5 break to a more 12-to-6, straight down break, leading to more vertical movement.
But by Priester’s own admission, that could sometimes lead to him trying to get more whiffs, creating some problems in sequencing. Going for the nasty stuff is fun, but hitters catch on. If he can’t throw either breaking pitch for strikes, wait for the fastball.
He’s been working to rectify that, getting all four in the zone more as the year went on and focusing on it this camp.
“I think that’s come with my understanding of pitching,” Priester said. “The pitch that comes here has a better chance to match the bat path. Or if it goes straight down, there’s one point of contact. That has developed because of my better understanding of pitching. Obviously I’ve always worked to pull that thing straight down. But feel for pitching, feel for my body has gotten better from reps.”
Priester will be taking the majority of his reps in Altoona this season, putting him in the upper levels of the farm system for the first time. There, he will face stiffer competition, plus the chance that a promotion to Class AAA Indianapolis, or perhaps even the majors, is in the cards.
“Obviously there’s more opportunity at the AA level," he told me. "But you’ve still got to dominate.”
