Luis Severino Makes FanGraphs' Prospect Watch

FanGraphs' resident prospect guru Marc Hulet does a regular "Prospect Watch" series in which he targets and scouts a few different prospects from around baseball.  Yesterday's edition featured Yankee pitching prospect Luis Severino, who's been making a lot of noise on the  scene thanks to his very good 2013 campaign.

Hulet's assessment of Severino was full of compliments.  He called Severino a potential "scouting coup" based on his tools, and like Keith Law, Hulet was a big fan of Severino's stuff.  He thinks there's room to add a few MPH to Severino's mid-90s fastball and likes the natural break of his curveball and fade of his changeup.  Also like Law, Hulet acknowledged that Severino has a lot of mechanical inconsistencies that need to be ironed out, especially the arm slot and motion repeatability when he throws his offspeed pitches.

Based on these 2 scouting reports, it's clear that Severino is far from a finished product.  That's true for any pitcher at age 20, so Severino has plenty of time to work on smoothing out his mechanics.  That can be taught and coached too.  What can't is stuff and both Law and Hulet recognize that Severino has plenty of that.  It wouldn't be a stretch at all to think that Severino could be the top organizational pitching prospect by the end of this season.

P.S.- I had Severino ranked 16th on this year's AB4AR Top 30 in his first appearance.  Check out the whole list here.