ESPN.com · May 14, 2019
Where do baseball's elite starting pitchers come from?
The amateur draft is less than a month away and teams are starting to hunker down, getting in those final scouting trips and narrowing down their list of potential picks and players with the good faces.
Chris Paddack was once of those draft prospects. In his senior year at Cedar Park (Texas) High School in 2015, he went 11-0 with a 0.46 ERA and 134 punchouts in 75 innings. He fell to the eighth round for several reasons, however: (1) He had a commitment to Texas A&M; (2) he already was age 19½ on draft day; (3) his fastball sat at 89 to 92 mph; and (4) while he already had that plus-plus changeup we've seen as a rookie, he had no third pitch.