The reason he’s not in the “A” group is because of his FB ratio. Personally as a Braves fan I’m in the group where he’s going to have to prove to me he can do it at the ML level. We’ve had too many so called top pitching prospects that have came through our system that have been total busts so I’m going to wait until he actually does something at the ML level 1st but I really love the way he misses bats.

the only video I have seen of hanson was the AFL championship. Great stuff in my opinion. the only part I did not like at all was him throwing a hissy fit on the mound when he thought he should of got the call. I saw 2-3 instances.

This won’t fly in the bigs, so he is going to need to work that out.

On the positive, this is probably one of the easier things to adjust.

Not quite as tall as Young, but a big guy with an unusually high FB rate and a low BAVG against. I could see him pitching 180 innings per year with maybe 160+ strikeouts. He won’t be tossing half his starts in Petco, so the ERA might be a little higher, but he seems like a solid pitcher.

Hanson will get knocked around a bit, trying settle in as a Braves 2/3 behind Jurrjens, Hudson (When he is healthy?). But he will surely get a lot of hits on him with his pounding the zone and delivery he better watch it. Otherwise IMO he should have a decent rookie year, when they SHOULD bring him up after ST so they can see what they have with that mess of a rotation they’ve got. LOL. Him over heyward/freeman is nuts. Those two could be the next bash brothers.

when it comes to Hanson. People want to focus on his overall AA numbers and seem to look at his AFL performance as a bit of an aberration. The problem with doing that is Hanson clearly changed as a pitcher once he added his slider back into the mix in late June, and his AFL performance wasn’t really out of line with what he was doing in AA at the end of the season.

Allegedly, the first start Hanson used the slider was in his no hitter. That start came on June 25. He had one more start in June, and I’m not sure how he did in it, but take a look at his post June splits. In July he upped his K rate from the mid 8s all the way up to 11 in July and 13.2 in August. His HR rate dropped from from 1.32 to 1 to .32 and his flyball rate dropped from 44.3% to 37.2% to 32.2%, and more than 1/4 of the FB he gave up in August were IF FBs. Suddenly his AFL performance, where he struck out 15.4 and gave up .31 HR per 9 innings doesn’t look that out of line with what he was doing late in the season. To me, it simply looks like Hanson became a significantly different pitcher once he started throwing the slider, and his growth from July to August to the AFL was simply a function of his getting back the feel for throwing his slider consistently.

The funny thing to me is the people who are willing to rank Porcello despite the stats because he isn’t allowed to throw his breaking stuff. Hanson basically went through the same thing with his slider, but he was eventually allowed to throw it and the results once he did were pretty staggering. I mean if this was Porcello we were talking about right now, people would be arguing for him to be on the same level as MadBum, and possibly on the same level as Price. Because Hanson was a “late” bloomer (seriously he pitched basically the whole season at 21), even after the improvement people rank him right around #10 among just SP prospects.