MLB Draft Notebook Excerpt: Aaron Barrett

For those of you that are fairly unfamiliar with my site or new to it, I'm putting together what I'm calling the 2010 MLB Draft Notebook.

The MLB Draft Notebook, as shown in the link here, is a .PDF product that can be sent directly to your e-mail inbox the weekend before the draft for only $9.99. In the Draft Notebook will be scouting profiles on 775 players, the exact number of players that will be selected in the top 25 rounds of the 2010 draft. As part of each profile, you'll get the vitals on each player (height, weight, etc.), commitments for high school and junior college players, my unique Seiler Rating system grade for each player, stats for junior college and four year college players, and scouting reviews that range between 200-300 words each. In addition, you'll find team-by-team draft previews that are updated versions of the previews I released earlier this spring. I'd say that's a pretty good deal for the price, considering you can't get that much information on that many players anywhere. Period. You can pre-order it here, as about 60 others have done so far.

I'm in the process of writing the final reports, and I'm through the first 50 pretty easily. I wrote preliminary reports on almost all of the players, so it's all about updating the information with the new information that has come in so that it will be as up-to-date as possible. The final reports are pretty much set in stone now unless something major comes up, so you can consider any previews I give you to be the exact profiles that will come in the Draft Notebook.

This is the first of the final reports that I will preview to you between now and draft day. It's very typical of a normal report, just without the stats filled in yet. The cutoff date for the stats this year will come the morning of May 24, which is the normal end of the college baseball season for most teams. Then the stats will be completed.

Without further introduction, here is my report on Aaron Barrett, senior right-handed pitcher from Ole Miss. Please forgive the formatting problems. It will look much better on your computer in PDF form.

Aaron Barrett   Position: RHP   School: Ole Miss   State: MS   Year: Sr.   Height: 6’4’’   Weight: 210

Birth Date: 1/2/88   Seiler Rating: 2C3   Last Drafted: 2009 (TEX-27)

*At Wabash Valley JC (IL)

Aaron Barrett has been a bit of an enigma, as entering the year he hadn’t been able to live up to the hype of his stuff since transferring in to Ole Miss from a junior college in Illinois. Barrett is originally from Evansville, Indiana, and he was drafted in the forty-fourth round by the Dodgers out of high school there at Evansville Central High School, which also yielded Andy Benes to the baseball world. He followed that up with a pair of solid seasons at Wabash Valley, and the Twins took him in the twentieth round of the 2008 draft. After failing to sign and transferring to Ole Miss, things essentially fell apart. He lost all command, and he struggled through an awful season. The Rangers took a flier on him in the twenty-seventh round last year, but didn’t put forth enough to sign him. After seeing his stuff deteriorate in his junior year, Barrett took his game to the Coastal Plain League, where he flashed some of his better stuff of the year. He continued that trend this year as a senior at Ole Miss, as he’s become a dominating sidekick to likely first round pick Drew Pomeranz. Barrett features a fastball that’s usually anywhere from 90-93, and his slider is a solid-average to above-average complement to it. He’s also mixed in a changeup that has flashed above-average, but he needs to really work on commanding all his pitches. He’s worked in a curve before, but it’s more of a show-me pitch, and it’s not Major League quality. He has improved in almost every facet of his game this year, and it looks like he’ll be one of the first senior arms off the board in the third to sixth round range.