Article: Justin Topa Traded to Seattle for Minor Leaguer

[MrTPlush]

39 minutes ago, TURBO said:

LOL  true.

I didn't realize he was a starter, figured he was a reliever.

22 years old, walk issues, uses one pitch 55% of the time, and has one super nasty pitch.

He will be a reliever sooner rather than later.

[owbc]

The Mariners will probably tell Topa to throw his slider harder and not worry about break. 

The Brewers will go to work converting Hernandez to a reliever and addressing whatever they decided was fixable. 

I like that we've become frequent trading partners with Seattle. They are generally a smart organization and love making trades, sometimes quicker than they should. Meanwhile, we should be quicker to make more trades and trade more frequently. 

[sveumrules]

Hernandez added to the Brewers list at #22 per FanGraphs with this scouting report…

”Hernandez's stuff, especially his slider, is the darling of some proprietary metrics. He has a tight, upper-70s slider that he throws most often, using it at a 60% clip in 2022. His tailing fastball will creep into the mid-90s and has the uphill angle that teams like Milwaukee covet, with both the tailing movement and angle stemming from his low arm slot. He struggles badly to throw strikes with his fastball, which is probably why he leans on his big-breaking slider more than half the time. There's a tertiary changeup here, but Hernandez's approach to pitching (which is to get ahead of a hitter with his slider, then try to run the fastball up the ladder) is more typical of a single-inning reliever than someone who has worked as a starter to this point. If he finally has an arm strength uptick in the bullpen, he'll be a solid middle reliever; if he can ever learn to command his fastball, his ceiling is higher than that.“