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First Pitch: Jameson Taillon Set the Bar Unfairly High For Other Prospects

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We are in a time where the amount of coverage on prospects is unprecedented. There are multiple national outlets that give reports on the top prospects from each organization, and then there are a handful of local sites that go into great detail covering the entire system and the stuff that the national sites either missed, or haven’t picked up on yet. And all of this is supported by the drive to learn about who is the next big thing in baseball.

The downside to this is that prospect hype and expectations are at an all time high. We’re now in a situation where totally reasonable struggles by prospects become unfairly criticized to extremes, and where outstanding results are expected to be the norm, rather than celebrated for how rare they are.

That’s where we get to Jameson Taillon’s pro debut. Taillon wrapped up his rookie season tonight on a strong note, giving up just one run on one hit — a solo homer — in six innings of work. He finished the year with a 3.38 ERA and a 3.44 xFIP in 104 innings. That is outstanding in ways that most people won’t even recognize. And the reason they won’t recognize it is because most people expected Taillon to produce these numbers, which is the unfair side effect of all the prospect hype and expectations.

Taillon was a high-profile prospect from day one. He was the second overall pick in the 2010 draft, and at the time he represented the first chance for the Pirates to have a future top of the rotation pitcher since Doug Drabek in the early 90s. We’re in a time now where Pirates fans talk about how weak the rotation will be if they don’t add a good starter behind Gerrit Cole AND Jameson Taillon, and for 20 years, Pirates fans would have killed to have just one of them in the rotation. So from day one, the expectations were high on Taillon to work out.

Fast forward through a lengthy development process that included fears about his low strikeout totals in the lower levels (when he had completely different mechanics and the Pirates weren’t focusing on strikeouts), the re-emergence of his two-seamer in Double-A (which would later play a much bigger role in his arsenal), Tommy John surgery, hernia surgery during his comeback, drastically improved mechanics during the rehab process, and you ultimately get to the 2016 season. And the 2016 season did nothing to help quell the expectations for Taillon.

The Pirates had a horrible rotation this year, and part of that was due to their approach in the off-season, where they went with Jon Niese, Jeff Locke, and Juan Nicasio for the final three spots in their rotation. That trio wasn’t projected to be as bad as they ended up being, but even if they reached their projections, they weren’t projected to have a lot of upside. The Pirates went with this approach because of the prospects like Taillon that they had projected to arrive at mid-season. This was always a mistake, because as we’ve seen this season, you can never get in a situation where you have too much pitching, and the fear of that non-problem should never lead to going for lower upside starters.

So the stage was set. The Pirates went for lower upside guys to hold the team over until the prospects arrived, which in turn only raised the expectations on those prospects to come in and be the saviors. As if the expectations weren’t already high enough.

Here’s the thing about Taillon’s rookie season: It’s not normal. It’s very special. That might be the expectation for prospects when they first arrive, but it’s not reality.

Chad Kuhl is reality. That’s a guy who came up, struggled right away, made a key adjustment to get his sinker down and get back to being a ground ball pitcher, pitched very well for two months, but has had a few outings this month where it looked like things were falling apart, which probably will require a further adjustment.

That is the normal path for young pitchers and young prospects. They come up, struggle for a bit, make an improvement, struggle after the league counters, and eventually you hope that they make that final counter adjustment needed to reach their upside. Even after that, the need to make adjustments never really ends. And so it’s just insane to see a pitcher like Taillon come up and do so well, and make things look so easy, and expect every prospect to perform that way, rather than viewing Taillon as a special case.

Taillon is special. He continues to make other prospects look bad for their normal results that are actually good outcomes, just because he continues to soar above what should be expected. He returned from Tommy John surgery and looked like a much better pitcher than he did before the injury, with very few command issues. Then guys like Clay Holmes and Nick Kingham have normal returns, with inconsistent stuff and command, and smaller improvements as they make their way back to where they were before, and it’s seen as a bad thing. In reality, Holmes and Kingham are the norm, and examples of good rehab stories from Tommy John. If you want a bad rehab story, that would be Brandon Cumpton, who returned from Tommy John last year, and then got shut down for another year with a shoulder injury around this time last year.

But Taillon was so phenomenal in his return from Tommy John surgery that it set the bar unreasonably high for everyone else.

The same thing happened with his pro debut. Here is a little perspective for how good Taillon has been this year. There are 235 pitchers since 2002 who pitched 100+ innings during their rookie seasons, and Taillon is one of them. I picked 2002 because that was as far back as xFIP results went on FanGraphs. The 3.44 xFIP by Taillon this year ranks 17th in that list. So for the last 15 seasons, there have only been 16 rookie pitchers who also went 100+ innings and had better numbers than Taillon did in his pro debut.

That’s not an example of the norm. That’s an example of a special pitcher. And once again, it’s unfair to guys like Kuhl and Steven Brault and Trevor Williams and Tyler Glasnow and anyone else who makes the jump to the majors and struggles initially. It’s unfair, because Taillon is seen as the norm, and seen as what you should expect from a rookie pitcher, and suddenly the bar has once again been placed so high that almost no one can reasonably reach it.

All of this is unfair to Taillon as well. His performance this year should be celebrated for the rare pro debut that it was. His amazing comeback from Tommy John surgery and a hernia injury — robbing him of the ability to pitch in a professional game for two years — shouldn’t be lost. His ability to actually improve in a major way during this process is downright impressive, especially when a lot of pitchers don’t even see any improvements in years where they are completely healthy. His willingness to adopt the two-seam fastball — formerly a situational pitch — as his primary offering right before making the jump to the majors was a bold choice, highlighting his constant drive to improve his game. He looked ready for the majors a month before he arrived, and instead of coasting until Super Two passed and until the Pirates got to a point where they were comfortable with his future workload, he ignored all of that and worked to continue improving his game.

As we take stock in Taillon’s pro debut, it’s important to recognize that this is a special pitcher, with a special approach to the game, and a really good chance of having a special career. It’s going to be very difficult for other prospects in the system to look this good in their rehab or their rookie seasons in the majors. That’s definitely nothing of their wrongdoing. It’s just that Jameson Taillon has set the bar way too high in almost every area of his development and game. If other younger Pirates prospects learn from him and take the same approaches he takes, then they’re going to be on the path for good results as well, even if they fall short of the high bar he set.

**The 2016 season is winding down, but we never stop with the Pirates coverage here. We’ve got instructs reports coming to you every week, and starting soon we will have daily Arizona Fall League recaps, live reports from the AFL, winter league recaps, and all of the leftover featured articles from the regular season. That doesn’t include our season ending recaps for each position and each team in the farm system. While every other media outlet in town starts going full-tilt into Steelers and Penguins coverage, we’ll still be the only ones writing about the Pirates every single day of the off-season. If you want to read about that other team in Pittsburgh before February rolls around, you should join us and get all of our reports this off-season.

**Jameson Taillon Has a Strong Finish to His 2016 Season in Pirates’ Win. Alan Saunders recaps the final outing of the year from Taillon.

**Clint Hurdle Makes Playing Time Adjustments With the Pirates Eliminated. Now that the Pirates are eliminated, Hurdle is adjusting the playing time for the final week. There might be an Alen Hanson sighting or two.

**Instructs Report: Taylor Hearn Makes an Adjustment to His Mechanics. My latest report on the adjustments Taylor Hearn is making, along with a recap of the games from Wilbur Miller.

**Pirates Will Play Two Games in Montreal Next Spring. I hope this is a step towards bringing back a Montreal Expos franchise.

**Baseball America Names Will Craig Among Top Prospects in New York-Penn League. Craig is the only Pirates prospect who made the short-season lists so far.

Tim Williams
Tim Williams
Tim is the owner, producer, editor, and lead writer of PiratesProspects.com. He has been running Pirates Prospects since 2009, becoming the first new media reporter and outlet covering the Pirates at the MLB level in 2011 and 2012. His work can also be found in Baseball America, where he has been a contributor since 2014 and the Pirates' correspondent since 2019.

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