Adam Morgan: Another Longterm Phillies Piece?

Tuesday marked a sort of holiday in the eyes of many Phillies fans. It was “Nola Day”, the big league debut of the team’s highly touted top pitching prospect Aaron Nola. He’s the guy that fans have been wanting to step out on the mound at Citizens Bank Park.

Despite the incessant clamoring from the fans, the organization stayed their course, asking him to remain in the minors for the first half of this season in order to refine a few things they believed he needed to work on in order to be a successful pitcher in the majors. He represents the first in a potential wave of arms that could help lead the organization back to the postseason…..or does he?

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Nola may be the best pitching prospect the team has, but another rookie, 25-year old Adam Morgan, has already made his big league debut and has thus far not embarrassed himself at all. Morgan ended up making that Phillies debut on June 21st, getting the win in 5.1 innings of two run ball against the tough Saint Louis Cardinals.

Morgan has only had one stinker thus far, that coming on July 8th in Los Angeles, when he surrendered 5 runs in four innings to the Dodgers. The lefty has looked solid otherwise. In total, he has started four games, compiling a 3.91 ERA (5.76 FIP, 5.05 xFIP) in 23 innings to go with 21 hits allowed, eight walks and fifteen strikeouts.

On the negative side, Morgan has only kept the ball on the ground at a 37% clip, which would likely prove to be a problem moving forward. As one consequence of that low ground-ball rate, he has given up a few too many home runs, allowing 5 in those 23 innings.

For a nice background on Morgan, I’d recommend you read this piece by Jay Floyd, as well as investigate some of the scouting reviews of Morgan from when he was considered one of the Phillies’ best prospects which can be found here from Baseball Prospectus, and here from Fangraphs.

To summarize these scouting and background pieces, Morgan looked like he would join the Phillies rotation in relatively short order after being drafted by the team in the 3rd round of the 2011 MLB Amateur Draft. That was before he suffered a shoulder injury that required surgery, causing him to miss all of 2014.

The injury was a particular shame, because all of the scouting reports that I found suggested Morgan would be a mid-rotation fixture, perhaps as early as 2014. However, the injury caused that time frame to slip backwards. It also dropped expectations and projections for Morgan to that of a back-end starter or lefty reliever.

When you look at Morgan’s season thus far a little deeper, there are several negative trends that have emerged which, hopefully, can be reversed. As most baseball people know, a shoulder injury takes longer to recover from than an elbow injury. Since Morgan missed all of 2014, it can be assumed that his stuff would not have completely returned just yet.

Even though he wasn’t considered a hard thrower prior to the injury, Morgan has already demonstrated lost velocity on his fastball, while his changeup has begun to creep up in speed (note: the game against Washington was never official, and results are not reflected in his pitching totals):

These are admittedly small sample sizes, but the fact that he has already lost two miles-per-hour off of his fastball has to be somewhat concerning. This is especially so when you consider two more facts. First, batters already have a .302 ISO against the pitch, and that’s with it barely reaching 90 MPH. What might happen if he lost another tick or two? Second, he isn’t exactly spotting that slower fastball very well:

Morgan’s game plan is fairly transparent: work down and in to righties, away to lefties. The problem is that he is leaving his pitches in hittable spots far too often. Even those pitches just outside of the zone are high enough that batters with good plate coverage can get solid wood on the ball. As you can see from this map, hitters aren’t swinging and missing at those pitches:

Going forward, Morgan looks like a no-doubt major league piece. His profile shows a pitcher who can get swings and misses from his slider and changeup. But that profile also shows that his fastball “is basically never swung at and missed compared to other pitchers’ fourseamers“.

Don’t know about you, but that doesn’t sound too good for now to me. Perhaps it is to be expected from a pitcher coming off a major surgery to his shoulder. Probably the best the team can hope for this year is that he holds his own against big league competition, then comes back next year having picked up a few ticks on the radar gun. Regaining that extra mustard on the fastball is probably the difference between Morgan being a fixture in the rotation, and a guy who rides the Triple A shuttle.

NOTE: I didn’t include Morgan’s latest start in the zone profiles because it shows all of his pitches as up and in against right-handed hitters, so it skews the map overall.

Velocity chart and zone profile used courtesy of BrooksBaseball.net