Taking a "Listen" at Tim Berry

I work in a cubicle. There's a lot of background noise - conversations, conference calls, printers, shredders, people walking back and forth. During baseball season, I like to listen to streamed internet game audiocasts to drown out the background distractions. Major league games are available (for a $19.99 annual fee) at mlb.com GameDay Audio. But I find equally effective the free minor league game audiocasts available from milb.com. During the offseason, I rely on archived audiocasts, and I find the minor-league archives more interesting than the major-league archives because I know less about the teams and players.

Most minor-league teams, including all the Orioles' affiliates, don't archive their audiocasts. But among the teams that do are some of the teams against which the Orioles affiliates play - the Potomac Nationals (Carolina League), Asheville Tourists (South Atlantic League), and Staten Island Yankess (NY-Penn League). By listening to the games those teams play against Orioles' affiliates, I can learn more about the Orioles' prospects (and non-prospects), plus get some observations from a non-Orioles perspective.

In 2013, the Potomac Nationals played twenty games against the Orioles High-A affiliate the Frederick Keys, all of which are available for listening on the milb.com audiocast archive. I haven't yet listened to all twenty, but I did listen to the four started by Orioles' prospect Tim Berry. Berry is a left-handed starting pitcher ranked by Baseball America as the Orioles' #6 prospect and by Baseball Prospectus as the Orioles' #7 prospect. I will explore Berry's four starts against Potomac.

First, the basics. The following table includes Berry's Game Score for each start, as well as the basic box-score line:

Date	IP	H	R	ER	BB	SO	GS
May 23	5 2/3	8	3	2	1	2	44
June 9	7	5	2	2	0	8	67
June 14	6	9	4	4	1	5	38
Sept 2	6	7	3	3	0	3	49

The four starts include one good game, one subpar game, and two games close to average. Even from this initial look we can see that Berry has several characteristics of the Tommy John family of pitchers:

• He's left-handed.
• He has excellent control. 
• He doesn't consistently strike out a lot of batters.
• He gives up more base hits than you would like, but doesn't give up a lot of home runs.

The next table summarizes the results of the plate appearances against Berry. The batted-ball results include both base hits and outs; the percentages in the total row are the percentages of batted balls only:

Date	GS	Fly Balls	Line Drives	Grounders	Walks	Strikeouts
May 23	44	6	5	9	1	2
June 9	67	6	3	7	0	8
June 14	38	6	5	10	1	5
Sept. 2	49	4	7	10	0	3
Totals		22 (28.3%)	20 (25.6%)	36 (46.1%)	2	18

In all four starts, Berry got ground balls on just under half of the batted balls put in play. His ground out/air out ratio on outs in 2013 was 1.88/1, so (at least in these four games) batters got hits against Berry when they were able to hit the ball in the air. I haven't systematically tracked the distribution of batted balls for other pitchers, so I don't know if Berry's pattern was typical.

In the lower-level minor leagues, generally speaking, the better players are the better prospects. That's not necessarily true at AAA, where typically half of each team consists of minor league veterans and players who have lost rookie eligibility. Therefore, it's not necessarily true that the best hitters a pitcher faces will be the hitters he faces in the major leagues. But, at the lower levels including Class High-A, the better prospects will most likely be promoted to the next level. It's obvious that pitchers will have the most success against the worse batters. But if a pitcher is having substantially more success against non-prospects, that's a sign that he might have trouble as he moves up to a higher level. Using Baseball America's 2013 Prospect Handbook, I  divided the players Berry faced into three classes -- those who were among the Nationals' top 30 prospects; those were included in the organizational depth chart; and those who weren't mentioned at all. Below are the results when Berry faced batter in each class:

Prospect Status	Plate Appearances	Slash	OPS
Top Thirty	27	.333/.333/.481	.814
Depth Chart	49	.326/.326/.408	.734
Not Mentioned	20	.222/.300/.222	.522

As expected, Berry did best against the non-prospects. It is interesting that both players Berry walked were non-prospects - interesting, but probably not significant. Berry allowed base hits at about the same rate to the low-level prospects as to the top-30 prospects, but the top-30 prospects hit with noticeably more power. Although I don't have any data for comparison, I'm a little bit concerned that Berry was so much more effective against non-prospects as I described above.

Tim Berry is a left-handed starting pitcher who appears to be a young Tommy John-type pitcher. It's been noted that Tommy John-type pitchers are more effective later in their careers. Jeff Ballard and Zach Britton were two similar Orioles prospects in my lifetime; both were promoted very quickly to the major leagues. While both had or have had moments of success, they've both failed to live up to their minor-league promise. I think that it would be best both for the Orioles and for Berry if the Orioles were patient with him, giving him a full year at AA and a full year of AAA before promoting him to the majors. I think he's a good prospect, albeit one who'll require careful handling and patience.