In a previous post I commended San Francisco’s Kyle Zimmer for his standout career both as a student and as an athlete and suggested that he also will fall in the first half of round 1 come June, so I felt as though I should follow that up with a brief scouting report.

Zimmer has a prototypical pitcher’s frame at 6-foot-4 with lengthy limbs.  He is an excellent athlete and often receives better grades for athleticism than for anything else, a terrific sign given the fact that he has had to learn pitching on the fly.  He did not go to the University of San Francisco to pitch but rather as an infielder, but his arm is so strong that eventually he was bound to wind up on a mound even as simply an experiment.

Zimmer has added a lot of extension and length to his delivery and is far more solid in back than he was early in his pitching career, exactly what one expects from a converted infielder or catcher.  Quality deliveries require enough length to provide the time necessary to reach a repeatable release point from a healthful slot.  Zimmer definitely has a delivery now that allows him to do that.  He has been up to 99 mph this spring already and could throw up a triple-digit readout at any time.  With a potentially triple-plus fastball and some polish to his delivery, he immediately shoots into the one-one conversation.

His secondary stuff is behind the fastball, but not nearly as far as it could be given how little time he has spent on the mound thus far.  His curveball (we are only considering the sharper and quicker version even though he has used a loopier one in the past as well) already is a 50 pitch, and his changeup, while fringy now, has shown enough promise to assume that it will always be useable and will always be improving.

He commands the ball well to both sides of the plate, and his numbers back up his projectability.  He has filled out a lot in his time with USF (around 220 lbs. now), but he probably still has some development left in him as well.  His changeup has already looked better in his spring starts than it did on the Cape, and he has used his tighter bender more frequently as well.  All of this shows Zimmer’s propensity to listen and react to criticism.  Zimmer’s makeup is off of the charts, and I like him a lot more than other righties in the 1-1 conversation right now.

• There’s been a growing buzz surrounding University of San Francisco RHP Kyle Zimmer, as he’s asserted his name into the No. 1 overall discussion.  In his first couple starts of the season, his command of four pitches has been great while consistently bringing it in the upper-90s.  John Kilma of Baseball Prospect Report – formerly known as Baseball Beginnings – details what he likes about Zimmer and provides some personal video of the right-hander.

• In the back-end of a double header on Sunday, Georgia Southern right fielder Victor Roache broke his wrist while diving for a ball and is expected to miss the remainder of the 2012 season.  Roache, who is ranked by Baseball America as the No. 9 prospect on their draft board, was coming off a monster offensive season in which he slashed .326/.428/.778 with 30 home runs.  Prior to the injury, he was hitting .412/.600/.765 with two home runs.

• Andrew Pentis of MLB.com wrote a great article on Trevor Bauer and his quest to be the perfect blend of a power and finesse pitcher.  Bauer apparently has nine (yes, nine) pitches, each one specifically designed for a given scenario and/or count.

• After watching endless video and reading a host of scouting reports, a player I like more and more everyday is David Dahl.  I love his setup at the plate as well as his bat path and balance to the point of contact – it’s pretty.  All the tools are there and everything he does on the baseball field looks natural.  Conor Glassey of Baseball America recently posted a first-hand video of Dahl recorded this past summer.  Baseball America also named him a 2012 First Team Preseason High School All-American.

• The great John Sickels of Minor League Ball has finally released his Top 120 prospects for the 2012 season.  In my personal opinion, his list is always one of the best and this year is no different.

• If you’ve enjoyed Dee’s articles on scouting philosophy and the evolution of the prospect landscape, then be sure to check out Nathaniel Stoltz’s “There’s No Such Thing as a First Base Prospect” at Seedlings to Stars.  Stoltz and the rest of the S2S staff have done an impressive job since launching last May, and I find myself reading it daily.

• Over at FanGraphs, Mark Anderson compares Pirates pitching prospects Gerrit Cole and Jameson Taillon.  He examines their respective mechanics and arsenal as well as their overall command and mound presence.  However, I’ll let you find out who he ultimately prefers.

As opening weekend of NCAA baseball came and went, baseball fans, particularly those of the amateur and collegiate ranks, were once again swept up in the joy of spring and a return to normalcy.  We have been without the game since the end of the Arizona Fall League in many ways.  Although there is no such thing as the off-season for us here at The Sombrero, the recruiting season just isn’t the same as the spring and summer seasons.

The premier series of the weekend saw Vanderbilt travel to Stanford where Mark Appel, arguably the top talent headed into the 2012 MLB Draft, deal on Friday night.  This series also featured the loaded 2011 Draft’s only unsigned 1^st-rounder, Tyler Beede, toss his first collegiate pitch.  Both of these teams rank in the top-10 and are absolutely loaded talent-wise.  What they also are loaded with are entire rosters of players devoted to academic excellence.  This weekend also saw Duke travel to 13^th-ranked Texas in a game that also featured nothing but standout student-athletes.  Next weekend Texas travels to Stanford where the same applies.  These teams come from prime-time athletic conferences and perform well in sports other than baseball, but consider the fact that last year’s Texas squad hosted a series against Brown, a school in which no player on the field was receiving athletic-based financial aid, and actually dropped a game to the Bears.  They’re the University of Texas.  Just imagine for a minute the 40 or so kids that the Longhorns football team might send to the hospital if the Bears were to travel to Austin for a football game.  This hypothetical scenario reflects the idea behind this piece.

Baseball is unique in the world of collegiate athletics in that it provides academically inclined players and institutions many if not all of the opportunities that those players and schools where athletics must come first are provided, which quite clearly is not the case across the collegiate sports landscape.

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