When the draft was unceremoniously shortened from forty rounds to a meager five in the midst of the 2020 minor league non-season, teams understandably focused on players with clear upside in those limited supply of picks. Generally speaking, the 160 players drafted that season were guys who projected to have a chance at a starting role, either on the mound or in the field. Specialist types–the sort who tended to fill out the later rounds in the old 40-round system–were left out to dry by the sudden change.
In fact, only five of those players–the Cubs’ Burl Carraway, the Giants’ R.J. Dabovich, the Royals’ Christian Chamberlain and Will Klein, and the Mets’ Eric Orze–were relievers. All of those except Orze were closer types with mid-to-upper-90s heat. If you were more of a finesse reliever who relied more on movement, location, and offspeed stuff, it was a terrible year to be a college senior.
That’s exactly what Illinois closer Garrett Acton was. Fairly ineffective early in his college career as a swingman at Saint Louis, the righty moved to the closer role after transferring to Illinois as a junior in 2019. He was dominant after that conversion, allowing just 13 hits in 33 innings, but wanted to return to school for his senior year to finish out his education anyway. He was 6-for-6 in saves with a spotless ERA in 2020 when the world shut down. But Acton was a near-sidearm slinger with merely low-90s heat, the sort of guy who projected to perhaps flummox inexperienced bats with his deception, but whom advanced opponents would be able to solve. His history of relatively high walk rates likely didn’t help. Acton wasn’t considered a Top 500 prospect by Baseball America, as Athletics Nation’s Alex Hall noted in an excellent writeup at the time of Acton’s signing in 2020.
As Hall states in that piece, Acton probably projected to fit somewhere in the middle of the old 40-round draft picture, perhaps a bargain senior sign in the late teens or early twenties. He was a proven Big Ten performer and was known for his excellent work ethic and intangibles, but he obviously didn’t enter the five-round picture. As it stood, Acton had to settle for being an undrafted free agent who signed for $20K. As Eric Longenhagen and Kevin Goldstein noted on this year’s A’s prospect list at FanGraphs, there was some doubt about whether Acton would even accept such an offer, since his scholastic excellence meant he could easily attend graduate school and pursue possible lucrative non-baseball career opportunities from there. Why delay that to be an A-ball middle reliever on a below-minimum-wage salary for a couple of years?
But Acton indeed chose to give pro ball a shot, a career that finally began when the 2021 minor league season got off to its delayed start in early May. Sent to Low-A Stockton a month shy of his 23rd birthday, the slinging righty would be forgiven if he had some second thoughts about that career choice early on. In his first month of official action, Acton allowed 13 runs, including five homers, in just 13 ⅓ innings of relief, getting pasted for not only an 8.78 ERA, but a .379/.455/.759 opposing batting line. His 91-93 mph moving fastball might’ve fooled Big Ten bats, but it wasn’t translating to the pros.
It’s not even a year later, and my gut feeling is that Garrett Acton is the odds-on favorite to close games for the Athletics in the middle part of this decade. How can that be, and is that actually a responsible prediction?
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I’ll start with the obvious part, the part that you know if you follow the A’s system at all: Garrett Acton has been excellent since that first month. He actually had struck out a full third of opposing batters amidst that terrible start, but once the calendar flipped to June, the strikeouts remained (37.8%) and the hits evaporated (.120/.192/.253). After 23 innings of near-flawless pitching in the tough Cal League environment, Acton was sent up to Lansing for a late-July promotion.
Acton was even better in Lansing: he was essentially untouchable, striking out a full 34 of 67 batters he faced, or 50.7%, to end the 2021 season. Bumped up to Midland this year, he’s off to a 6.23 ERA start, but six of his nine runs allowed were in one game where he was weirdly hung out to dry, and he’s struck out over 30% of opponents again. People have taken notice of Acton’s performance–for instance, in the FanGraphs list linked earlier, he was rated the 24th-best prospect in the Oakland system, and the best reliever other than A.J. Puk.*
*By this, I mean, “best pitcher currently pitching in relief.” FanGraphs also projects Ryan Cusick, Colin Peluse, Jeff Criswell, and Mason Miller, all currently starters, to end up in the bullpen as big leaguers. More on this in a bit.
So, how did Acton go from being a fringe low-minors specialist to such a dominant force in the past 12 months?
Any discussion of Acton’s effectiveness at any level probably has to start with his delivery, which itself has changed a fair bit since his Illinois days. He wasn’t quite a sidearmer in college, but had a lot of sidearm-y elements to his motion, hunching over to more easily allow his arm to travel through a low ¾ slot. Now, he comes to a set position much more upright and utilizes a more traditional ¾ angle.
The rest of Acton’s motion isn’t traditional at all, though. The most notable thing about it is his extremely short arm action, which is kind of a stiffer version of what Lucas Giolito does. Acton’s right elbow almost locks in place parallel to his torso, and then all of a sudden, the baseball seems to appear out of nowhere. The suddenness of the release is compounded by Acton’s lack of a legkick:* he comes to a set position slightly closed, then basically just uses that closed position to execute a slight hip turn to start his motion and further hide the ball, and then suddenly all of his momentum bursts toward home plate. Violently so, as Acton has one of the more pronounced head whacks this side of Carson Fulmer and is clearly a max-effort type on the mound. Still, the zero-to-sixty nature of his mechanics, combined with orientations of his arm and body that make the ball very hard to pick up in the first place, makes Acton extremely uncomfortable to stand in against.
*This is another change that Acton’s made as a pro–he used to have a fairly subdued, but still existent, legkick up through the 2021 season. Now, he all but pitches from a slidestep, albeit with the hip turn directing his momentum the other way very briefly to start.
Acton’s repertoire as a professional pitcher has consisted of three pitches: a four-seam fastball, a sweeping slider, and a changeup. The fastball gets running action in on righties from his three-quarter release but maintains good carry because of its high spin, which allows Acton to consistently place it letter-high and get upward plane because he’s not throwing straight overhand. The slider boasts good two-plane bite and contrasts well with the running action on the fastball: Acton likes to bust righties up and in with the heater and then run the slider off the plate away. Finally, the changeup, which he added in pro ball, is a unique pitch that Acton throws without his index or middle fingers on the ball at all–sort of a mutant Vulcan change, I guess–and it gets good sink and fade as well as strong velocity separation from the heater. Each of the three offerings has above-average movement, which is especially hard to contend with because of the deception Acton brings to the table.
If Acton was still throwing 91-93 mph like he often did in college and at the start of his pro career, all of these positives would make him an interesting curiosity, but still a smoke-and-mirrors type who walks a tightrope that most max-effort guys can’t balance themselves on. But that’s not Acton’s velocity anymore. By the time he arrived in Lansing last July, his fastball had taken a step forward, sitting 93-95 and flashing the occasional 96 mph the rest of the season. That increase was enough to dominate Midwest League* hitters and get Acton on the prospect radar, as previously noted. But this year, he began sitting closer to 95 in April, and has since picked up even more arm strength, working in the 96-98 range in his most recent two outings in Amarillo. The slider and change, which both were in the 82-84 mph range for much of last year, have also gotten bumped up, now into the mid-80s.
*Yeah, I know it was “High-A Central” last year. I don’t care.
You don’t need me to tell you that a 96-98 mph fastball with good plane, a high spin rate, good running action, and premium deception is a heck of a pitch, and the offspeeds are plus offerings as well. Despite the three-pitch mix, Acton’s max-effort approach still probably rules out starting him, but it’s hard to deny that if he can hold these velocity gains, the stuff and deception has elite late-game reliever promise.
There are, naturally, a couple of negatives with Acton. One is that the max-effort nature of his approach to pitching isn’t conducive to precise location, and his walk rate is indeed up near 13% so far this year after being kept in check in the lower minors. The second is that as a pitcher whose fastball plays best up and out of the strike zone, Acton is an extreme flyball type who will likely always give up some home runs. Still, he’s a good athlete, the motion is obviously quite simple despite its effort (thus allowing for more repeatability than most max-effort types), and as a guy with elite makeup, Acton likely has a better chance than most to find ways to improve in his weak areas as he progresses.*
*Acton’s implementation of such dramatic improvements so quickly serves as a textbook example of the importance of makeup in player development.
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So, understandably when I watched Acton’s outings this past week, I thought “future closer.” I have to admit, though, that I often think that a lot about pitchers like him. Like I’ve been doing a lot in previous pieces on this site, I wanted to check through my biases.
There are two biases at play here, and they kind of contradict each other. Acton is a minor league reliever, and that is not a category that tends to be regarded highly. It’s been almost 20 years since I first read it, but I’ve never been able to shake this quote from Moneyball:
The more pitches the opposing starting pitcher throws, the earlier he’ll be relieved. Relief pitchers aren’t starting pitchers for a reason: they aren’t as good. When a team wades into the opponent’s bullpen in the first game of a series, it feasts, in games two and three, on pitching that is not merely inferior but exhausted. ‘Baseball is a war of attrition,’ Billy Beane was fond of saying, ‘and what’s being attrited is pitcher’s arms.
That quote runs through my head like a ticker tape. Relief pitchers aren’t starting pitchers for a reason: they aren’t as good. Relief pitchers aren’t starting pitchers for a reason: they aren’t as good. Relief pitchers aren’t starting pitchers for…We live in a different era now than when Michael Lewis wrote that in 2003: most major league relief pitchers are not simply “inferior starters.” But minor league relievers still inherently are a weird category of player to evaluate, because many of them ultimately do get boxed out by converted starting pitchers when vying for MLB relief jobs. Other than the occasional Chris Bassitt, Jesse Chavez, or Andrew Triggs type, it rarely goes the other way, where a minor league reliever becomes a major league starter.* Therefore, minor league relievers have an inherently lower probability of making it to the major leagues than do minor league starters. On the hitting side, the same thing is true for minor league first basemen, who see themselves crowded out by converted third basemen, outfielders, catchers, and even the occasional Mike Morse.**
*Luis Castillo is a particularly notable exception. I still can’t believe he was a middle reliever in Low-A, admittedly on one of the more talented Low-A staffs I ever saw (He threw 94-96 in an outing I saw in May 2014, for context).
**Usually, only around half of MLB 1Bs were originally drafted/signed at that position (A rough count for this year puts it at 18/30). As with relievers, there is the occasional Trey Mancini type who finds a way to go from first base to a different MLB position, though.
With this knowledge in mind, we are primed to discount minor league relievers as prospects. Sure, baseball has undergone a sort of “relieverization,” but there are reasons that minor league relievers, especially those like Acton who never started as professionals, aren’t starters. The reason might not be Moneyball's blanket “they aren’t as good,” but it’s usually at least “they aren’t as good at starting.” For all his subsequent excellence, Acton struggled as a starter as a sophomore at Saint Louis and in the New England Collegiate League in summer ball. We’re predisposed to think of that as a more telling failure than, say, A.J. Puk’s conversion to relief at the big league level, or even Lou Trivino’s move to the bullpen in the upper minors.
But the thing that’s especially tricky with relievers, even relative to first basemen, is that because they only are pitching for short stretches,* they’re going to show something closer to their best possible stuff than starters are. Even though they're often low-priority organizational players, they thus are going to look like major league relievers more frequently than their more-highly-touted starter teammates do. Acton and Wandisson Charles, probably the two hardest throwers in the Oakland system right now,** come out of the bullpen. Starter Ryan Cusick is probably third, and then you have a bunch more relievers–Nick Highberger (94-97), Grant Holmes, Robin Vazquez, and maybe Hunter Breault (all 94-96ish) and/or Trayson Kubo (93-96)–before you get to whoever the next-hardest-throwing starter is (there are a bunch of starters who sit 93-94 or so).*** Starters are also incentivized to develop their third and fourth pitches. Cusick is working on his changeup. Joey Estes and Kyle Virbitsky are working on their sliders. Jeff Criswell is working on his curveball. When they pitch, they don’t really look like relievers, because that’s not what they’re being asked to do right now. It is thus more of a visualization exercise to think about what those pitchers would look like out of the bullpen, especially since there's more uncertainty involved there: some pitchers gain a couple of ticks of velocity upon that conversion while others don’t throw much harder than they did as starters.
*Worth noting, for anyone unfamiliar, that minor league relief outings are often longer than MLB ones, even post three-batter rule. So it might be that the starter/reliever velo difference is a bit less dramatic in the minors. Would be an interesting research topic for anyone who has those data (maybe last year’s FSL data could tell us something?).
**Among healthy pitchers, so excluding Mason Miller, Jorge Juan, etc. If you want to include minor leaguers who are not eligible for prospect lists, throw Domingo Tapia in near the top as well.
***This is an unofficial ranking based on data I could gather from radar-accurate broadcasts and some other sources. It’s not an official source like PitchInfo, so it’s possible one other starter sneaks into that second tier.
Even though “relievers aren’t as good” remains frustratingly implanted in my head, then, I’ve always had a tendency* to jump on minor league relievers who throw mid-90s heat and a good offspeed pitch and declare them serious future closer candidates. Occasionally, this proved prescient (Jose Leclerc, Carlos Estévez, sorta J.T. Chargois), but more often, the pitcher simply wasn’t able to deploy that stuff effectively at higher levels (Aroni Nina, Yhonathan Barrios, Braulio Ortiz, etc.). Others, of course (Ray Black, Shae Simmons) ran into injury attrition.
*I'll reiterate here, for those who don't know my history: most of my history in doing this is in my time of going to minor league games live, from 2012-2015. I imagine I’d have developed higher standards for velocity in the intervening half-decade had I kept going with that.
Since baseball has undergone this sense of relieverization in the 20 years since Moneyball was written, and especially in the seven years since I last regularly wrote about baseball, I wanted to see how these two biases–minor league relievers aren’t good prospects, yet they’re often the easiest players to envision in high-leverage MLB relief roles–actually play out in the data of who gets to be high-leverage MLB relievers. This gives us a sense of how likely a pitcher like Acton is to become a trusted late-game asset versus getting boxed out by Cusick, Criswell, Mason Miller, or whoever else coming in from the rotation.
So here’s what I did. I looked at all pitchers who, in the span of 2017-2022, accumulated either a) 15 or more saves or b) 2.0 or more fWAR pitching in relief. This gives us a fairly good sense of pitchers who have been trusted in a late-game shutdown guy for at least some length of time, have been quite effective, or both. There are 141 such pitchers (current as of 5/5/22, when I pulled these data).
For each of the 141 guys on the list, I took a look at what level they last were a regular starting pitcher. This did require judgment calls in a few cases, since several pitchers changed roles midseason, and a few pitchers started out as relievers, then started for a bit in A-ball or AA, then moved back to the bullpen. But these were only a few cases, and I tried to place each of them in what seemed like the most appropriate category given their career arcs. Without further ado, here’s the table:
Last Level Used as Starter | # of Pitchers |
Rookie | 5 |
Short-season-A | 1 |
Low-A | 5 |
High-A | 11 |
Double-A | 11 |
Triple-A | 15 |
MLB | 46 |
None | 47 |
The neat way to tell this story is to look at this in thirds. Essentially, one-third of high-leverage relievers in modern MLB are guys like Acton: pitchers who began their professional careers in the bullpen and more or less stayed there. Another third are pitchers who made it to MLB as starters but then were moved to relief: the average number of MLB starts among this group before their relief conversions was 53.5 (median 31.5). The final third are pitchers who initially were starters in the minors, but moved to relief by the time they debuted in the big leagues: most of these seem to make their conversions in High-A or higher.
Another way to think of these data is that while only a third of these high-leverage relievers were in the bullpen from the beginning, about half of them were relievers by the time they got to Double-A. In this sense, Acton’s origin as a reliever becomes less and less relevant as he advances through the minor leagues, as the bullpens he’s a member of become more stocked with potential big league talent.
So relievers like Acton do undeniably experience some crowding-out by converted starters as they advance, but a fair number of the elite MLB relievers–Craig Kimbrel, Kenley Jansen, Sean Doolittle, Kirby Yates, Joakim Soria, etc.–of recent years have come from the relief-only path. Though Acton justifiably ranks below guys like Cusick and Criswell on A’s prospect lists, a portion of their successful possible MLB outcomes are in the rotation. I don’t think it’s incorrect to say Acton is the most likely important internal contributor to the A’s bullpen in the next few seasons.