Scouting Ashcraft and Burrows' best pitches

This story was excerpted from Alex Stumpf’s Pirates Beat newsletter. To read the full newsletter, click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox.

PHOENIX -- We’ve heard plenty about the Pirates’ deep pool of pitching in their farm system all season. This week in the desert, we got to see it.

On Monday, Braxton Ashcraft (No. 7 prospect) made his Major League debut, tossing three scoreless innings out of the bullpen. On Tuesday, Mike Burrows (No. 15 prospect) made the start, and while a messy fourth inning cut his night short, he was mostly dinked and dunked by one of the top performing offenses in baseball. He showed some stuff and didn’t surrender much hard contact. Sometimes, that’s baseball.

Neither prospect is currently on MLB Pipeline’s Top 100 list like Bubba Chandler (No. 2), Thomas Harrington (No. 84) and Hunter Barco (No. 93), but they are well touted and have full pitch arsenals that could play in the Majors. Each pitcher has one offering that stands out in particular: an offspeed and a breaking pitch.

Burrows’ pitch: Changeup
The stats: 0.48 BAA, 66% whiff rate in Triple-A, 27.5 inches of vertical drop, 1,569 RPM of spin in Majors

The skinny: Burrows’ two starts in the Majors have been mixed bags. The results haven’t been there yet, allowing four earned each turn, but also flashing some plus pitches, including the changeup. In his first start, he got eight whiffs with it. On Tuesday, he threw more changeups than he did fastballs.

“I think it’s also a little bit of a testament to the fastball as well,” Burrows said on his changeup after his first start. “I don’t think I would get as many whiffs if the fastball wasn’t good. It’s something to build off of, and making sure I’m utilizing that as much as I did today and locate the fastball better.”

For most pitchers, the changeup is an offering that is used exclusively when they don’t have the hand advantage against the batter. Burrows will throw it to right-handers, too, challenging them on the inner-part of the plate. When he locates like he has in his brief time in the Majors, it’s going to yield plenty of weak contact off the hands.

Burrows is going to need to sharpen that fastball -- his troubles in the fourth Tuesday stemmed from his heater and the curve -- but he has an out pitch in the changeup.

Ashcraft’s pitch: Slider
The stats: .194 BAA, 41.9% whiff rate in Triple-A, 28 inches of vertical drop, 2,620 RPM of spin in Majors

The skinny: If you want to nitpick, Ashcraft wanted a wild first pitch in his debut back, but quickly regrouped and put together a quality outing.

“I settled in, pitched my game,” Ashcraft said. “I lean on my slider a lot, especially coming in in relief.”

Ashcraft wasn’t underselling his slider usage. He threw it 48% of the time in his debut (he averaged 28.4% usage in Triple-A), and it worked. The Diamondbacks put six sliders in play, all for outs, and he struck out Tim Tawa for his first big league punchout with that slider.

Oh yeah, that slider to Tawa also came in at 90.9 mph. That’s a cutter for most people, but most cutters don’t get the type of depth Ashcraft does. He can skirt that line between making it a slider or cutter given the situation or which part of the zone he’s attacking. If it’s up, it’s more of a cutter. If it’s low, it’s a gyro slider.

It doesn’t get a ton of sweeping action, but that bite tunnels well with his four-seamer, which usually goes in the upper-part of the zone. Like Burrows -- and plenty of other pitchers -- the best secondary pitch usually plays off the fastball, but he showed he can use it as a primary pitch for an outing. That’s something worth keeping in mind as he adjusts to bullpen life for the first time.