Major League Baseball

New Cub Fowler saw Bryant-Soler explosion coming last season

Published Mar. 24, 2015 12:01 a.m. ET

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Ken Rosenthal

Emptying the spring-training notebook:

Dexter Fowler was on a rehabilitation assignment with the Astros’ Triple-A affiliate last August when he got his first look at Cubs outfielder Jorge Soler and third baseman Kris Bryant.

“I was like, ‘Who are these kids?’” Fowler recalled. “I told (John) Mallee (then the Astros’ hitting coach), I’ve never seen anything like it. In the minor leagues, you never see anything like that.”

Little did Fowler know, the Astros would trade him to the Cubs during the offseason, reuniting him with Mallee, who became the team’s hitting coach in October.

Mallee recalls Fowler saying: “Those two boys down there are some of the best young players I’ve ever seen. They are for real, no joke. I couldn’t wait for them to get up and hit, so I could watch them hit again.”

Mallee said he already had heard about the Cubs’ prospects from his friend, Cubs minor-league hitting coordinator Anthony Iapoce. But he confirmed Fowler’s assessment after working with Soler and Bryant this spring.

“He was like, ‘Bro, you told me!’” Fowler said, laughing. “I should be a scout or something. But then, it’s easy to scout players like that.”

ANGELS’ WILSON FINDING ANOTHER GEAR?

Angels left-hander C.J. Wilson, coming off his worst statistical season as a starter, gives every appearance of being a bounce-back candidate -- yes, even entering his age 34 season.

Wilson said he is throwing his fastball harder and his changeup softer, hitting the “second gear” of his unusual career. He didn’t pitch until he was 21, didn’t become a starter until he was 29.

In other words, he is still learning.

“I have to give credit where it’s due,” Angels GM Jerry Dipoto says. “C.J. is working at a much quicker pace. He’s efficient. He’s killing the strike zone.

“We’ve seen his velocity 90 to 94, mostly 92, which is a couple of ticks above where he was a year ago. I couldn’t be happier with the way he’s throwing.”

Wilson’s average fastball velocity last season was 90.6 mph, according to Fangraphs.com.

BUNTIN’ BILLY RARIN’ TO GO

Reds speedster Billy Hamilton, for the second straight offseason, worked out in Atlanta with former major leaguer Delino DeShields, the team’s new manager at Triple-A Louisville.

DeShields, who played from 1990 to 2002, stole 463 bases with a 75.9 percent career success rate and also was a proficient bunter. Hamilton, who was third in the majors with 15 bunt hits last season, wants to become even more proficient at that skill.

“I felt like he just needed to slow down a little bit,” DeShields said. “I feel like overall he has slowed the game down a lot from this time last year to now. It comes with experience and maturity, those kinds of things.”

Hamilton said he indeed rushed his bunts last season.

“I was trying to get out of the box too fast -- run before I bunt,” he said. “You have to bunt first, get the bunt down. And the better the bunt is, the easier it is to get to first base. I feel like my bunting will be a lot better. I’ll use it way more than I did last year.”

And yet, the bunt cannot be Hamilton’s only weapon.

“Even Brett Butler, who I played with and learned so much from . . . he still could hit,” said DeShields, who was Butler’s teammate with the Dodgers from 1994 to ’96.

“You’re not going to bunt your way through the big leagues. You’ve still got to compete with the bat, make people respect that.”

WHO IS HE? SOMEONE SPECIAL, IT SEEMS

Blue Jays righty Miguel Castro, who appears poised to make the jump from Class A to the majors as a reliever, continues to create quite a stir in the Grapefruit League.

One scout likens Castro to a “6-foot-5 Pedro Martinez,” but a Jays official says a better comparison, due to the pitcher’s body type, is Pedro’s older brother, Ramon. The official added that Castro has a “Fernando Rodney changeup and a fastball up to 99 with sink.”

Jays GM Alex Anthopoulos recently told USA Today, “Our manager (John Gibbons) said he could be Dellin Betances. He could. At the same time, as a starter, maybe he could be Yordano Ventura, because he’s got a big arm and he throws strikes and he has great stuff.”

Castro, 20, is likely to open with the Jays as a reliever, but long-term the club still projects him as a starter.

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