Major League Baseball

Tim Hudson & Mark Buerhle: Two non-prospects who hit it big

Updated Mar. 5, 2020 1:58 a.m. ET

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There are a lot of leaderboards, and the recently retired Tim Hudson and Mark Buehrle are on a bunch of them: Hudson has the 21st highest winning percentage in history (min. 300 starts), and Buehrle is seventh on the White Sox’ all-time innings, and Hudson has the seventh best HR/9 rate in baseball since his debut, and Buehrle has the fourth most complete games, and so on. But there’s also a leaderboard they’re all the way at the very tip-top of, and this is the interactive part of the article: Can you guess what this leaderboard is?

Hmmmmmmmm….

Give up?

These are the 10 best pitchers of the Baseball America Top 100 era who were never named on one of Baseball America’s Top 100 lists. Tim Hudson and Mark Buehrle, two of the greatest pitchers of the last 15 years, pitchers who produced more career WAR than Sandy Koufax or CC Sabathia, were non-prospects.

Well, that overstates things a little. Hudson and Buehrle were prospects within their own systems—Org Filler don’t make major-league debuts at 23 (as Hudson did) or 21 (as Buehrle did)—but not the sort of names that got national attention. The distinction is significant: I once looked at an entire year of minor leaguers and found that the prospects ranked 11th through 100th on Baseball America’s ranking, as a group, far outproduced the 5,000 or so unranked prospects below them. Those 5,000 barely edged even the top 10 prospects for value.

Which is to say, we bemoan the unpredictability of top prospects, the way they fail or get hurt, the way all those glowing comps we put on them turn out to be hysterical in retrospect; but if top prospects are unpredictable, they are also an almost monopolistic source of top-tier talent:

So, as these two great beacons of hope and optimism (and Dan Haren, too!) fade into history, let’s figure out a few things.

Question 1: So they weren’t “prospects,” but what did scouts think of them way back then? Thankfully, we live in the future, so we can finally answer a simple question about the past: The Diamond Mine scouting-report archives include two reports on Buehrle (both after he signed as a draft-and-follow 38th rounder) and one on Hudson (when he was a college student at Auburn). They describe pitchers who are a) recognizably Hudson and Buehrle and b) not exactly sending the scouts marching into their bosses offices demanding action.

Hudson is “poised,” “intelligent,” with positive communication skills; every aspect of his makeup—self-esteem, leadership, etc.—got an above-average grade. Choosing from eight personality types, the Brewers scout selected “in control.” He noted that Hudson spotted his fastball, threw from multiple arm-slots, changed speeds well, and had good arm action on his out-pitch, a forkball (or splitter). Sounds pretty good, except for this: “Shorter version of Bruce Kison. Fastball ranges from 86-89.” Kison was a side-arming swing man from the 1970s and ‘80s. Had a long career, a good career, but not a sexy career. The scout pegged Hudson as “a good senior sign” and a 20th round talent. The A’s took him in the sixth, but signed him for just $20,000—a good senior sign.

Buehrle was a junior college pitcher who signed for $150,000. According to a Jerry Crasnick profile, the scout who signed him still carries around the report he submitted on Buehrle “because it helps serve as a guidepost when he's evaluating similar pitchers. Among other things, the report praised Buehrle for his mound presence, quick feet, ‘pitchability’ and four-pitch mix. ‘With several corrections to his slider and change, he could become a solid No. 3-5 starter,’ Kazanas wrote in '98.”

The scouting report that another team’s scout filed on him the following year noted the same attributes, but with limited appeal: “Locates FB well. Best pitch is SL—wide breaking. Disguises CH well. Feel that he will be a fringe guy in ML."

And, a year later, as Buehrle was a month from his big-league debut, a report that was a bit more encouraging: “Easy motion, from 3/4 release; average arm-speed, with above-average arm action; very good balance/approach to pitching; FB near average; excellent idea how to pitch; controlled his selection, with high pitchability; starter role in ML.”

Question 2: Why wouldn’t a writer like this profile? John Sickels, in his prospect retrospective for Buehrle, explains:

“Although (Buehrle’s) K/BB for Burlington was impressive, he gave up more than a hit per inning. I had not seen him in person, but the scouting report I had indicated that his stuff was nothing special, with a mediocre fastball and an assortment of adequate but not excellent off-speed pitches. For me was a Grade C prospect at that point, like a hundred other guys. …I remember thinking that Buehrle was a fluke of some kind and that in the long run he would be an average pitcher, at best. He didn't throw that hard, and his strikeout rate was very low. Usually, even a successful finesse pitcher still has a decent strikeout rate. I was convinced that the hitters would eventually catch up with him and figure out how to beat him.”

And, for Hudson,

“I didn’t grade many short-season players then, but nowadays a guy with this profile (average velocity, good secondary stuff, good college and short-season success) would probably get a Grade C+. Scouts were very impressed with his splitter, but his command wobbled, shown by the high walk rate and 13 wild pitches. Scouts praised his tenacity, but his fastball excited no one, he walked too many guys, and wasn’t rated among the best prospects in the Southern League by Baseball America. 
I gave him a Grade C in the 1999 book, noting that he had decent stuff, but that the command issue would prevent success unless he solved it. I also wrote that he would probably do better as a reliever than as a starter.”

Question 3: So what the heck? In a sense, Hudson and Buehrle’s careers were the sort of twists where the director hides all the clues right in front of you all along. Those scouting reports have all the positive words you would use to describe each pitcher: Buehrle’s deceptive changeup, Hudson’s fastball movement, Buehrle’s command, Hudson’s makeup, Buehrle’s mound presence, Hudson’s arm-action on the splitter, Buehrle’s pickoff move, Hudson’s poise, Buehrle’s balance. Imagine asking a scout back then, hey, what do you think of this random college pitcher, and having him list off a dozen positive attributes. Pretty good, scouts!

Ultimately, what made Buehrle and Hudson so great—well, Hudson added around three or four mph of velocity, and Buehrle would learn a cutter that, by the very rough “pitch value” metric, became his best offering by some distance. So what made them so great was that they developed in ways that were not visible, or even imaginable, during their prospect years. But what also made Buehrle and Hudson so great was what was there all along: Their durability (neither threw hard, or threw with much effort, and both were immune to injuries until much later in Hudson’s career); their control (Hudson’s walk rate was about 80 percent of the league’s average during his career; Buehrle’s was about 60 percent); their pitchability (each had an ERA around three-tenths of a run lower than their FIP, a FIP/ERA gap that puts them in the 85th percentile among pitchers with 1,000+ innings since 1999); and, yes, their makeup, their intelligence, their self-discipline, those things that made them more likely than most to pick up three ticks on a radar gun or a dynamite cutter.

There’s one more clue that the director was hiding: Their pitching motions. It’s not just that Buehrle and Hudson didn’t throw hard, but that they almost didn’t seem to be trying to throw hard. Doug Thorburn, who writes about pitching and pitching mechanics for us at Baseball Prospectus, says that each pitcher has very little torque in his motion, but good balance, good posture, and, especially, excellent repeatability. It’s not an accident neither threw all that hard; it’s also not an accident that they consequently did many other things, like throw strikes and keep the ball down and stay healthy, very well.

It’s always going to be low-velocity guys like Hudson and Buehrle who make these Top 100 prospect lists miss a Hall of Famer. That’s not a knock on the lists—the lists miss these guys because there’s little profit trying to find these guys. There are far more kids with great makeup and bad fastballs than there are kids with great fastballs, and, as we’ve shown, the ones that prospect writers prefer (the fastballers) are overwhelmingly more likely to make it. It makes the game more fun, though, that there’s room for Hudson and Buehrle in the Hall of Nearly Great, too.

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