Sooooooo if you don't know the name yet, you should, San Diego State's Stephen Strasburg is ridiculous.  He's far and away the front runner to be the #1 overall pick, and the blogospheres for the worst teams in baseball have been alive with tanking wishes so they can get him to salvage something from the season.  He was the only amateur on the US National team and you can watch his start against Cuba here.  Though it wasn't a dominant one you can see he's got the low to high 90s fastball, the power curve, the size, the command, not to mention the stats (ridiculous 133/16 K/BB), he even has a cool name.  But what would this site be if we didn't ask about the mechanics?  I don't have any slo-mo GIFs for you, but my thoughts inside the break:

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I looked at a late round sign in Tim Melville, today a quick look at Pirates 2nd rounder Tanner Scheppers who failed to come to terms.  Long story short, he was rated as a surefire Top-10 pick up with Aaron Crow as the the #1 college righty, but before the draft he had some significant shoulder problems.  First it was diagnosed as a stress fracture, which would be completely ridiculous without some sort of trauma, but it turned out to be some rotator cuff and labrum problems after visiting with some of the best in the biz of sports medicine. 

As someone new to pitching (according to the MiLB draft report---and he threw 15 innings freshman year) throwing 91-95 is going to put a lot of stress in new places it's not terribly surprising there's some hurting going on, but lets see if there's some mechanical background as well after the break.

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Finally I'm getting to some writing here, sorry for all the delays, but for my first significant article here at Driveline Mechanics I went with Royals' draft/signee Tim Melville.

Background: Melville entered the year vying to go #1 overall, but fell off some when his velo was down early in the year.  He still rebounded late in the year and was rated by Baseball America as the top high school pitching prospect in the country but fell all the way to the Royals in the 4th round (115th overall) due to the 6th tool of a player, "signability".  Well the Royals ended up piling on to their draft haul and signing him for a 1.25 million bonus which is roughly the "slot" bonus for the 28th overall pick.

There is some injury history here as his sophomore year of high school he pitched just 5 innings during the high school season due to a shoulder injury that was at least diagnosed as a torn labrum.  I can find nearly anything else written about the subject in anyone's pre-drafts and his stuff did come back so maybe it was an initial mis-diagnosis?, but it's clear he's faced at least some shoulder problems in the past.

Stuff: When he's right---as he was leading up to the draft---he sits 91-94 with an inconsistent-but-occasionally-plus knuckle curve and a high school pitcher's changeup.  The early year inconsistent velo is a red flag but it picked back up as the season went along, and Missouri's cold early spring weather probably played a role there.  Although his draft video only shows a handful of pitches, it has him throwing 87-91, but I saw him in the AFLAC All American game the summer of '07 and his stuff is legit.  Given a prototype 6'5 205 frame with wide shoulders and still more room to fill out (dude is going to be built like a tank if he gets on the right lifting programs), he has the current stuff and raw projection to make for a pretty good high school prospect on the surface.

Video/mechanics breakdown inside the break:

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