Milwaukee Brewers: Scouting Report On RHP Luis Ortiz

Scouting Report

Size/Stature/Delivery
Ortiz is listed at 6’3 and 230 pounds. He’s certainly all of that, and probably could lose 20 pounds or so of “bad weight”, though he’s athletic enough off the mound that it really doesn’t affect him, frankly. He’s a right handed pitcher.

Ortiz pitches from the first base side of the rubber. He has a high 3/4 arm slot, though he has some arm extension on his release that creates some deception in that hitters likely aren’t used to seeing the ball from that release point with that arm angle.

Ortiz has an easy motion and works quickly. He works the low part of the zone and with his size on the mound, he gets good angles for this as well.

In spite of his size, I did note that Ortiz comes out of his delivery in good fielding position and made two solid plays on balls, one ruled foul after he’d made an excellent bare hand grab and throw to first.

Pitches
Ortiz’s bread and butter pitch is his fastball that he runs from 92-97. He has very good movement on the pitch, allowing him to move the ball around the zone and get swings on the pitch, but his best use of his fastball is when he gets it down in the zone. He has some natural arm side run on the ball that is more pronounced lower in the zone, and that makes the pitch really difficult on lefties.

I noted on the fastball that from the wind up, he gets more velocity, but possibly a touch less movement. From the stretch, he gets a tick less velocity as he can’t get his significant mass behind the ball to generate that velocity, but he does seem to get a bit more run on the ball, especially low in the zone. The fastball became a great double play weapon when he had runners on base.

His slider is something that I’ve seen grades of 55-60 on, but I honestly think there’s a lot more ceiling there. He has great control of the pitch, which is rare for such a young pitcher to have such control of his breaking pitch. He runs the pitch in the 82-86 range, and he got excellent break on the ball, and it seemed to me that he got even better break on the ball on the edges of the zone, making it even harder to hit for batters.

Ortiz’s change is the pitch that he’s been working on since his draft, and in the games I saw, he’s made some big improvements on the pitch from last season even. He’s always had good arm deception with the pitch, with a fastball/change that you can’t distinguish by arm movement, but his change previous to this year didn’t move similarly to the fastball, and that could make it easier to pick up and led to him getting hit a bit on the pitch. This year, he’s getting good depth with the pitch when he works it low in the zone. He runs the pitch up there in the 81-84 MPH range in the games I saw on a stadium gun.

Video

Next: Future Outlook