Last night I saw this tweet come through my timeline from Dave Gershman of Baseball Essential:
Source: #Reds, P Tim Melville (spent last year at AAA-Toledo in Tigers org, former Royals Prospect) are nearing deal. Announced next week.
— Dave Gershman (@Dave_Gershman) November 26, 2015
He’s been a starting pitcher for his entire career in the minor leagues. Originally drafted in 2008 (4th round, Royals), he has struggled to find the success he had in his first full season, mostly due to control problems as his walk rate has been rather high throughout his career. He’s walked 4.2 batters per nine innings pitched over 668.2 innings.
Melville missed nearly all of 2013 after having Tommy John surgery. He’s thrown 129.1 and 151.2 innings in the two seasons since. The results haven’t been good, posting a 5.50 ERA in Double-A his first season back and a 4.63 ERA in Triple-A last year.
At one point he was a Top 100 prospect in baseball, but that was a long time ago (after the 2009 season). He’s still showing quality stuff – working in the 91-93 MPH range and touching higher with two solid or better breaking balls. It’s just been his inability to throw enough strikes that’s been holding him back. Consistently pitching behind in counts makes everything that much more difficult.
What’s interesting to note though, is that from April through July, he walked 60 batters (12.2% of the ones he faced), including three months where he either had as many walks as strikeouts or more walks than strikeouts. Then over the course of seven starts in August and September he walked just seven batters unintentionally (4.3%) to go along with 37 strikeouts (22.6%). Maybe it was just a blip on the radar, but there’s always the chance that something changed and he’s figured it out.
It’s just a rumor right now and nothing is official, so maybe I wasted my time watching a little bit of video and breaking down the stats here, but this could be interesting.