On fast track with his fastball

June 06--THE FIRST rule of the Major League Baseball draft is that none of us knows anything. None of us with bylines, anyway. All we can do is listen to the words of the guys who are paid to do this and then make some rudimentary calculations of the odds that we will ever see the player in question at the major league level. The baseball draft is all about projecting risk and measuring probabilities. It's an actuarial endeavor disguised as a meat market. Tools are easy to identify. The hard part is deciding whether those tools are worth the risk that they won't translate against better competition.

This brings us to the words Marti Wolever spoke about the player he drafted at No. 7 last night. The two most important: fastball command. Forget about velocity, although the book on Aaron Nola is that he sits in the low 90s (Wolever said 93 to 94 mph in his final start at LSU). Forget about secondary pitches, although scouts say Nola has a good feel for his changeup and a breaking ball he should be able to throw in the majors. Forget about upside.

"He can command his fastball," said Wolever, the Phillies' longtime scouting director, "and he can throw to both sides of plate."

That Nola can do both of those things right now is why he was the obvious pick. Not because the Phillies are looking at him as any type of savior who can prevent them from having to spend the next couple of seasons drawing a new blueprint. Not because they were targeting a pitcher who could help as early as next year. The reason Nola fits for the Phillies is that the Phillies could not afford to whiff on this pick, and a pitcher who can command his fastball down in the zone and on both sides of the plate is already at a place where many higher-ceiling prospects never reach.

If Wolever's words are accurate -- and almost all of the nonpartisan scouts and analysts who study this kind of stuff agree with him -- then Nola belongs as a member of the lowest risk pool of the draft. To a health insurance company, he is a 21-year-old nonsmoker from Minnesota, because he can do something that Phillippe Aumont still can't, that Jesse Biddle does inconsistently, that Kyle Drabek and even Jarred Cosart still haven't proved they can do.

Nola can locate his fastball, and that fastball has decent movement, and decent velocity, and now the only questions are whether he can stay healthy, and whether he can develop his secondary pitches into a top-of-the-rotation repertoire.

"We don't have to project a lot, because it's already there," Wolever said.

If that sounds like a more promising prognosis than those made after recent first rounds, it should. That's the difference between picking in the top 10 and picking where the Phillies have picked most often over the last 6 years, which is the bottom third of the first round, or lower. The Phillies forfeited their first-round picks in 2009, 2011 and 2012 for signing Raul Ibanez, Cliff Lee and Jonathan Papelbon. In that regard, Wolever probably takes too much blame for his recent run of top picks. Kelly Dugan, Larry Greene and Shane Watson were picked No. 75, No. 39 and No. 40, respectively. The Aaron Nolas of the world were long gone, and it makes some sense to err on the side of reward, since the lower-risk guys often do not possess the upside that matters.

The legitimate quibble with the Phillies' strategy over the last half-decade lies in their inability, or unwillingness, to balance the risk they do take on with safer picks throughout the rest of the draft. Take 2008, when they selected Anthony Hewitt, Zach Collier and Anthony Gose with their first three picks, all of them in the Top 51 overall. All three were raw high school players with tools and upside, but a hell of a lot of developing to do. Gose turned into a legitimate prospect, while Collier and Hewitt were unmitigated busts. Mixing in a college player at least would have lessened their total risk. For example, eight of the 13 college players selected in the second round that year have played in the majors, compared with six of 17 high schoolers (Gose was one of those high schoolers).

Point is, there are ways to estimate the risk a team takes when it drafts a certain type of player from a certain type of place with a certain selection in the draft, so the Phillies' recent paucity of productive picks isn't necessarily evidence of a case-by-case scouting breakdown. It could be a big-picture decision-making breakdown. At No. 7, though, the decision to take polished fastball command seems entirely sound.

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