This is a guy I've been wanting to profile for awhile now, and Blez (SB Nation's fearless leader and webmaster of Athletics Nation) asked me to do it as well, so here it is!

Trevor Cahill is one of Oakland's highly-touted pitching prospects along with Brett Anderson, Josh Outman (profiled on this site here), Gio Gonzalez, Craig Italiano, Fautino De Los Santos... well, you get the point: The A's have a lot of young pitching that hold plenty of promise, which is the Billy Beane way.

Trevor stands 6'3" tall and weighs in around 200 lbs. He is an RHP with average velocity (88-92 mph) on his fastball, but gets great sinking action on it. He pairs his sinker with a good curveball and decent changeup. Scouts have questions about his mediocre heater, but he generates plenty of groundballs and also gets a ton of swings and misses. John Sickles gave Trevor Cahill a B+ grade in the middle of 2008 with questions about his walk rate, but overall liked what he saw.

Trevor's statistics are impressive - no one can deny that. At just 20 years old, Trevor made it to AA and had no problem continuing his dominance of the opposition, posting a 2.19 ERA over 37 innings. He only struck out 33 batters and walked 19, but it's important to remember that he's a 20 year old pitching in AA!

His health is a bit of a concern, as he had a rotator cuff strain after he was drafted by Oakland. Let's take a look at his mechanics and see if we can find any indicators on why this might be the case...

I must admit, this was a really interesting pitcher to look at. There's a lot that immediately jumped out at me, but I had to look at the video frame-by-frame for a long time to confirm what I saw. Even now, I'm still not positive about some of the aspects of his delivery, which I'll point out as we go through it.

Tempo: Cahill is 23-24 frames from maximal leg lift to footplant. This might help to explain his lack of velocity. As I've said before, we want pitchers to be at or under 20 frames per second, so this is Below Average.

Arm Action: Cahill's arm action really puzzled me for a long time. My immediate thought after looking through the video was: "Hrm. I see a lot of hyperabduction and forced scapular loading. Not good." However, I took a look at multiple other angles, including the front side view that I included above, and this made me reconsider. Check it out:

Like I said before, I'm still not 100% sure about this. However, if you look at Homer Bailey and compare him to Trevor Cahill, you can plainly see that the two do not have the same scapular loading arm action. To further compound the problem, there isn't very good video available from behind Trevor Cahill when he's pitching on the mound. This would help us quite a bit.

However, we can see that there's no real hyperabduction here to worry about, as the elbow stays low enough. The still image at the top of this post also illustrates that Cahill is not getting his elbow up high like Anthony Reyes or Mark Prior would, so that's a good sign.

Readers will note that I think that forced scapular loading is inherently injurious and that passive scapular loading, while not ideal, represents a much smaller threat to the anterior muscles of the shoulder. The above video looks like Trevor Cahill does not excessively reverse rotate his shoulders as he strides towards the plate and that he has a small forced scapular load. However, if you look very closely, you will see that he starts to rotate his shoulders before his foot plants and his hips have maximally opened. This is an inefficient throwing pattern and will lead to decreased velocity. As such, the perceived concept of forced scapular loading might actually be due to the fact that he turns his shoulders a bit earlier than he should, and his arm is passively entering the shoulder horizontal abduction phase.

It's really tough to say, so I have to give him an Incomplete grade. I'd love to see high speed video of Cahill from multiple angles, and with my trip to Spring Training 2009 being planned as we speak, I might get the opportunity to do just that. If you forced me to give him a grade, I'd say that it's Average trending towards Below Average. Certainly I like the arm action of a Tommy Hanson or a Justin Duchscherer better, but I don't hate Trevor Cahill's either.

Ball Release: Cahill has intent at the end of his delivery, which I really like. He also features hard pronation on a lot of his fastballs, which is probably how he primarily throws his sinker (think Brandon Webb - he gets inside the baseball and pulls down). He has his glove in a solid position, too - up and against the shoulder as he pulls his right leg off the rubber. Excellent.

Followthrough: Cahill's followthrough could also be the reason that he has rotator cuff discomfort - he features extreme gloveside flyout, just like the picture of the guy in my blog's icon (see the top left of this page). However, it is well-known that by pronating hard through release, you will have a shorter deceleration phase as the pronator teres muscle takes on much of the load rather than the connective tissues of the shoulder, so that's not necessarily a bad thing. Still, the gloveside flyout is a reason to be concerned, so I'll have to give him a Below Average grade.

Overall, Trevor Cahill is one interesting guy to research. His fastball is a solid pitch featuring late sink, even if the velocity isn't necessarily there. I have a lot of questions about his arm action and his followthrough, but without more evidence and high speed video, I'm not ready to make any strong conclusions.

Hopefully I'll get the chance to meet up with some Athletics Nation fans in 2009 at Spring Training and tape Trevor Cahill myself!