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:

Mechanics:

Well he's been given the prized "effortless" tag by media reports but from this video there really isn't a whole lot to like.  For the good: he does throw to a near perfect front side, doesn't appear to actively break his arm, albeit with a little extra "recoil", or overly reverse rotate, and I do like the little glove side leg "kick out" before plant.  The ball does come out free and easy but that's mostly just a cosmetic thing (see Prior, Mark).

Unfortunately, he's very much a tall-and-fall delivery at 23-24 frames from maximal leg lift to release and there just isn't that lower half aggression I like to see.  His torso rotation finish gets cut short as he doesn't end up with his arm-side shoulder pointing to the plate post-release.  Plus notice how completely closed his foot is when he lands, thus keeping his hips from fully rotating.

It gets worse from the side:

While from the front view I somewhat underrated his lower half aggression, you can see the big old M in his arm action, Ick.  While his timing isn't as bad as is possible, his glove side foot still plants definitively before he reaches the high cocked.  It's not too terribly surprising he had shoulder issues... (note: I actually did judge the mechanics before I even found the labrum article, I swear!)

There's the M on the left and the timing at footplant on the right in a couple different pitches.  Like Garza he's at least past the horizontal, but that's still another cause for concern.  You can also see how closed he lands here especially on the pitch on the right.  How ridiculous is it that he lands like that and still manages to throw 90?  Seriously, try to throw a pitch off a mound doing that, that's remarkable.

The total package from a projection standpoint: That M-arm action scares the crap out of me, that's the first thing I'd do if I was a Royals coach.  He's been taught the "whippy" arm action which isn't going to change at this point, but keeping the elbow below the shoulder line isn't that dramatic of a tweak and might fix the timing issue by shortening the distance to get up to the high cocked in time.  Changing that up might make him lose velo as well, but the risk of injury is too high for that to matter right now IMO with just that going a long way to curb that.

Buuuut in an ass-backwards way, the fact that he does have so much to gain from tweaking his lower half makes him all the more intriguing.  Like I said, it's ridiculous that with his lower half push/landing that he's able to throw 90+, imagine what would happen to his fastball if he Lincecum-ized himself?  Well maybe I wouldn't have him go that extreme---that takes a ridiculous amount of body control, Lincecum's command his first 2 years at Washington was bad---but the point stands.  93-96 is well within Melville's range of possibilities as he has years of minor league baseball to do such a thing, not to mention just addding pure strength.  All in all, this is a kid with a ton of talent and a ton of arm strength.  For a team like the Royals that has no hope of competing unless they develop a Rays amount of homeground talent, 1.25 million for that talent is more than worth it, they just need to manage it properly.  Hopefully with the relatively new management we'll see just that.