FanPost

Savage's Pro Pipeline: Checking in on Cole, Bauer

Remember these guys? The ESPNLA UCLA blog has a report on Trevor Bauer's debut against major leaguers and it sounds like it was a good one:

Bauer struck out Dexter Fowler and Tyler Colvin, and he got Carlos Gonzalez, Troy Tulowitzki and Michael Cuddyer to ground out. He threw seven of his 22 pitches in the first innning.

Bauer was drafted third overall by the Diamondbacks last summer, so obviously their organization is expecting big things from him. Sure it's only Spring ball, but having a strong first outing surely beats not having one.

Seeing Bauer's name up there reminded me that I had lost track of the top overall pick, Gerrit Cole. There was a report last fall on his brief post-UCLA career:

Well, the word out of the Arizona Fall League is that Cole, the top pick in the June draft, is everything the Pirates could have hoped for. The buzz is that Cole has . . .

"As live a fastball as I've ever seen, and I'm going back to Nolan Ryan," one veteran scout (who doesn't work for the Pirates) said after returning from Arizona. "The first time I saw him, he was sitting at 100, 101 [mph]. He had a better fastball than Strasburg.

"They knew it was coming, and they still couldn't start fast enough to crank it up. He could have struck out big-league hitters with his fastball that day."

I've never been a big MLB guy, but the hype around seeing these guys that I'm familiar with at the next level reminds me of the excitement I used to feel when our basketball program was putting big time prospects in the NBA before Howland let the inmates run the asylum and flushed our proud tradition down the toilet. Hopefully we'll be able to see more reports like this on more Bruin prospects in the future unless Chianti drives Coach Savage out of town with his incompetence. Perhaps Chianti should look into doing something substantial with JRS. Just a thought.

This is a FanPost and does not necessarily reflect the views of BruinsNation's (BN) editors. It does reflect the views of this particular fan though, which is as important as the views of BN's editors.

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