Cole Winn entered the season as our #78 prospect in all of baseball. We were lower on him than most too with MLB Pipeline, Baseball America, FanGraphs, and ESPN all ranking him within the top 61. Everyone had a 2022 ETA for Cole Winn. Fast forward to September 2022, and Winn has seemingly fallen off the map. He’s not in the majors, and some are questioning if he can be a starter in the major leagues at all.
To say Cole Winn had a season to forget is an understatement. He saw his strikeout rate plummet and his walk rate nearly double, all while seeing his HR/FB rate jump, and his BABIP against soar by over .100 points. His K-BB% is just 5.5% and his xFIP is 6.35. It’s been ugly. In response, fantasy owners are all dropping Cole Winn left and right as he plummets down every prospect ranking.
I think people are making a mistake. Cole Winn had an awful season. There is no sugarcoating that fact. His stock has taken a hit, but he is far from hopeless. He is hurt but not broken yet, and I expect a big bounce back in the majors next year. The stuff is probably still there, and there is good reason to expect a command resurgence. There are still four quality pitches with enough command to start, and the body is one you can dream on. The risk has increased, but the upside is the same, and I don’t think the risk is as high as the results would indicate.
The PCL is Weird
The Pacific Coast League is not a normal offensive environment, and it’s important to remember that when scouting any player who plays there. Cole Winn has spent his entire season there. The league average ERA in the PCL this season is 5.40. The league average pitcher has a 10.6% walk rate, and a 23.1% strikeout rate. Pitching in the PCL is hard, and it leads to some very misleading performances. Cole Winn was bad even by the PCL standards, but he wasn’t completely unusable like the numbers appear to be.
The PCL issues this year go beyond just hitter friendly ballparks though. The PCL baseball, for whatever reason, does not move the same as it does at other levels, or even as it did in past seasons of PCL play. Talking to some people who have handled the balls from multiple years and levels, it appears that the 2022 PCL baseball is slicker than what they’ve used anywhere else. That is absolutely a factor and maybe explains why the ball is moving so much less at that level when compared to both the majors and the FSL. (See table below).
Cole Winn is averaging 3” less ride on his fastball this year and now sits at just 16.2” IVB which is right at the MLB average. However, the median fastball has ~1.4” less vertical movement in the PCL compared to the average in the majors. This checks out anecdotally as guys like Ryan Pepiot, Hunter Brown, Ryne Nelson, and Drey Jameson are all averaging 1-2” more IVB in the majors than they did in AAA. This doesn’t explain all the vertical movement regression from Winn’s previously standout heater, but it explains a large portion of it.
A Major Minor Injury
Cole Winn’s fastball movement was great at the start of the year. He was averaging 18.1” IVB across his first four starts. He was also performing at that point. Then, on 4/26, he took a comebacker at 105.9 MPH off of his left ankle. He was removed from that start immediately. Cole Winn didn’t wind up missing a start after his scare. He took the mound as normal on 5/1 and threw 5 innings.
In that start, however, Cole Winn’s fastball movement fell off the map. He averaged just 14.4” IVB. He also walked six batters after combining for just five walks in his first four starts. The fastball was better in his next outing, but it never returned to the early season highs. The spin axis shifted slightly to a 12:45 instead of the 12:30 it was previously, and the command has been absent since.
Clearly, the ankle injury was the inciting incident in Winn’s horrendous season. So what was the injury? By all accounts, there was no real injury. He was bruised up, and probably sore for a while, but it’s not any damaged ligaments or broken bones. This was a minor thing that Winn probably could have played through, and the Rangers opted to let him play through it. At the time, I would have absolutely recommended he play through it- this isn’t the Rangers messing up on anything.
The problem is how the injury affected his mechanics, not the injury itself. With the pain in his ankle, Cole Winn (likely) subconsciously altered his delivery to keep weight off his left ankle. His arm angle shifted 10° because he had less bend towards his gloveside after the injury as that put weight on his ankle, and likely caused him some minor pain.
2021 - Left 2022 - Right. Screenshots are from Scott Lucas // YouTube
That new delivery became muscle memory after the ankle healed, but he didn’t have the same comfort with it, so his command waned. As is the case with most 10° drops in arm angle, the fastball spin axis shifted 20° laterally, and that cost him some vertical movement for a touch more horizontal movement on the heater.
Three Almost Good Secondaries
A large portion of Cole Winn’s appeal last year was that he threw three above-average secondary pitches in his slider, curveball, and changeup. Stuff wise, he hasn’t gotten much worse- if at all. The problem with all three pitches this year has simply been command regression that has them all playing as average or below.
The slider took the biggest hit to its stuff this year. Winn lost 2 MPH on his slider in exchange for 0.7” more drop. The sweep is the same, and the horizontal separation from the four-seam is as well. It’s a fairly standard gyro slider with both velocity and depth that would be above average with decent command. It plays potently off of the gloveside heater with an effective tunnel on both planes that enables it to miss bats.
The command leaves a lot to be desired as Winn is throwing a little over 14% of his sliders more than a foot out of the strike zone. He also shows below-average feel for zoning the slider. The command has been better with the slider in the past, so it’s easy to cling to the possibility of a bounce back. However, when combined with the velocity regression, it’s hard to call this much more than an average slider.
The curveball is, in my opinion, Cole Winn’s best pitch. The pitch sits at 79 MPH with great depth as Winn is averaging -13.5” IVB this year. The pitch has limited sidespin, and nearly a perfectly mirrored axis to that of the fastball. He sells it as a fastball, and off of the gloveside heater, he gets chases below the zone. He also has a slightly above-average feel to zone the curve and gets in-zone swings at a below-average rate.
The curve is a multi-dimensional weapon that can freeze batters with the in-zone pitch that looks distinct. Alternatively, he can work down just off the plate where it looks more like the fastball, and collects whiffs in spades. When there is the rare batted ball against the curve, Winn gets ground balls at a high rate as well. This is because of the extreme drop on the pitch, and how hard it is to get underneath one.
The changeup rounds out Cole Winn’s deep arsenal of impressive pitches. He throws it 8.2 MPH slower than the four-seam with a unique movement interaction. The changeup has over twice as much horizontal movement as the four-seam with 13.7” of fade compared to 6.1” on the four-seam. He also has nearly twice as much vertical movement on the four-seamer. The changeup has good movement on both planes, and solid velocity separation. This extreme difference in horizontal movement has a massive effect on the changeup’s performance against right-handed hitters.
Objects that are closer to you appear to be moving faster than those moving away from you. That is how depth perception works. The changeup looks like the fastball even more so, for right-handed hitters because it has so much more tail that it ambushes them and gets them to swing way out in front, and chase the changeup. His swinging-strike rate is actually over 6% higher against right-handed hitters, as opposed to the lefties changeups are usually designed to beat. Against lefties, it is more of a highly effective pitch to contact pitch at the bottom of the strike zone. The one problem with the changeup? You guessed it! Command. Cole Winn has a tendency to miss to his gloveside, doing so 28% of the time, and only 35% of those gloveside changeups are in the strike zone. The benefit to using gloveside changeups is purely called strikes, and Winn gets too backed up to even throw those consistently.
How Volatile is Winn?
Cole Winn’s regression has been blown out of proportion. The stuff is still there, and the command is likely fixable. That being said, this poor season exposes some warts in Winn’s profile. This is the second time that a seemingly minor issue has caused Winn to go completely off the rails. In 2019, it was an 8.7% K-BB% in Low-A. This year was worse, but this kind of struggle is not totally foreign. Winn has had one good year and two terrible years in his minor league career. It is totally reasonable to question if Winn can actually start regularly in the majors.
I believe you can fix Cole Winn’s command right now by changing his arm angle without too much effort. If, for some reason, you decide the new angle is better, you could also probably improve the command from this slot with an offseason of reps. The arm angle caused the hiccup, but how to fix it is not the right question.
The better question is; how do you stop him from breaking again? Cole Winn is probably a high-maintenance pitcher who, despite his athleticism and smooth delivery, seems to need to have everything perfect for his stuff to actually perform. One minor tweak and he falls apart. I don’t have an answer to that question I posed. I think that it’s fairly likely that Winn will be an up and down starter with years where he looks closer to the front of the rotation, and lean years when you wonder why he is in the big leagues at all. This profile has a lot more variance than the repertoire suggests.
Cole Winn suffered a minor paper cut when he bruised his ankle and that is likely the primary driving factor in his regression this season. Theoretically, it should be simple to get him back to normal and restore both the stuff and command to its former glory. The secondaries are still stand-out pitches in terms of stuff, and if the command returns, then he will be right back to the top 100 prospect he was before the season. There is no guarantee that the command bounces back, and more importantly, no guarantee that it stays back. There is extra risk now, and that extra risk hurts his stock some, but it does not break it.