By: Luke Siler
First time seeing Hanifee pitch.
Hanifee is tall, slender, still has room to gain good weight but not so thin that he needs to gain weight.
He works fast and has an athletic, repeatable delivery. There is some effort in the delivery but he uses his lower body well which seems to take some stress off the arm.
There isn’t a ton of deception in the delivery but his long arms and strong drive towards home plate makes his fastball jump on hitters who were late on it all night ( I don’t know how hard he was throwing but the swings said it was a good fastball). The fastball seemed to have good downward plane and some arm-side tail and it generated a lot of GBs (I think all but 2 batted balls were grounders and only one ball made it out of the infield cleanly)
I think he was also throwing a slider and a change up. Neither of them looked to have much in the way of horizontal movement and I couldn’t tell vertical break from the angle, but he was able to throw the breaking ball for strikes at times.
His control was good, command was decent as well. When he missed the zone it was a mechanical issue where he left his body open and would miss arm-side and up, that led to the fist of his two walks (4 straight balls) but he was able to fix it pretty quickly and get back on track.
Final Line: 6IP, 3H, 1R, 2BB, 7K, HBP, 84 pitches, 57 strikes
