And Dylan Bundy seems different so far. There is almost a mythical air forming around this 19-year-old righty from Tulsa. He was picked fourth for a reason: as a high schooler, he could hit 98 with his fastball and threw both a slider and curve well. And he's no beanpole, either, standing at 6'1", 195 lbs. But what Bundy has done in his limited minor league appearances is absolutely astounding. He has been starting games but not going for more than three to four innings, which is expected with a team dealing with a highly touted - and most importantly young - prospect. The length of his outings have not made them any less incredible, though, as Bundy has blazed through each one and made opposing hitters look like Little Leaguers swinging toothpicks. Through 13 innings and 40 batters faced, he has allowed zero hits and just one walk. That's right, zero hits, from someone one year out of high school and facing not just lots of guys who played in college, but guys who played in college and were really good. The number that stands out the most to me, though, is that Bundy has 21 strikeouts. He has faced 40 professional baseball hitters and less than half of them have put the ball in play. Bundy had numbers like that in high school, but against professional hitters? Holy cow. Video from his debut with the Delmarva Shorebirds of the single-A South Atlantic League ("The Sally) tells a large part of the story. Bundy can flat-out blow the ball past hitters. And he doesn't get any deception from his nearly straight over-the-top delivery either: his pitches just fly like heat-seeking missiles past bats. His curveball broke like crazy too, and throwing it (and his slider and changeup too) in complement with his fastball makes each pitch doubly nasty. His domination is simple and direct, nothing sneaky about it. This video of Bundy in an intrasquad game during spring training is also very telling. He is facing Adam Jones, Mark Reynolds and Matt Wieters, guys who have shown that they can hit major league pitching quite well (well, sometimes). He comes straight at Jones, throwing three fastballs right by him. Again, all killer, no filler (except that one ball to the backstop). He then induces a weak fly from Wieters and, with Reynolds, shows a lethal change of velocity and buckles his knees with a changeup. Now, I understand that this was early in spring and the hitters are still working on getting their timing back, but it was still an incredibly impressive display.
The caveat, of course, is that we are working with a very small sample size here. 13 innings is probably 1/10th of what Bundy is going to end up throwing this season, and there is no doubt that someone will eventually get a hit, someone will score a run, someone will probably hit a home run. And there is no PITCHf/x data on Bundy, so I have no objective way of comparing his stuff to big league pitchers or even other guys in single-A. His current form might just be a fluke, he might just be on a tear of epic proportions and only has so long before he crashes back down to Earth. But in the meantime, he has turned into an massively exciting prospect, someone Orioles fans can use to look forward to the future, when they'll surely turn around and revert back to early-to-mid-1990s form. Because, honestly, after the early season hot streak they're currently on goes cold like it always does, what else can they do?
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