Minor League Notables & Draft Pick Tracker - April 17th, 2026
write-ups on notables across all four levels & our draft pick tracker rolls on
LOW-A ARMS
Miguel Sime Jr. | RHP | Age 19 Season | Washington Nationals 4.0 IP / 0 H / 0 ER / 1 BB / 9 K / 56 NP
Zero hits. Zero runs. Nine strikeouts. Four innings on 56 pitches. The biggest number for me is the one walk. Miguel Sime Jr. is 19 years old and touching 101 mph and last night he was completely untouchable. The Fredericksburg lineup couldn’t do anything with him — not a hit, not a run, barely a hard swing — and nine strikeouts in four innings from a teenager throwing that kind of heat with that kind of efficiency is a performance that belongs in a completely different conversation from where this name currently lives in the industry. This comes after an outing in which he had absolutely zero command of his fastball and we had to watch the poor kid try and work backwards, upside down, downside up, anything — to get a called strike or a swinging strike. Great to see him make tweaks and come out for this outing with something to prove. Extreme conviction and it just grew with this outing. My biggest takeaway is the bounce back from his previous outing and coming out and showing command of his fastball and slider in this one. It’s okay to be excited with this profile but just remember this will be a project. Truth is however, the Nationals have something terrifying in Fredericksburg.
Seth Hernandez | RHP | Age 20 Season | Pittsburgh Pirates 5.0 IP / 0 H / 0 ER / 2 BB / 8 K / 67 NP
You know that one kid in school who probably already absorbed a college course load by the time they were in early high school? That’s Seth Hernandez. Seth Hernandez is Doogie Howser. The Pirates should just award him with his M.D. and let the savant get to practicing surgery. Let’s not waste time training on spaghetti models in Low-A.
In his last 11 innings of work — 1 hit allowed, 2 walks, 20 strikeouts. That is not a Low-A pitcher dominating Low-A hitters. That is a pitcher who has already run out of things to prove at this level and is waiting for the Pirates to notice.
The four-seamer at 97.0 mph average — touching 100 — with 17 inches of IVB and 14 inches of armside run is the foundation and it is a legitimate one. Sixty-three percent of his pitches last night were this pitch and hitters produced an avg EV of 87.9 against it with a max EV allowed of 104.9 on the entire outing — one hard-hit ball in five innings of 97-100 mph gas. The 60% zone rate paired with a 57% in-zone swing rate tells you hitters know it’s coming and still can’t do anything meaningful when it arrives.
The changeup at 82.6 mph with 29 inches of drop and 15 inches of armside run is the separator. Thrown 16% of the time and posted a 45% CSW on 11 pitches — nearly half the changeups thrown generated either a called strike or a whiff.
The cutter at 87.8 mph with 32 inches of drop and 12 inches of glove-side break gives him a third shape that cuts back against right-handed hitters — it posted a 33% CSW on nine pitches and zero hard contact allowed. The curveball at 79.1 mph with 54 inches of drop is the fourth weapon that resets eye levels when he needs to change speeds entirely.
Four pitches. All four generating weak contact or misses. 0.75 ERA. One hit in his last eleven innings. The Pirates need to stop scheduling this kid for Low-A starts and start scheduling him for flights to Greensboro. Seth Hernandez needs to be in High-A. He needed to be in High-A three starts ago.
Patrick Galle | RHP | St. Louis Cardinals | Palm Beach Cardinals 1.0 IP / 0 H / 0 ER / 0 BB / 3 K / 17 NP
The four-seamer at 97.5 mph average — touching 98.5 — with 19 inches of IVB and 4 inches of armside run is a legitimate fastball. Not a show-me pitch, not a fringe offering — a genuine 97-98 mph four-seamer with carry and life that generated a 67% CSW on nine pitches in one inning of work. Zero hard contact allowed against it. When you’re sitting 97-98 with that kind of vertical movement from a right-handed arm, that is a fastball that plays at any level.
The cutter at 88.4 mph with 27 inches of drop and 7 inches of glove-side break is a true cut fastball — tight movement, controlled shape, hard enough that it doesn’t give hitters time to sit on the separation from the four-seamer. A 9 mph gap between the fastball and the cutter with that compact glove-side cut creates a real decision problem when the four-seamer is running the other way. It generated a 100% CSW on its two competitive pitches — small sample, but the pitch isn’t getting barreled.
Galle is a pen arm in its truest form. Hard fastball with ride as his calling card. Can he design a better slider and/or changeup to go with it? That’ll be the question. But the arm is intriguing and the fastball is live.
Cory Lewis | RHP | Age 25 Season | Minnesota Twins 0.1 IP / 2 H / 2 ER / 2 BB / 0 K / 23 NP (Rehab Debut)
Last night was a rehab debut — a short outing by design that got cut shorter by the results — so I’m going to put the line aside entirely and talk about what the pitch data says, because the pitch data is the reason this profile is worth writing about.
Cory Lewis is a knuckleballer. Historically, that is a designation that narrows the margin for success to a sliver. But I want to be precise about what kind of knuckleballer he is, because the distinction matters enormously.
Start with the fastball. 90.4 mph average with 19 inches of IVB and 2169 spin. 2169 rpm at 90 mph with 19 inches of induced vertical break means the fastball is genuinely riding through the zone with elite carry for a pitch at that velocity. This is not a knuckleball-primary arm throwing a fringe fastball to fill counts. This is a pitcher with a legitimate riding four-seamer that can play as a swing-and-miss offering in its own right. The armside run give it additional life and the total drop tells you the ball is staying up in the zone.
Now the knuckleball. 84.5 mph average with 161 spin. That spin number is the story. Elite knuckleballs generally sit in the 25-50 rpm range — a pitch so devoid of spin it has no reliable movement plane and becomes genuinely unpredictable. 161 rpm is like a high blood pressure reading. Higher than that elite range but still dramatically lower than any other pitch in his arsenal, and the 6 mph separation from the fastball with completely different movement characteristics — 6 inches of IVB, 4 inches of horizontal movement — creates a presentation problem that most hitters simply aren’t equipped to solve. The hard knuckleball at 84-85 mph paired with a riding four-seamer at 90 is a combination that requires hitters to simultaneously process two different movement planes at two different velocities from the same arm slot. That is not a normal equation. The 13% CSW on the knuckleball is the one number worth monitoring — it generated only one whiff on eight pitches last night and zero called strikes on two competitive looks — but this was a rehab debut against a lineup that may have been sitting on the knuckler specifically. The pitch profile makes conceptual sense even if last night’s results didn’t reflect it. Dickey made the hard knuckler work, and it led him to a Cy Young. I’m not making any comps but there are only a handful of knuckleballers to work with. Especially ones who throw one this hard with barely any spin.
I’ve written endlessly about Cory Lewis over the years and here is where I’m at. The success or failure of this profile lives entirely on whether the knuckleball can operate as a legitimate swing-and-miss offering against Triple-A competition. The riding four-seamer is a genuine asset — 90 mph with 2169 spin and 19 inches of IVB is a pitch that generates weak contact and misses bats even without the knuckleball working. But the knuckleball is the separator. If it plays — if the 161 spin produces enough unpredictability to create real swing decisions when paired with the fastball — then Cory Lewis has a profile that is genuinely difficult to game plan against because nothing in the standard scouting vocabulary applies to it. If the knuckleball gets squared up at this velocity, the four-seamer becomes easier to isolate and the profile loses its central premise. One rehab inning tells us nothing definitive. I’m still keeping an eye on Cory Lewis.