Player Breakdowns: April 10th
Hayden Birdsong, & Brandon Sproat
Hayden Birdsong (SFG) - AA:
Birdsong is a pick of mine to be a breakout of sorts this year if he wasn’t already last year. I ranked him 16th in Projecting the Future: 2025 Top 56 Pitching Prospects and here is what I wrote:
The name alone stands as an 80 grade as it sounds like he writes Hunger Games fan fiction in his time off. Birdsong is going to rise in rankings in 2024. He finished 2023 ranked 11th in TiltValue posting a 14.83% SwStr% between A/A+/AA. In his final 13 starts between A+ and AA, Birdsong pitched to a 3.29 ERA with a K rate of 34.8% and a walk rate of 8.6%. Not bad at all. In fact, those numbers are borderline elite. His FIP in those final 13 games was 2.86 while registering a .195 AVG against. He is the real deal and is being highly undervalued.
Birdsong is up to 96-97 on his fastball after experiencing some velocity increases within the Giants’ organization. He also has a pretty nasty 12-6 curve to pair with the heavy fastball. Birdsong was on my radar all of last year as he was on the TiltValue leaderboards for the majority of it. I would be watching his starts this year, likely at AA, to get a better understanding of what kind of pitcher you’re going to get and to see if he goes deeper into games.
Last night, Birdsong started his first game of the season at AA and he pitched to stellar results. He finished with a line of 4IP 2H 2ER 1BB 6K. Looking deeper into the start he could’ve pitched to even better results. After the 1st inning, Birdsong pitched 3 hitless innings with 4Ks and generated 18 Whiffs+CS — mostly in control of his fastball, changeup, and hellacious curveball.
The primary trouble came in the first inning when he allowed a leadoff single to Khalil Watson and a 2-out, 2-strike homer to Aaron Bracho. After the leadoff single, Birdsong struck out the next two batters and then got Aaron Bracho down to a 2-strike count and was one pitch away from escaping the inning before Bracho got the better of him on a high fastball. You can see the single and home run below:
Both hits on the night came on fastballs middle-up. He was sitting mostly 93-94 in the first inning and then ramped it up to 95-96 as the start went on. His curveball was on point last night as was his slider and changeup. He has a legitimate 4-pitch mix right now and his changeup is looking a lot better than it did last year. Here are the Whiffs and CS from his 1st inning last night:
The first batter he struck out was Chase DeLauter, who he made look silly all night — it was a theme. DeLauter wasn’t comfortable against Birdsong’s stuff at all — staring at breaking pitches landing over the plate and chasing them off the plate.
In the 2nd inning, Birdsong quickly disposed of the lineup getting 3 balls in play for easy routine outs:
3rd inning: Birdsong racked up 3 strikeouts in the 3rd inning, once again striking out Chase DeLauter on a pitch he chased in the dirt.