Paul Hembekides

He really stood out when I got my couple of looks on him in 2023 in the backfields.

As you mentioned, high school arm out of New Mexico.

Not that there aren't great players that have come out of New Mexico.

There absolutely have.

I mean, Alex Bregman is pretty good.

But...

You know, it's like being from around here, Massachusetts or New York.

You're not seeing the same quality of high school baseball that you're seeing in California, Texas, Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas, Arizona, that sort of thing.

But I think that what we see with a lot of these high school guys is it takes a few years.

You can't really evaluate them on the first two years.

They have to, A, stay healthy.

We can look at Ricky Tiedemann, right?

who was one of the best pitching prospects in baseball and has barely pitched over the last several years.

But also kind of that refinement of just continually improving little things.

And I think we've seen that with Perry, who's by the way, now a top 100 prospect.

He was added to our top 100 list last, last week.

I think that speaks volumes about the kind of season that he's had.

You can argue that he's been statistically, if not the best pitcher in the minor leagues over the first two months, but,

top two or three um and it's a really good pitch mix and you know he has four pitches that he'll throw in a variety of counts of different handedness first strikes consistently it's a good fastball with good shape he's got good spin characteristics he really spins the four seam and he's got two breaking balls that he can spin and i think you know we we had gotten away from kind of the raw spin conversation for a while and saying oh it's really how you spin it to make the ball move that's accurate

But guys like this that can spin their breaking ball at 2500 to 2700 RPMs and spin their fastball at 24 to 2600 RPMs.