By Kiley McDaniel

I covered earlier in a Notes column just a taste of the legend of Tampa prep 1B Jamie Mallard. Frankie and I both believe that mechanical breakdowns and scouting reports should be separated, so the legend will continue now in part two, and later this weekend with part three in a scouting report.

For now, I think Mallard’s swing is the majority of the scouting report and also a great exercise for establishing certain philosophies about breaking down an amateur’s swing. As I said in the previous column, it is hard to talk about Mallard and use anything but extremes.

That being said, it is because of those extremes that he could be a dynamic big league slugger. Or he could flame out the low minors. That’s the beauty of the draft, right now, no one is wrong, and especially with high schoolers, there’s a lot of room for disagreement between reasonable people.

You can being you own evaluation of arguably the best power prospect in the 2008 draft after the jump…

Here’s a quick first look at the two best swings I got of Mallard, performance-wise. The left one is a long HR to left-centerfield (easily over 400 feet) and the right one is a gapper to right-centerfield that he was thrown out trying to stretch into a double.

I would imagine even the most amateur of baseball fans could see there’s some funk in that swing. Let’s break it down, step-by-step.

Setup: His legs are about 1.5 shoulder lengths apart, pretty standard but far enough apart that if you stride much farther, it could lead to over striding. Most hitters in this situation do the short stride, or pick up their foot and put it back in the same place.

His shoulders appear to be square to the pitcher from this angle (confirmed in a later game that they are). Everything appears to be slightly bent, but one part is flexed that I don’t like.

His elbow is making the classic chicken wing elbow, which many hitters employ, but get out of as the ball approaches. Mallard never gets out of it, and the general side-effect is the swing path being loopier. Just try it sitting in your seat, doing the arms part of a swing with your elbow sticking out—you either over-extend your arms to get out of it, or the first few moves toward the ball are loopier (down instead of direct to the ball). Not horrible, but not desirable, depends on how he bounces back from putting himself in that position, just like the stride.

Plate Discipline: This is yet another spot where Mallard cannot be explained without extreme language. You can look at his stats for an indication, but we all know HS stats, especially for big sluggers are skewed, particularly with walks (lots of unintentional intentional walks) and strikeouts (inferior competition). That being said, his OBP is .704, which is good at any level, and his K/BB rate is 25/6. And, in this game from the video, his first at-bat was a quick walk, followed by a long at-bat ending in a HR. Mallard watched 10 straight pitches, then the next one was a HR. That also is impressive for a HS hitter to be that selective and focused. Against this competition, he looks like Frank Thomas—a big guy toying with the pitching that will sit there until you throw him a pitch he can hit out of the county. And for whatever reason, he keeps getting those pitches and doesn’t miss them. I didn’t see him swing and miss in 3 games.

Disclaimer: I’ll give this it’s own section since there isn’t a good spot to go over it in this format. I realize this video is in a high school game with a metal bat against a guy throwing low-to-mid-80s, and that it’s pretty dumb on my part to use this as my only evidence for speaking of Mallard’s hitability and power in such revered terms. I’ve talked to scouts and team personnel that have seen him against 90 mph fastballs, with wood bats, and one guy that even threw him BP at a team workout, and they all feel exactly the same as I do. Basically, these abilities we know will play at least in the low minors, since he’s been as successful as he was in this game against low minors competition with wood bats. So that’s why I said earlier his floor seems to be flaming out in Hi-A or AA.

Head Movement: As you might guess here, less movement is better. Given the somewhat wild bat cock and movement before the pitch comes, Mallard’s head has to move some, but he keeps it about as still as you can during this move. The head goes down as he readies to hit, and forward as his weight shifts. It’s more than you like to see, but it’s still as his body is at contact, so this is just another example to me of an unorthodox approach working for him. Not fantastic in this regard, but if the bat works as well as it does with the moving parts, the head is moving as little as possible given the moving parts, so he gets a passing grade.

Balance/Lower Half: I think this is where some gains can be made without drastically altering Mallard’s swing. If you look at this super-slow GIF below, you can see that he is “spinning” on his back leg, or instead of rotating is body around his front leg (as desired), his center of his weight during the swing is too far back. I’d say about 90% of his weight is on his back leg, but he still stays relatively level, without leaning back and trying too hard to loft the ball, somewhat amazingly.

You can also see that at the point of contact, his knees are locked. Essentially, he’s an out-of-this-world hitter with enormous power and he isn’t even using his bottom half.

Now, you can get into a lot of trouble by either mandating him to lose 20 lbs (sorry, Prince Fielder), or trying to make him look conventional at the plate. Being quirky is part of why he works, so if you’re going to fix him in any way, it has to be slight stuff and I think the bottom half could be slight enough for him to improve a lot and has low potential to mess with what’s working.

There may be growing pains and you don’t like drafting a guy for two tools (bat, power) and trying to change them both, but I think this is a part of his swing that gains could be made.

Stride: These days, it seems everyone is advocating, as am I, a smaller, shorter stride, that is just a mechanism for timing the swing, rather than the engine behind it. Mallard’s certainly isn’t small, but it is relatively short. As I mentioned above, anything longer than short would have him over-striding, which is an enormous problem that snowballs into other things you just don’t want to deal with. Mallard’s does seem unnecessarily big and loud, but it does the job, and is one thing at first glance you want to change, but really shouldn’t mess with.

Swing Path: As you might not expect, Mallard has outstanding contact skills as well, and this is due in part to his swing path. One of the things you look for in HS hitters to gauge, beyond raw mechanics, their ability to hit at higher levels, is the ability to square the ball up against good pitching, since wood bats have smaller sweet spots. Mallard has an uncanny ability to do this, and his chicken-wing “flaw” actually helps to loop his swing to be in the zone longer, but his bat speed and strength overcome that to a large degree. Gifted hitters get away with flaws and Mallard is a great example of this.

Mallard also has, predictably, great power and part of this comes from his swing path being long in the zone and also having a lofted finish without being a reckless, swing-and-miss uppercut.

That being said, this long-in-the-zone swing path via the chicken wing still creates a bit of a hitch, and may affect his plate coverage at higher levels. Maybe his bat speed and hit-ability cover it completely, maybe just part of it, but it will likely create at least some problem that will need adjustments in higher levels.

Extension: This is the other area I think a small tweak could make a big difference. The still to the right is of the home run. Mallard is completely extended here, and almost is locking his arms like he does his legs, which really saps his power. Hitting coaches say that many big guys hit for more power with they get their arms extended, but this is over-extended.

Mallard does do a good job, despite extending a little too far at contact, to keeping his arms bent up until that point and not creating an arm bar, which affects the swing path and contact-making ability while cutting off power.

Summation: As you might’ve guessed given the flaws yet still Ruthian power, Mallard has excellent elements of power: torque, lofted swing path, strong wrists, bat speed, bat in the zone a long time, aggressive hip turn leading the bat head, etc. And as said above, that’s getting great results without even using his bottom half, so there’s room for more upside. He also has what you don’t expect in a young hitter with his profile: outstanding plate discipline and contact skills, even against top competition with wood.

I’ll go into more details as far as a long-term projection in the forthcoming scouting report, but I felt his swing is funky enough to warrant a full breakdown before I wade into his draft prospects later. I think you’re looking at a big league hitter and whether he goes to college at UCF or not really depends on his own bonus requirements. If a team can get past the body to see the skills he has and believes in his makeup and ability to make the inevitable adjustment, you might see him playing pro ball soon. Other teams won’t even consider him because they think his weight indicates his work ethic in other areas, which very well may be a fair assessment. The big question is whether he’s Walter Young/Calvin Pickering or Cecil Fielder/Ryan Howard, and that’s what makes the draft so fun: no one knows for sure.

Mechanical Comparison: Cecil Fielder

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