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: Mallard’s setup is pretty standard, with his feet just outside his shoulders and set up square to the pitcher.  His elbow is making the classic chicken wing elbow, which many hitters employ in the setup, 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 chair, 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; it depends on how he bounces back from putting himself in that position.

Plate Discipline: 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 the unintentional intentional walks) and strikeouts (poor quality pitching).

That being said, Mallard’s OBP is .704, which is good at any level, and his K/BB rate is 25/6.  His plate discipline is something he’s been working on to combat being pitched around.   In this game from the video, Mallard watched 10 straight pitches, then the next one was a HR. It was impressive for a prep 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.  That being said, we’ll learn a lot more about Mallard’s plate discipline at higher levels with consistently better pitching.

Disclaimer: 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 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 saw what I saw

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 his head is still at contact, so this is just another example of an unorthodox approach working for him.

Balance/Lower Half: If you look at this super-slow GIF below, you can see that he is “spinning” on his back leg, or instead of rotating his 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. He’s got enormous power and he isn’t even using his bottom half.  The second part of the swing is mostly hands-driven and that also may cause problems.

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 and has low potential to mess with what’s working.

There may be growing pains if you try to make changes, 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. Any longer of a stride and he would be 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 longer, slower path to create power. The longer swing also helps create some loft,  Gifted hitters get away with flaws and Mallard is a great example of this.

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

Extension: This is the another area where Mallard is effective, in that he does extend his arms, but at times he causes big problem by over-extending.

In the HR still to the right, Mallard over-extends while off-balance and almost locks his arms like he does with his legs.  He looks in the still frame like he should fall over.  His arms are just barely flexed and this is due in part to his upper and lower halves un-synching as his hands take over late in the swing.

Summation: In a pre-draft workout facing BP with a wood bat at a spring training stadium, the baseball people on hand confirmed that he hit the ball farther than anyone has in that stadium.  That being said, Mallard has a horrible baseball body and a number of swing flaws.

The power is for real and he has all the performance-based indicators you’re looking for.  He will have growing pains in the pro ranks, likely with hard stuff inside.  I can see many teams leaving Mallard off their board due to body and mechanical issues, but Prince and Cecil Fielder were in the same league body-wise and while he’s got swing flaws, Mallard continues to hit pro-level pitching.  To make the big leagues, he will need to make a few adjustments to quiet his swing and keep his balance better, but Mallard has ability you can’t teach and that covers a multitude of sins.

Mechanical Comparison: Cecil Fielder