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Crasnick: Nixon, Diamondbacks agree on minor-league deal

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D-Backs notebook: Team waiting on Nixon

The D-Backs have offered a minor league contract that would include a salary believed to be less than $1 million if he makes the major league roster. He played for $3 million last year.

Because the D-Backs see Nixon as a possible short-term solution if Chad Tracy (knee) is not ready for the start of the regular season, they would like him to give “advance consent” to accept a minor league salary if he does not remain on the roster long.

Neighborgall had immense difficulty harnessing his stuff, however, going 1-4 with a 17.32 ERA in 51 games. He walked 128 and threw 60 wild pitches in 42 1/3 innings.

Eat your heart out, Steve Dalkowski.

I wonder what the odds are for this kind of extremely hard throwing, super wildmen ever becoming useful pitchers. Some of them develop, like Randy Johnson, Nolan Ryan, and Mitch Williams. Are they any better bets, as a group, than average stuff, decent control pitchers taken in the same draft rounds?

Maybe one of these days SABR's minor league database can help answer this question.

One of Josh's biggest challenges going forward is going to be keeping a pipeline of top notch baseball operations staff around him. There are several future GM's and Asst GM's on his staff right now. He is not going to be able to keep all of them around for too long. It's only a matter of time until Peter Woodfork gets a GM job.

Great news. I'm interested to see if his approach changes at all with this sort of security.

I wonder what the odds are for this kind of extremely hard throwing, super wildmen ever becoming useful pitchers. Some of them develop, like Randy Johnson, Nolan Ryan, and Mitch Williams. Are they any better bets, as a group, than average stuff, decent control pitchers taken in the same draft rounds?

Well all of those guys were better bets than Neighborgall. Johnson, Ryan, and Williams were wild, but they couldn't hold a candle to Neighborgall. I watched him in college, and those stats you see are representative of his performance there, too. The only reason to ever swing the bat when facing him was to use it as self defense in case the ball came at you.

By the way, I wonder what Neighborgall's catchers' (WP+PB)/G are? Those catchers must suck.

Neighborgall's numbers from last season are remarkable:

http://www.thebaseballcube.com/players/N/Jason-Neighborgall.shtml

37 walks to 4 strikeouts - yikes.

So far Neighborgall has faced 310 batters in the minors and:

Walked 41% of them
Struck out 15% of them
Hit 4% with a pitch

By comparison, in Dalkowski's first three seasons, he faced ~1472 batters and:

Walked 38% of them
Struck out 34% of them
Hit 1% with a pitch

If you were Neighborgall, wouldn't you give a call to Mike Marshall. I think Marshall claims to teach a way of throwing that results in fewer injuries. Maybe Neighborgall would have better control throwing that way? You've got to go outside the box for a solution at this point, don't you?