When the Yankees announced their Spring Breakout Game lineup, the starter wouldn’t be Chase Hampton, Will Warren, or Clayton Beeter. Instead of going with their highest-ranked arm or their most MLB-ready one, they selected left-hander Brock Selvidge, who reached High-A Hudson Valley that season. He didn’t just live up to the honor, he dominated, delivering four scoreless innings with nine strikeouts and just one walk, showing off excellent stuff and a fiery demeanor on the mound.
Now in Double-A with the Somerset Patriots, Brock Selvidge delivered a dominant 11-strikeout outing across seven shutout innings, and his ERA sits at just 1.71. Still only 21 years old, the southpaw might take that next step toward becoming one of the best left-handed pitchers in the Minor Leagues.
Brock Selvidge is Becoming One of the Yankees’ Top Pitching Prospects
One of the things the Yankees have garnered a reputation for is maximizing pitching talent, and Brock Selvidge is another example of a prospect whom they’ve developed masterfully. The left-hander was selected in the third round of the 2021 MLB Draft out of Hamilton High School, and he’s currently one of the youngest pitchers in the Eastern League. He’s the fifth-youngest qualified pitcher at the Double-A level, and yet he’s overpowering the competition.
Brock Selvidge has a 1.71 ERA and 1.86 FIP in four starts, striking out 29% of batters faced while keeping his groundball rate at a strong 45.1%. He hasn’t allowed a home run thus far, and we’re looking at a pitcher with all of the skills necessary to shove at baseball’s highest levels. Selvidge has elite secondaries that are spearheaded by a dominant slider with tons of horizontal movement.
He throws a gyro slider that he primarily uses against right-handed batters as the sharper movement and vertical drop make it a better pitch for those matchups. It plays well off of the four-seamer, which he improved dramatically last season to generate league-average vertical movement and velocity from a deceptive slot. The pitch that he’s spent the most time tinkering with however is his changeup, a pitch that he’s learning to command and throw off of his fastball for strikeouts and soft contact.
It’s a pitch that Spencer Medick, the pitching coach for the Hudson Valley Renegades, told me Selvidge was doing a lot of work on, and you can see how hard it is to hit when he mixes it in against righties. He’s aggressive in terms of utilizing his secondaries, as he knows he can make hitters look foolish by throwing his best stuff in any count.
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He also has a sweeping slider, as most pitchers in the Yankees’ organization do, and his cutter is another weapon in his deep arsenal that helps him keep hitters off balance. Brock Selvidge has the chance to become a top-100 prospect this summer, and the Yankees might have hit another home run in the draft. At just 21 years old, we’re talking about an arm who could end up in Scranton, just one level away from making their Major League debut. With Chase Hampton and Will Warren being perceived as near-MLB-ready starters, the future of this rotation is bright.
Most 21-year-old pitchers are either in their first year with an organization or in college preparing to get drafted, but Brock Selvidge is shoving against players who are 23-24 years old on average. There are seasoned MiLB veterans down here with years of experience toiling at the upper levels of the Minor Leagues, with players here who even have some brief MLB experience. The jump from High-A to Double-A is often the most difficult, and yet Selvidge is completely dominating the competition.
What the Yankees continue to do is find prospects and convert them into top-100 caliber prospects, with the likes of Agustin Ramirez also looking like he’ll get into that conversation this season. Among their top prospects, you could argue that they have as many as eight prospects who could be on a top-100 list. I’m extremely excited about this system, and there’s plenty of buzz about Brock Selvidge potentially impacting the Yankees at the MLB level soon.