Diamondbacks Prospect from Taiwan Makes Impressive Use of Sweeper

It's not been an easy year for Yu-Min Lin, but Sunday showed the promise of the young left-hander from Taiwan.

Lin gave up three runs in the first inning on two RBI base hits, but settled down from there to throw five scoreless innings.

That allowed his offense to get going and take the lead before Lin left the game at the end of the sixth. The Aces won 5-4 over the Albuquerque Isotopes.

Catcher Gavin Logan lead off the third inning wit his first Triple-A home run to kick start the offense. Tristin English stayed hot, going 2-for-4 with two RBI. He's batting .341 with a .962 OPS. Shortstop Andy Weber went 3-for-4 with an RBI base knock as well.

Lin's pitching line was 6 IP, 7 H, 3 ER, 2 BB, 7 K. His record is now 2-4 and he has a 5.91 ERA. While that ERA may look inflated to most eyes, Lin actually has a 100 ERA- . That is a league and park adjusted metric from Fangraphs under which 100 = league average, and lower is better.

It's always important to take into account the fact that league average ERA in the PCL is 5.46, and Greater Nevada Field in Reno, at 4,500 feet elevation, is one of the most hitter friendly parks in the league.

There was a very large change in approach for Lin Sunday. Whereas he came into the contest throwing his Sweeper just 13.6% of the time, he threw 35 of them, or 39% in this game.

Lin induced nine whiffs on 19 swings on the pitch, or 47%. Furthermore, he allowed just one hit off the sweeper, a seeing-eye ground ball up the middle in the fourth inning.

The sweeper has been an effective pitch for him this year, as coming in hitters managed just a .211 batting average and .368 slug against it.

So it makes sense that he would increase its usage. Prior to this outing, his primary breaking and off-speed pitches were the curve and the changeup.

It will be very interesting to monitor this development and see if this game was a one-off experimentation, or if it represents a shift in approach. This was Lin's first start after the All-Star Break, so might have been something in the works developmentally.

Lin, who just turned 22 on July 12, has seen his stock in the prospect ranking drop a bit due to his early season struggles.

Here at Arizona Diamondbacks On SI he fell from number nine to at the end of last year to number 13 in our mid-season update. Previously top 10 at Baseball America, he's slid to 17. MLB Pipeline has him number 11.