Jackson Flora’s Dominant Opening Day Start Raises Draft Stock
A number of high profile starters across the country were on the mound on Friday as the college baseball season kicked off, many of which will make a case to be first round draft picks this July. Among plenty of excellent performances, UC Santa Barbara’s Jackson Flora stood out after dominating #20 (Baseball Focus #22) Southern Miss in the Gauchos opener at Pete Taylor Park in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. The right-handed Flora is the ninth ranked draft prospect on the Baseball Focus MLB draft board, but showed on Friday that his ranking is subject to change very soon.
Coastal Carolina’s Cam Flukey finds himself at the top of plenty college pitching draft rankings, but the gap is not far between him and Flora. Although it’s just one start, that gap closed a bit more on Friday. Flora tossed 80 pitches across six shutout innings against an experienced Southern Miss lineup, striking out five while giving up just three hits and no walks. Flora established his plus arsenal from the get go, pumping his upper-90s fastball while touching triple digits in his first inning of work. The fastball was electric all night and is a big reason he is a near-lock to be a first round draft pick. On top of his present arm talent, he can really spin the fastball and create a lot of carry on the pitch. It reached as high as 22 inches of IVB (induced vertical break) which is nearly un-hittable when Flora’s driving the ball through the top of the zone like he was on Friday. On top of the carry, the pitch featured some cutting action as well as he flashed a pitch with 21 inches of IVB and 0 inches of HB (horizontal break). When thrown in the upper-90s, that’s a plus-plus fastball. The metrics will back up a little bit in the pros with the difference of the Minor League ball but it still projects as above-average at the very least.
Opposing hitters looked like they had no answer for Flora’s revamped changeup as well. He adopted a new “kick-change” grip, the newest trendy pitch that’s making its rounds throughout the game. Flora relied heavily on his fastball and slider a year ago due to his changeup’s ineffectiveness, but the new changeup was anything but ineffective on Friday night as he mixed it in against both right-handed and left-handed hitters, dropping it in and out of the zone for called strikes and whiffs. With the killed spin and arm-side run, it played nearly perfectly off of the high-octane fastball.
If the fastball and changeup weren’t already enough, Flora managed to work in two distinct breaking ball shapes as well. It was a high-80s tight “cutter-ish” slider and a low-80s sweeping slider averaging 18 inches of HB. His breaking ball of choice last year was a more traditional two-plane slider, but he has managed to create two different shapes from it to diversify his arsenal. His command with both offerings were spotty early as he was leaving them out over the plate and up in the zone but no one did any damage to either pitch. With the fastball being as good as it was on top of how Flora was mixing in his pitches, it was tough for opposing hitters to sit on any pitch type. Throughout the night, his command with the breaking balls tightened up as he was locating down and away with precision.
Chart via Developing Baseball Data Analytics, @developbaseball on Twitter/X
Flora is uber-athletic and gets down the mound very well, creating a lot of extension which only made each of his offerings play up further. There are some moving parts in his delivery but he repeats well. However, when he missed, it looked like it was a product of his delivery getting out of sync. He didn’t walk anyone and rarely saw three-ball counts, but did hit three batters. It was on those misses that it looked like he was out of sync. It was only 80 pitches so he didn’t have to labor through any innings and at no point did it look like he was losing his release point which can be a common thing for young pitchers as they work deep into outings. As he’s stretched out throughout the season, it will be worth taking note of how his stuff and command holds up over a full season’s workload.
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