The Detroit Tigers started establishing a new draft strategy in the 2023 amateur draft, the first with Scott Harris running baseball operations. Among a host of high school pitchers they selected, was right-hander Jatnk Diaz. Easily the most raw of the group, Diaz was always going to be a long term project, and yet he\u2019s the only prep pitcher from the class who finished the season at the Single-A Lakeland level.<\/p>\n
Diaz has a really interesting backstory. He played a bit in high school, but a stay in the Dominican Republic with family during COVID screwed up his high school eligibility and kept him from pitching in his senior season at Hazleton High School in Pennsylvania. Instead he spent most of his free time in 2022-2023 working out relentlessly and training himself to pitch using online content. By the time the 2023 draft approached, the now 6\u20194\u201d, 215 pounder was topping out at 97 mph, showing off good rising action on the fourseamer and raw feel for spinning a breaking ball.<\/p>\n
As a result of all this, and some video and velocity readings that made the rounds as coaches who knew Diaz advocated for him, he became a late candidate for a sleeper pick as the 2023 draft approached. The Tigers\u2019 scouting group got wind of him via old fashioned leg work, and they ended up selecting Diaz in the 8th round. He got a $247,500 bonus, which was roughly 100K better than the minimum, but still a pretty modest amount.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s to be expected that most prep arms, particularly those who have only recently converted to pitching, are going to take time just to build up to throwing a full season\u2019s workload of innings. The details come later after work on conditioning and pitching mechanics are set in place. Diaz in particular was an extremely raw project despite his obvious athleticism and built up physique. He threw 49 innings of Complex League ball in his first full season as a pro in 2024, and appeared to be on the right track.<\/p>\n
In 2025, Diaz got a late start to the year and didn\u2019t take the mound until early May, but he upped his workload a bit to 64 innings total and didn\u2019t miss a beat over four months of work. His control improved and while he\u2019d occasionally get out of rhythm and get wild for stretches, he was making adjustments mid-outing more effectively. In terms of velocity, Diaz was sitting pretty comfortably around 93-94 mph, though he was using his sinker more instead of the fourseam. He also showed some really nice improvements in using his circle change as well.<\/p>\n
Diaz didn\u2019t make a whole lot of progress with his breaking stuff, however. He spins a slurvy curveball in at 2500 rpms and showed better control of it than in 2024, but it\u2019s still on the slow side at 77-78 mph. Meanwhile, progress on developing a slider hasn\u2019t really clicked for him yet. He\u2019ll sometimes flash a good mid-80\u2019s slider off with sharp break, but he\u2019s still working to command it with any consistency. Both breaking balls are still works in progress at this point. His circle change has gotten quite a bit better though, and he used that pitch with a lot of confidence as the season progressed and drew a good amount of funky swings against it.<\/p>\n
With the Flying Tigers, Diaz also saw his velocity dip into the 90-91 mph range over those final few outings in August. He used his changeup a lot more and the slider in particular was pretty rarely used by that point. Perhaps he was just running out of gas a little as the season wound down.<\/p>\n
Ultimately, Diaz is still a project arm with some potential at this point. He started to find his way as a pitcher instead of just a thrower this season, but a lot of work remains ahead to turn himself into a real pitching prospect of note. His size, ability to spin the ball, and previous velocity peaks say there\u2019s plenty of raw ability. But until that velocity really perks up and we see sharper breaking balls with consistency, he\u2019s going to remain well down the pecking order among Tigers\u2019 farmhands.<\/p>\n
In his defense, other prep pitchers who had a lot more high school coaching and experience from his draft class, like third rounder Paul Wilson, or right-handers Andrew Dunford and Johnathan Rogers, have barely even been able to stay healthy and make any progress at all. We\u2019ll give Diaz a minor vote of confidence here that two years of pro ball and consistent training and coaching have set him up for a modest breakout in 2026 as he looks to conquer the Single-A level and hopefully make his way to West Michigan by year\u2019s end. If he does we\u2019ll look low on him here, though in other quarters he\u2019s entirely off the radar at this point.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Detroit Tigers started establishing a new draft strategy in the 2023 amateur draft, the first with Scott…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":516665,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[2386],"tags":[5,147,53,38501,2583,4,594],"class_list":{"0":"post-516664","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-detroit-tigers","8":"tag-baseball","9":"tag-detroit","10":"tag-detroit-tigers","11":"tag-detroit-tigers-prospects-minor-leagues","12":"tag-detroittigers","13":"tag-mlb","14":"tag-tigers"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@mlb\/115882430553112826","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/516664","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=516664"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/516664\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/516665"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=516664"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=516664"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=516664"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}