The Pittsburgh Pirates Luis Heredia is now a teenager with a following. MILB takes a detailed look at how he is growing up in the minors. Be sure to check it out.

Heredia gives a detailed account of three of his pitches.

We found this especially interesting about his curveball, the evaluation is from the State College Spikes pitching coach, Justin Meccage.

Origin: I learned it in Mexico, from my coach, Hector Chavarria, when I was 15 years old. It was difficult to learn at first. It’s a 12-to-6 break.
Purpose: His curveball is more of a strike pitch right now. He only throws two or three and no more than five per fame. What we are working on is the ability to strike guys out with the curveball. Developing the fastball is the first step and right behind that is the changeup — especially for a power guy like him. As we progress, developing the curveball will be the next process.

Grip: With my index and middle fingers, two-seam curveball.

Speed: 78-79 mph.

Evaluation: It’s pitch No. 3 for him. A lot of it mentality, that it can be a put-away pitch. In the future, as soon as when he gets to instructional league, you’ll see him increase his hand speed, and that will bring sharper depth. Right now, it’s a big-depth pitch — it’s really big — and if we can shorten the depth and throw it with more fastball arm-speed and hand-speed, it will be sharper and smaller and it will become a strikeout pitch. Not this last outing but two outings ago, it was nice to see him bring it to the table with two strikes

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Luis Heredia just keeps getting the older kids out for the State College Spikes, the Pittsburgh Pirates short season minor league club.

The Pittsburgh Pirates big right hander is just 17 years old.  His name is known by most Buccos fans, his 18th birthday is coming up on August 10.

We are amazed at how well he is pitching based on the fact that he has been relying on fastball command.  There have been outings that the amount of breaking pitches can be counted on one hand.  Hell, one finger.

In his outing on July 13, he threw 68 pitches.  One was a breaking ball.

The good starts have been mounting for the big teenager and the competition has been increasing too. None more evident than this video from when Heredia took Deven Marrero to school. Marrero was the 24th overall selection out of Arizona State in this years draft.

Heredia has thrown 38.1 innings this season with the State College Spikes with a 1.88 ERA and 3.51 FIP. He has struck out 5.17 batters per nine innings which is 22 total punchouts against nine walks.  Over the eight starts the hard thrower from Mazatlan, Mexico has made, he’s had a strikeout in every game except one.

We’re looking forward to when he grows up.

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Seriously, wouldn’t it would be tough to be looking at this list today and see another teams names beside one of those right handers?  Cole has been bumped from his preseason spot in the top ten, at number nine.  The Altoona Curve right hander is now ranked number twelve despite a number of prospects no longer being on the list.

The biggest drop was for Jameson Taillon who checked in at number thirteen in the preseason.  Taillon is now ranked number thirty-two.

But the teenager has moved up the list.  We thought Luis Heredia surely would have made a bigger jump especially when one considers the amount of fastballs he has thrown this season.  The Little Horse has moved up five spots to number thirty-seven in Goldstein’s poll.

The interesting news is the emergence of even more Pittsburgh Pirates prospects playing their way up the rankings.  Those players are shortstop Alen Hanson and outfielder Gregory Polanco.  If you check out the tweet below, you can see Goldstein will be ranking ahead of Hanson.

Some solid video of Hanson and Polanco are now up in our Hub section.

And finally KG’s reasoning….