2015 Player Projection: Andrew Heaney

Jerry Dipoto was on the hunt for young pitching again this offseason. He hit his mark and brought in Andrew Heaney but it cost him Howie Kendrick in the process. Heaney has a lot of potential, but will the long-term reward be worth the short-term risk?

What happened in 2014?
Andrew Heaney was in the Miami Marlins organization in 2014 and widely considered a top 30 prospect, quite possibly the best left-handed pitching prospect in baseball.  The former #9 overall pick was moving up the ladder quickly and finding success at every level. He tore up Double-A to start the season and quickly earned a promotion to Triple-A.

After only a few starts, Heaney got called up to The Show. That’s where things started to go wrong. Heaney got pounded in the Majors. He was able to find the strike zone, but perhaps a little too much, leading to not very many whiffs and a whole lot of homers. It also included Heaney pitching with lower velocity than normal.

Heaney claims that it was a case of dead arm, which might be true as he returned to Triple-A and generally met with success after he worked through the dead arm period. He got one more shot at the big leagues in September, but still didn’t impress much.

That short sample of struggles seemed to turn the Marlins off on him, resulting in Andrew Heaney being part of a convoluted three-way trade that resulted in Heaney joining the Angels via the Dodgers.

[table id=88 /] *The MWAH projections are simply my best guess based off my own personal opinion and research (my wOBA calculation is approximate because my math skills are only “meh”)

What do the projections think he will do in 2015?
Let’s just say nobody is expecting Andrew Heaney to win Rookie of the Year. He has a high prospect pedigree, but the struggles in his 2014 MLB cameo have poisoned the well a little bit. What the projection systems all generally foresee is Heaney still being able to be a successful strike thrower but not yet have the ability to really dominate hitters and miss bats like he did in the minors.

Does the Monkey agree or disagree?
I more or less agree, I also am a little more optimistic but also a little more pessimistic. Allow me to explain.

As we’ve seen this spring, Heaney clearly isn’t quite a finished product. There are still some approach issues he has to work out. Let’s not forget, he’s only 23 and was drafted in 2012, so he doesn’t have a ton of professional experience still. As you can see from my projection, his FIP is pretty encouraging. However, his ERA is decidedly not. My reasoning is simply that Heaney is going to have some hiccups along the way where things will go horribly off the rails and cause his ERA to be out of whack with his peripherals.

More specifically, I fully expect Heaney to win a rotation spot out of training camp, but I think it is going to be the rotation spot that gets forfeited once Garrett Richards returns from injury. Heaney will struggle through three or four starts and get demoted upon Richards’ return. He’ll take what he learned from that experience, work out his issues in Triple-A for a month or so and come back to the majors around June. When that happens though, he’ll stick in the rotation for a long, long time.

THREE OPEN QUESTIONS FOR ANDREW HEANEY IN 2015
1) Why did the Marlins sour on Heaney so quickly?
That’s the million dollar question. The Angels seem to be making a habit of scooping up former top pitching prospects that have lost their faith of their original club after a brief stint in the majors didn’t go so well. Last year it was Skaggs, this year it is Heaney.

It is a troubling thing to see the Fish give up on Heaney like they did because they theoretically know him better than anyone, so if they see reason to divest themselves of him, it suggests that maybe the Halos are getting damaged goods. A lot of what it appears to be though was the dead arm period Heaney went through in his first stint with the big club. Heaney consistently chalks that up to dead arm, but maybe the Marlins are a bit concerned that there is something else going on there.

It might also just be that the Marlins don’t have issues trading young pitching. They traded Nate Eovaldi this winter as well, so maybe they think they are trading from an area of depth and want to compete now rather than wait for Heaney to fully develop.

2) Is he going to make the Opening Day rotation?
Theoretically, Andrew Heaney has to earn that spot, but really it is more that he needs to not lose it. While it wouldn’t hurt Heaney to spend a few more months in the minors, the Angels very much want Heaney to be a part of the rotation. They aren’t going to just outright hand him the gig because that’s not how they do things, but he’d need to stumble pretty badly in his final spring starts to fall out of the roster picture altogether, especially when one of the rotation spots is only going to be open for about three weeks before Richards comes back.

3) If Heaney struggles this year, was the trade a mistake?
That’s a question that will be asked a lot if Heaney doesn’t find immediate success. Frankly, I think the move is already an unqualified success because the Angels got six years of cheap team control for a top pitching prospect in exchange for one year of a borderline All-Star second baseman. I love Howie, but that’s just too much value too pass up, especially when you consider that moving Kendrick also created payroll flexibility that will allow the Angels to make a more significant move at the trade deadline. If they make such a move, that will more than justify the Heaney-Kendrick swap even if Heaney sucks in 2015 and the second base situation is lousy all year.

Really, the only way this one ends up looking bad is if Heaney just ends up being a total bust, but given what he’s shown so far, it is hard to see how he doesn’t end up at least being a usable back-of-the-rotation starter for the next six years. Granted, the Angels acquired him to be a top-of-the-rotation arm, but there’s nothing wrong with a cheap #4 starter.

The Final Word (and GIF)
“Future”

Make no mistake, the Angels view Andrew Heaney as a big part of their future. They are counting on Heaney to help this year, but they are really counting on him to be a major contributor for the five years after that. Jerry Dipoto has very sneakily diversified the meager resources he has in the farm system to make sure that he’s got quality assets in place to step in when the older assets start to decline. He’s got Weaver and Wilson now, but by the time they hit free agency or have their talent fall of a cliff, Heaney and Newcomb will be ready to step into their roles. That’s why they were willing to move Howie Kendrick. They thought they could gain a major future asset by forfeiting a short-term asset that they could at least partially mitigate the loss of by making other moves around the edges.