With Vanderbilt sophomore pitcher Jack Armstrong, athleticism is never an issue; the 6-foot-6, 226-pound hurler does backflips on the baseball field and slam-dunks on the basketball court. Instead, when pitching, Armstrong often grapples with a mental aspect of the game, which produces a particular question from his coaches.
"Are you a competitor or are you a caveman?" Vanderbilt pitching coach Derek Johnson often queries his young righty. "The competitor is the guy who can stay there in the middle, make his pitches, not exactly forbidding emotion but using emotion wisely. And then there is the caveman, who is all over the place, grunting and grinding."
Last season, Armstrong channeled his inner competitor more than his inner caveman to vault himself into elite draft prospect status. Moving toward the 2011 draft, the hope is that he can take the next step emotionally in order to harness his immense physical gifts.
"I need to make sure I keep that calm, cool, collected mentality, like every pitch is the same," Armstrong said. "Doesn't matter if it's 0-2 and trying to strike the guy out, I'm just trying to make a quality pitch, as many quality pitches as I can make."
If you could draw up the perfect pitcher, body-wise, it would be Armstrong -- he's tall, thick, strong-armed and even has the bloodlines. His father, Jack Sr., pitched seven years in the bigs for Cincinnati, Cleveland, Florida and Texas. Jack features a power arm that thrusts fastballs with heavy sink between 92-96 mph, a loopy 12-6 curveball that drops in around 77-81 and an 81-83 changeup. But while Armstrong may be long on potential, he is short on experience.
As a high schooler, Armstrong, who has a 40-inch vertical leap, focused more on basketball. He didn't pitch much, and his rawness showed when he arrived at Vanderbilt in fall 2008. He pitched 7.2 innings, fumbled with his command and spent most of the time learning the nuances of the collegiate game.
"His freshman year was spent trying to get him to just keep things going and understand the process of college baseball," Coach Johnson said. "How it works and the things he would have to do to be successful."
Armstrong's breakthrough came in the summer between his freshman and sophomore years. He took the ball as a starter on a regular basis for the Wareham Gatemen of the Cape Cod Baseball League and quickly went from project to polished.
He became an all-star in the league and finished the summer season with a 2.57 earned run average and 31 strikeouts in 35.0 innings. Much of his success there can be attributed to his Wareham coach, Cooper Farris. He allowed Armstrong to pitch into trouble and pitch out of it. He racked up innings and, in turn, gained valuable experience.
"These are all the things that are really necessary to develop as a pitcher," Jack Sr. said of his son's Cape experience.
When Armstrong returned to Vanderbilt in the fall of 2009, he had a different approach. Gone was the wild man who had trouble controlling his sinking fastball. In his place was a pitcher who was measuring the movement of his pitches and, finally, commanding his secondary pitches.
"I remember freshman year I was more of just a thrower, and I'm trying to develop more into a pitcher instead of throwing as hard as I can every time," Jack said. "I want to hit this spot here, I want to set up for this pitch. There is a lot more that goes into it."
Armstrong finished the season with a 4.71 ERA and struck out 50 in 78.1 innings. There were bright spots, such as allowing one earned run in 14 total innings against Florida and South Carolina. But there were also difficulties, such as giving up four earned runs in 1.1 innings against Florida State in the NCAA tournament.
"He wants to do so well, sometimes it's like he over-pitches a little bit. Like he tries too hard to make perfect pitches and ends up not making a good pitch at all," Johnson said. "He has to realize he's throwing 92-plus; he has great stuff. He just has to be able to use that stuff more."
At the Cape with Wareham, Armstrong has battled some of those inconsistencies, going 4-4 with a 3.14 ERA so far this summer. Before he left, his father gave him a knockout pitch, a slider that Jack Sr. describes as the "missing ingredient" in his son's arsenal.
But as a developing tall righty, it's tough to glean Jack Jr.'s potential from his current stats. It's more about projecting what he will turn into once he fully figures out the levers of his giant frame and combines them with a refined mental approach. They are quickly coming together.
"He has such good downhill plane with his fastball," a National League scout said. "He has that changeup as well. He is more of that pitchability-type guy. I think his stuff is going to continue to improve."
Jack Sr. can see this development when he watches his son pitch. As a major league veteran, he knows what it takes to get to the pros and is quick to compare his son to his own contemporaries. At the moment, he measures Jack Jr. against the ultimate thinking-man's pitcher, the very un-caveman-like Greg Maddux, except taller and with more velocity.
"That's what I see based on his delivery and how he throws the ball," he said.
But after a brief pause, he brings up Jr.'s sinker and one of the biggest competitors of the '90s.
"Kevin Brown was a teammate of mine in Texas, and Jack's stuff is very similar," Jack Sr. said. "Kevin made a pretty nice career out of it [the sinker ball], and I think Jack has a chance to be as good or better."
Josh Cooper is a frequent contributor to Rumor Central.