This is a series of evaluations that will be done this offseason on every player that closed the season on the 40-man roster for the Minnesota Twins, with one appearing every weekday from now until each player has been evaluated. The plan is to start with Mr. Albers and move all the way through the pitchers, then to the catchers, infielders, outfielders and finally those listed as designated hitters on the club’s official MLB.com roster. That means we’ll wrap it up with Miguel Sano sometime in the first week of December.
- Name: Mason Melotakis
- 2016 Role: After missing all of 2015 due to Tommy John surgery, Melotakis was added to the 40-man roster prior to the 2016 season, and spent the entire campaign in the bullpen at Chattanooga, where he pitched almost exclusively in the seventh and eighth innings. Melotakis also had an effective (one earned run in five innings pitched) stint in the Arizona Fall League that just wrapped up.
- Expected 2017 Role: It’ll all come down to how he’s viewed by the new front office. He’s got the skills to be a big-league LOOGY right now, but that might not be enough to keep him on the 40-man roster with a new brain trust that didn’t spend a second-round pick on him.
- MLB Stats: N/A
- MiLB Stats: 2.97 ERA (3.14 FIP) in 33.1 innings, 11.3 K/9, 3.2 BB/9, 0.8 HR/9, .384 BABIP, 1.44 WHIP at Double-A Chattanooga.
- Contract Status: Two more option years, assuming he makes it through the offseason on the 40-man roster.
2016 Lowdown:
Melotakis is cut from the same cloth as Tyler Duffey. Both are 2012 draft picks of the Twins where the club tried to take a college reliever and turn them into a starter. The Twins had some success with Duffey early, despite the fact that he’d started just one game in his three years at Rice before he was drafted. Melotakis was a similar case with Northwestern State, as he’d made just nine starts in three seasons, and really only came on all that strong in his final season at the school.
The Twins grabbed Melotakis with the 63rd overall pick that season, and sent him to Elizabethton and ultimately Beloit before the end of that year. He didn’t make any starts the rest of the way but put up eye-popping numbers across the two levels — 1.88 ERA in 24 innings, 12.8 K/9, 2.2 BB/9 and 0.96 WHIP — before heading to Cedar Rapids (essentially repeating Beloit but the team’s affiliate shifted) to get a look as a starter. Melotakis’ stuff leveled off pretty quickly at that point, as his strikeouts were nearly halved while his walks increased and frankly he allowed too many baserunners (1.31 WHIP) for comfort.
Melotakis made a couple more starts the next season but mostly worked out of the bullpen between Fort Myers and New Britain, but by that point looked to be on the fast-track to the big leagues as a solid lefty reliever. The then-23-year-old lefty finished a strong 2014 with a good stretch at Double-A New Britain, where he had a 2.25 ERA, more than a strikeout per inning and a K/BB ratio of 17-3 in 16 innings. It wasn’t hard to envision a scenario in which Melotakis could be recording key late-inning outs in 2015 with the big club, but Tommy John surgery flatlined his 2015 before it got off the rails.
Working in Melotakis’ favor was that he’d pitched in college and at Double-A, so he was a fairly safe prospect who’d progressed to the level where the more legit-type guys typically get weeded out. As far as Tommy John recoveries go, this was a pretty clean one as well, as he pitched to the end of 2014 and picked up right where he left off in 2016, including heading to the Twins’ new Double-A affiliate Chattanooga to get his feet wet in the Southern League.
On the positive side of things, Melotakis allowed more than one earned run in just one of his 35 appearances all season. It appears the Lookouts used Melotakis in a pretty regimented role, too. Melotakis didn’t work more than one inning in any appearance this season, which is pretty unusual in the Twins organization. Former general manager Terry Ryan was fairly outspoken about the team liking to get some length with guys in the minors for developmental reasons, though clearly there was a lot of benefit to keeping the workload down as Melotakis worked his way back. Still, on nine occasions Melotakis threw at least 20 pitches, and as one might except seven of those nine outings resulted in at least one walk — which isn’t terribly surprising.
What stands out about Melotakis — both pre- and post-TJ — that might limit his ceiling a bit is that he’s susceptible to right-handed hitters. That’s not unusual for lefties, but at least in the numbers the last two seasons, Melotakis doesn’t have the look of a guy who can be trusted from the jump to get three outs in a row if that means powering through right-handed hitters.
Before having surgery, Melotakis allowed a .622 OPS to lefties and a .790 mark to righties across 63 innings between High-A and Double-A. Now, that’s not necessarily a smoking gun. There are plenty of quirky things in Melotakis’ splits from that year. He had a 4.86 ERA and 1.74 WHIP on the road, and a 1.21 ERA and 1.18 WHIP at home. There’s no such thing as a home-only specialist. Time on the developmental cycle can suss out some weird tendencies from guys that they have to work on as they progress up the ladder.
Post surgery at Chattanooga, Melotakis allowed an .850 OPS to righties and a .587 mark to lefties. It’s hard to get a read on that. On the surface it isn’t a good split, but it can be looked at a few ways. First of all, it’s unclear how Melotakis’ “stuff” was this season. Especially to start the season, when a post-TJ pitcher can have some bumps to navigate. For instance, Melotakis had a 5.40 ERA and 2.00 WHIP in April, but a 10.8 K/9.
It was also his first full season at Double-A, a year removed from competitive pitching. Additionally, Melotakis was prone to peaks and valleys. Check out his month-by-month ERA marks:
- 5.40
- 2.89
- 0.00
- 5.87
- 0.00
- 0.00 (one inning in September)
The funny thing is that it’s not that drastically different than how his 2014 season went:
- 3.71
- 4.86
- 1.42
- 1.38
- 4.91
So where there can be some issues here is that despite the fact that Melotakis has been beaten up a bit by right-handed hitters, we don’t know if the struggles against righties are a season-long thing or a sample-size thing where he gets hard in his down months and is just fine against both types of hitters when he’s good. Being a reliever hurts a bit in that respect since a rough week can sully numbers for a month or more, and we don’t really have the ability in the splits to break it down month-by-month. At some point, you’re elbow deep in data that is just too small to analyze, besides.
He does get dinged for struggling against righties, though — something that could cost him in the future.
So part of it comes down to physical projection, and if you think he has it in his repertoire — now in the future — to evolve into someone who can at least keep righties honest. Otherwise, you’re moving toward a guy more like Ryan O’Rourke or someone who can’t knock Buddy Boshers off the roster, as opposed to maybe an Andrew Miller type — don’t take this too literally — who is not at all dispatched as a specialist.
Dan Farnsworth at Fangraphs had Melotakis as his No. 21 Twins prospect coming into 2016 and said he was told by one of his team sources that he could be a top-10 guy if he can come back to the level they expected. Farnsworth said he’d seen Melotakis run his fastball up to 96-97 with a good curve, but that he worries about the stiff arm action keeping him from being a long-term contributor. That might give Melotakis a bit of a short shelf life, both in terms of shorter outings in games and a shorter MLB lifespan. That jibes with his usage at Chattanooga a bit this year, but also might work for him as a specialist as well. But that’s a double-edged sword because not many teams are going to roster a LOOGY that needs more than a full year to get to the big leagues — since it’s already been a full season, that is.
It’s not terribly surprising, but Melotakis didn’t make any of the lists this season where places did top-10s such as Baseball America or Baseball Prospectus. MLB.com presently has him at No. 19, behind fellow reliever Trevor Hildenberger and ahead of outfielder Daniel Palka. They hang a 65 on Melotakis’ fastball, a 55 on his curve, a 40 on his change and a 45 on his control and overall. MLB.com has Melotakis working in the mid-90s comfortably with his fastball, with what they call a “power” curve in the mid-90s that’ll miss bats and a usable changeup. They also list him as a possible set-up man, so it’s likely there’s something in there baked into the expectation that he’ll someday get righties out.
One last thing worth noting: Melotakis had a 54 percent groundball rate in 2014 before surgery, and just a 43 percent mark this year after. It showed, as opposing batters hit .277/.340/.431 against him in 2016 as opposed to .270/.348/.391 in 2014. Stranger yet is that he had a .384 BABIP in 2016 despite allowing so many fly balls. Perhaps he was victimized by bad defense at Chattanooga? Ultimately, it appears he has the stuff to perhaps piece it together at the MLB level. It wouldn’t be stunning to see him spend a little time at Triple-A Rochester — it frankly makes sense for him to start there in 2017 — with him making the jump to the big leagues sometime this season.
Grade: B. Melotakis did a pretty good job coming back from Tommy John surgery, and didn’t experience the command issues typically associated with recovery. He was pretty old for the Southern League but has to be graded on a curve based on missing all of 2015. He does get dinged for struggling against righties, though — something that could cost him in the future.
