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College  | Story  | 3/1/2017

Week 2 College Player Spotlight

Patrick Ebert     
Photo: Steve Fiorindo
 


Perfect Game College Player Database | Week 1 Player Database Spotlight

Every week during the 2017 college baseball season we will be pulling at least one report, and corresponding video when available, of a player entered into the College Player Database. All of these reports can be found in one, easy-to-find place as linked above, and can also be accessed off of the individual PG player profile pages. To access all of the reports you will need a College Baseball Ticket (CBT) subscription. To learn more about the CBT and to sign up today please visit this link.

Here are the players, school-by-school, who were added to the database from the second week of the 2017 college baseball season:

Oregon: David Peterson, Tim Susnara, A.J. Balta, James Acuna
UC Irvine: Keston Hiura, Andrew Pallante
Utah: Jayson Rose, Riley Ottesen
Ohio State: Ryan Feltner
Lipscomb: Michael Gigliotti, Brady Puckett, Jeffrey Passantino, Zeke Dodson, Lee Solomon
Missouri State: Jake Burger, Jeremy Eierman, Trey Turner, Dylan Coleman
Middle Tennessee State: Austin Dennis




Keston Hiura, OF, UC Irvine (Junior, draft eligible in 2017)

Hiura, a preseason First Team All-American, can flat hit. He’s a pure hitter that resembles Howie Kendrick with more pop and more willingness to hit for power. Hiura uses a big leg kick, works the middle of field well and has an excellent feel for the barrel. He hit a bomb of a home run to left-center field in UC Irvine’s 11-5 loss to Oregon as part of the Tony Gwynn Classic in San Diego.  Similar to Kendrick, Hiura looks like a second baseman or left fielder at next level (mostly based on past looks as he served as the Anteaters designated hitter in this game).  Regardless of his future position he offers a bat-first profile that could hit near the top of a lineup.


Jake Burger, 3B/1B, Missouri State (Junior, draft eligible in 2017)

Burger has an average arm with plenty enough arm strength (about 88-89 mph out of the hand) to stay at third. He has quick transfers but his feet are a little heavy and he is slow coming in on balls. Burger made two errors in the first inning of Sunday’s game against Middle Tennessee State (a 5-0 Missouri State win) which seemed to remove him mentally from most of the rest of the game. One error was a throwing error that pushed the second baseman off the bag. The wildness of his throws does seem to be a concern as his throws were all over the place during pre-game infield drills on Saturday as well. The other error was him booting a scorched ground ball right to him. While this was only a two-game look it has been speculated in the past that a move across the diamond to first base may be in Burger’s future.

What isn’t a question is his power and the ability to make in-game adjustments. In Saturday’s game Lipscomb’s Jeffrey Passantino got Burger to chase a slider that was well outside for a strikeout in his first at-bat. However, in the second at-bat, again against Passantino, Burger laid off that pitch. He ended up just missing a home run, hitting a 385-foot flyout to center field with a 5.74-second hang time. By the third at-bat Burger jumped all over a first-pitch fastball hitting it for a home run.

His ability to make in-game adjustments is impressive and is on par with 2015 first-round pick Christin Stewart. In his fourth at-bat on Saturday he ripped a line drive that hung up just a little bit too long as the left fielder was able to make a play on it. However, during Sunday’s game he could not make the adjustments. The Middle Tennessee State pitchers pounded sliders away causing him to expand the zone resulting in two unmemorable grounders and strikeouts on sliders away. Finally, he got a pulled hard ground ball double up the third base line in his final at-bat of that game.

Burger compares favorably to 2016 first-round pick, Will Craig. They have the same bat speed, swing plane, load and arm strength, and both have questions defensively that may end up pushing both of them off third to first.

Overall, the power is a plus tool with the arm being about league average at third. If he carries his 2016 production into 2017 he could be drafted in the back end of the first round thanks to his impressive potential at the plate.
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