Prospect Watch: Will Gardner
Baseball was not originally in the cards for current Pirates pitching prospect Will Gardner. He was fully intent on pursuing a football career, but a gruesome injury would cost him his scholarship and would send him to the sport that would eventually turn him pro. Gardner was taken in the 21st round of the 2018 draft and has become a reliable prospect working out of the bullpen. He features a high strikeout rate at all levels of the Minor Leagues, but he has control issues as well that have made him susceptible to the big inning. He is helped lit by a low opponent batting average, which gets him out of sticky situations when people get on via the free pass.
Last season, he moved to full-season baseball, spending his second year as a professional pitcher with Class Low-A Greensboro. He had the highest ERA of his professional career at 3.00, but he worked in the most innings he ever has at 48 innings pitched. He posted the highest strikeout numbers of his professional career setting down 58 batters, but continued to deal with control issues walking 29 batters. He features a really good four-seam fastball that he can change speeds effectively with throughout an outing. It can hit as low as 90 miles per hour and get up as high as 96 miles per hour. He has the stamina to be a long-relief guy, but he can also change it up and bring the heat in short spurts.
Originally, Gardner was looking to pursue a career in football coming out of Morristown, Tennessee. He was a star on both the football field and the baseball diamond but had a scholarship to Coastal Carolina to play football after his Junior season. However, things took a turn when he suffered a torn ACL that made him lose out on his scholarship. Luckily for Gardner, he was able to transition into baseball season and continued to improve on the baseball diamond. He was looking for a place to pursue baseball at the collegiate level and ended up starting out at Tennessee Tech during his first two years of his collegiate career.
He appeared mostly as a reliever during his first two seasons of college baseball, and things did not start out the way he planned. In his first season, he appeared in 15 games, making two starts, and posted a 9.55 ERA while struggling to get outs. He gave up a total of 40 hits in his 21.1 innings of work and allowed 23 earned runs. He showed decent strikeout numbers but wasn't blowing anyone away on the mound with 6.23 strikeouts per nine. He was still dealing with effects from the ACL tear, and that was probably affecting his work on the mound. He would make a full time move to the bullpen during his sophomore year and things didn't go much better as he again had an inflated ERA of 13.97 in 9.2 innings of work.
Gardner decided it was time to move on again, and he ended up transferring to Carson-Newman University for his junior year. The change of scenery was just what the right-hander needed as he completely turned things around and became one of the top pitchers for the Eagles. He went 6-3 with a 4.73 ERA and helped lead his team to the SAC Championship. He had five complete games during the season and became only the fifth pitcher in school history to throw five complete games in a season. Once in the championship, Gardner stepped up his game even more going 1-1 while throwing 247 pitches across two starts in the SAC Championship.
He came back for his senior season as a reliever and dropped his ERA to 4.37 while serving mostly as the team's closer. He led the way with 12 saves that season and dramatically increased his strikeout rate by setting down 55 batters in 35 innings of work. He all but proved that he could be a relief prospect at the professional level and started catching the eyes of scouts. He knew he wasn't a top-tier prospect, but had some hope that his name would be called in the 2018 MLB Draft. The Pittsburgh Pirates were on a string of selecting college pitchers and took Gardner in the 21st round of the draft, the sixth straight college arm they selected that year.
Because he was still making the transition, Gardner was sent to the Bristol Pirates to continue to develop his repertoire. He started right away in high leverage situations serving as the closer for Bristol during that first season. While his ERA was an impressive 0.82 in 11 innings of work, he gave up a lot more runs than the numbers suggest. Of his six runs given up in 11 innings of work, only one was earned and all six were given up between two outings. His control was not the greatest as he walked eight batters, but he featured a high strikeout rate, setting down 31% of the batters he faced and his velocity was a big plus that the Pirates focused on.
Gardner was on a roll of three straight outings without allowing an earned run and earned a call-up to Class A Short Season West Virginia. His ERA numbers began to balance out in Short-Season ball as he pitched in 14 innings of work, and put up a 2.45 ERA. He was still working in the back-end of the bullpen and continued to have success. His control still needed work, as he walked nine batters in those 14.2 innings of work. His strikeout rate dropped slightly to 23.8%, and opponents were hitting slightly better against him at .246. While his control issues were a problem, he balanced it out with good velocity.
Because of this, he would receive a promotion to Class Low-A Greensboro for the 2019 season. He would more than double his workload from the year before and still posted strong numbers with a 3.00 ERA in 48 innings of work. His strikeout rate was back to normal as he set down more than a quarter of the batters he faced on strikeouts, and, while he still had control issues, he got a little better with 29 walks. He dominated South Atlantic League hitters throughout the season allowing just a .191 opponent batting average throughout the season. He worked mostly in short relief throughout the season but occasionally showed his stamina working three innings twice during the season.
His first two months of the season was when he played some of his best baseball of the season. In May and June, Gardner had a 0.84 ERA over his first 13 outings of the season and was well on his way to being a dominant reliever. He was on a roll until the end of the season when one bad outing raised his ERA. In his second to last outing of the season, Gardner gave up six earned runs in an inning and a third. He rebounded with two scoreless outings to end the year and headed into the off-season with confidence on his side. With Minor League baseball on hold until 2021, look for Gardener to advance to Advanced-A Bradenton when baseball resumes.
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