2B Justin Foscue, Mississippi State
Full index of profiles here
DoB: 3/2/1999. B/T: R/R
2020 Stats: 2 HR, .321/.464/.509, 1 SB, 3/15 K/BB in 16 games
For the brief 2020 season, Mississippi State had the best middle infield in college baseball between shortstop Jordan Westburg and second baseman Justin Foscue. Like Westburg, Foscue wasn't an extremely heralded recruit coming out of high school in Huntsville, Alabama, then hit an unremarkable .241/.332/.353 as a freshman in 2018. However, while Westburg significantly boosted his prospect stock through athleticism and projectability, Foscue did so by just plain performing. As a sophomore in 2019, he hit .331/.395/.564 with 14 home runs and a 32/30 strikeout to walk ratio across 67 games, then he kept on rolling with a .321/.464/.509 line in 2020 with five times as many walks (15) as strikeouts (3). In that sense, he and Westburg now enter the 2020 draft as two very different kinds of prospects – Westburg looks like a ballplayer and has the physical tools to succeed, while Foscue has performed at a higher level despite average physical tools.
Foscue is listed at 6' and 203 pounds, with below average speed and average athleticism. It's not the profile that will make traditional scouts jump out of their seats. But few hitters in this range of the draft have performed like Foscue has, and there's reason to believe he'll get the most out of what he has. He sets up from a spread out stance, holding his hands back above his head and his feet out apart. Despite the setup, Foscue employs a pretty simple swing, using his advanced plate discipline and hand eye coordination to find the barrel consistently and drive balls into the gaps and over fences with metal bats. There's little question about his ability to handle advanced pitching, and he finds the barrel consistently enough to be a threat as he moves through pro ball.
The questions do come in when it comes to Foscue's ability to translate offensive impact with wood bats, especially because he's just average at second base and the pressure figures to be on his bat. He hit just .255/.288/.362 in a small, 14 game sample with the US Collegiate National Team, which is certainly not enough to say he'll never hit with wood but it also didn't answer any of those questions. Foscue will need to continually rely on his advanced sense of the game to hit his way up, without getting the same benefit of the doubt that some of the toolsier infielders in this class, like Casey Martin and Jordan Westburg, get.
The good news is that Foscue should hit. You don't hit like he has in the SEC by accident, and the plate discipline numbers only further his cause. At the end of the day, you could be 6'4" and blasting balls into the parking lot in batting practice, but it matters what you do in games. Foscue is a gamer who is known to work hard at his craft, and I like his chances of continuing to hit. The projection probably looks like 15-20 home runs annually at the major league level with good on-base percentages, enough to warrant a starting second base job, though there is a chance the power numbers dip more into the 10-15 range. His name has been picking up some steam lately and what previously looked more like a comp/early second round profile is now being mentioned more and more in the back of the first.
2020 batting practice
Game action in the 2019 College World Series
No comments:
Post a Comment