I wonder though, what did Maddux or Radke's minor league K totals look like?  I bet they were a lot higher like Slowey's.  I wonder if a lot of Slowey's strikeouts come on looking K's or not.

Actually, the only thing that worries me about him is where those extra strikeouts go.  Does he get them from getting ahead on hitters then throwing junk out of the zone that suckers the young AAA hitters into bad swings?  What happens when he has to come in against MLB hitters?  Does it come from freezing hitters with lesser plate eyes?

A lot of the K's will end up coming from changing speeds up in the majors, but the one concern for me would be what happens to those 4 out of 9 K's that come from throwing balls out of the strike zone when he has to come into major league hitters?  That's the spot that probably ends up as the hangup because it might mean a change in approach.

But based on his intelligence, he should be plenty smart enough to figure it out.

We have to try and remember though, and this is going to seem out of character, that a lot of pitchers with long careers were only okay their first years.  They didn't really put it all together yet.  Some guys do, but not everyone, and Radke is a good example.

I will take the ubellman approach and modify this quote like this:

I think Slowey will resemble something between Kevin Tapani and Orel Hershiser.  It all depends on health and development."

95 mph fastball? Greg Maddux?

At no point in his career. Not even close.

Even out of high school the scouting report on Maddux was his fastball topped out at 89. It never changed.

The MLB Scouting Bureau report on Maddux was "average velocity on a sinking fastball", and no scout projected him to ever be overpowering.

He was a mid-80s pitcher when he came up with the Cubs, just as he was at Valley High in Las Vegas.

At 25, with 173 starts (Slowey would project to 173 starts in his late 20s, and in only someone's wildest dreams is likely to compare to Maddux), Maddux's fastball speed had not changed in any way worth noting in comparison to his high school days.

He could reach 90 on an accurate gun in his early seasons with the Cubs, giving him at best 2 mph over his high school days.

At that point, his changeup was his out pitch, a devastating fuse to more empty right-handed swings than any other pitch in baseball. It was Maddux's changeup that made his dipping 87-mph fastball so effective. But 95? That's just plain incorrect, and by a long ways.

Maddux's fastball always moved, but it was never something that would scare a hitter if it had come at his shoulder.

At 25, Maddux threw the fastball plenty, but he also had a slider (which he lacked completely in high school and overthrew in his early Cubs' years; it was his worst pitch), curveball (which was a good pitch for him against high school hitters, but he got on top of it only intermittently even when he was 25, which was sometimes understandably problematic for him), that unmatched circle change and a well-above average splitter.