Pitching, pitching, pitching. It seems like all we ever do around here anymore, right? The most noteworthy pitching performances from college baseball’s second Saturday of the season below, but, before we start, a quick recap of some recent stuff you may have missed this weekend…

College Mid-Week Update, featuring the battle between Mike Leake and Kyle Gibson
All Strasburg, all the time!
College pitching from the second Friday night of the season

Matt Harvey (North Carolina): 4 IP 0 H 0 ER 2 BB 7 K, 2 separate games

Comparing any college pitcher to Stephen Strasburg is unfair and irresponsible, so let’s do it anyway. Strasburg will be the first overall pick of the 2009 Rule 4 Draft. Matt Harvey is the early favorite to go first overall in 2010. Below is a fair and responsible look at how their numbers stack up so far:

Harvey’s line: 9 IP 3 H 3 ER 2 BB 18 K (1 WP, 1 HBP)

Strasburg’s line: 12.1 IP 8 H 2 ER 3 BB 27 K (1 WP, 1 HBP)

Harvey

K/9: 18
K/BB: 9/1
GO/AO/LO: 3/3/2

Strasburg

K/9: 19.7
K/BB: 9/1
GO/AO/LO: 4/4/1

In the weird and wonderful world of amateur baseball, performance doesn’t always necessarily tell the whole story, what with park factors, levels of competition, strength of schedules, and relatively small samples and all. It’s hard to line up two statistical profiles and draw any kind of grand conclusion. But the raw numbers comparing Strasburg and Harvey do suggest similar performances thus far, something I think is pretty interesting.

There are reasons every move Strasburg makes is newsworthy and I’m not not not trying to say that anybody here or elsewhere is sleeping on Matt Harvey (he’s a big deal and has been for a good long while), I’m just throwing this out there as a lead-in to my question – what is the likelihood, if it exists at all, that Matt Harvey reaches the same level of hype other elite college pitchers (Strasburg, Price, and Prior, to name a few) had heading into his draft year?

Six other pitchers to watch after the jump…

Deck McGuire (Georgia Tech): 8 IP 4 H 1 ER 0 BB 7 K, 97 pitches

Without doing too much research on the topic, I’ll just come out and say that McGuire may be second only to Matt Harvey when it comes to ACC prospects eligible for the 2010 Draft. Did any astute reader notice the lack of GO/AO data for McGuire? Yeah, that’s because there is absolutely no record of a play-by-play game log for this game. An hour of my life looking for enough information so I could compile my own GO/AO data wasted. College baseball stats vex me like nothing else in this world…

Kendal Volz (Baylor): 7 IP 4 H 0 ER 3 BB 6 K 6 GO 5 AO 1 LO, 102 pitches
Gerrit Cole (UCLA): 6 IP 2 H 0 ER 5 BB 8 K 4 GO 4 AO, 104 pitches

What an age we live in. From Keith Law’s Twitter account, via text: “Gerrit Cole’s first 11 pitches: 94 94 95 96 97 94 98 97 98 96 98.” I’d rather hear/read more about Cole’s non-fastball offerings because, well, we know the heater is special, but it’s good information all the same. Volz’s line was similar to Cole’s, continuing a weird trend that probably exists only in my head and not actually in reality where starting pitchers facing off in big matchups put up weirdly similar pitching lines. Hey, I just realized that the matchup was Volz vs Cole. I will never not be amused by similar sounding last names, it’s just a part of who I am.

Scott Alexander (Pepperdine): 7 IP 3 H 0 ER 4 BB 4 K 11 GO 1 AO

Don’t sleep on Scott Alexander, I’m warning you…

Ryan Berry (Rice): 9 IP 2 H 0 ER 0 BB 12 K 7 GO 6 AO 2 LO

I’m still not sure how a guy like Ryan Berry fits in as a prospect exactly, but a performance like this is worth a mention, right?

Kyle Heckathorn (Kennesaw State): 4 IP 6 H 4 ER 3 BB 6 K 5 GO 1 AO

On one hand, this is a bad sign; failure to dominate lesser competition is not something Heckathorn wants to put on his resume. However, he is still striking out over a batter an inning and he is getting guys to pound his heavy stuff into the ground with regularity. My fearless prediction about Kyle Heckathorn’s eventual draft position – no matter where the consensus decides he should go in the draft, he’ll go at least 15 spots higher. It only takes one team to like you enough to make you rich, and I get the feeling that a scouting director will see the big righty on the right day and fall in love. Weird prediction after he threw a lackluster game, I know.