Baseball Prospect Report

By The Baseball Beginnings Guy
June 6, 2010

I had my first look at LSU outfielder Leon Landry since the Cape at the UCLA Regional. What I found was a guy who has taken the next step up the athletic conditioning ladder. Always a good athlete, Landry is much leaner and meaner than he was in the summer, and he’s turning himself into a classic National League top-of-the-order guy with the potential for punch.

I would grade Landry’s athletic ability a 70 and his present body condition a 60. Landry told me he is down 15 pounds from the summer. It shows.

 Perhaps most importantly, Landry’s improved conditioning shows up in his speed. He was a 60 runner on the Cape. He’s a 70 runner now. His first step is better and he’s accelerating much better. He got thrown out trying to steal second base in a Friday game, but that was because he didn’t get a secondary lead. The speed improvement is most exciting to me as a scout, because now I can see a guy with the money tools shaping into form: hit, speed, power and defense.

Arm strength won’t be a weapon, at a 40, but it was good to see him able to throw to the best of his ability after a sore arm prevented that on the Cape.

Defensively, Landry is going to be just fine in center field. He can easily glide left or right and you would at least put a 50 on his fielding range. He will catch what he gets to. Landry’s feet always move in center field, which you like to see in a center fielder, much like you like to see it in a shortstop. He had trouble picking up a ball hit right at him early in the game and then adjusted to make the play on a similar ball a few innings later.

Offensively, Landry’s hands are there, but the difference between this spring and last summer is that he’s letting pitches get deeper. This is resulting in much more plate discipline, and it benefits him because I saw him lay off pitches away from him rather than chase and get himself out.

Landry is absolutely at his offensive best when he goes right back up the middle. He still doesn’t have the traditional trigger in his swing, but his front leg lift is slightly more pronounced than it was over the summer. Landry’s wrists are so fast that he really doesn’t need much of a trigger, but even so, he’s getting his foot down faster.

He sets his hands low, which is uncommon for college hitters, but Landry is intentionally swinging with a very low plane in order to generate low line drives. He will have to show at the advanced levels that he won’t let hard velocity at the letters beat him. He won’t see the kind of velocity he really needs to face on a regular basis in college baseball.

The best ball I saw Landry hit was a double off the left-center wall in the ninth inning against the slipping stuff of UCLA right-hander Trevor Bauer. The ball was smoked and it sounded like a hammer pounding a nail when it hit the wall. This is a precursor to the kind of power you should see from Landry in the coming years. Do not expect light-tower power. He’s not the guy who will hit the rainbow. The home runs he hits as a pro will be laser beams over the center and gap walls. As he ages and develops more as a hitter, I could see Landry developing more lift in his swing as he gets stronger and develops a better sense of when to line and when to lift. This guy should simply get better offensively the more at-bats he accumulates.

One concern he will probably have to address as a pro is how he handles left-handed pitching. I’m not looking at his splits, but he was dropped to no. 7 in the order against a left-handed starter. What Landry showed in those at-bats were the aspects that he improved on – letting the ball come to him and trusting his hands. He’s also starting to develop a sense of how to better use his hips and thighs to help him drive the ball.

After watching two LSU games, I came away with the impression that Landry isn’t used correctly. He batted in the bottom half of the lineup both times. This is a complete mismanagement of Landry’s tools. He will not be a back third hitter in a major league lineup in the early years of his career. He should be a top-third hitter because he has four tools: hit ability, power, center field defense, and run speed.

All in all, I think Landry had a very productive summer-to-spring cycle and helped himself leading up to the 2010 draft.

Watch 2010 Regionals Leon Landry Video
Watch Leon Landry Video
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Watch more Leon Landry Video
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Read Leon Landry Scouting Report
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Categories: '10 Scouting Updates
Tags: Leon Landry, Leon Landry Update, LSU