Jeff Gray is probably unfamiliar to a lot of Cubs fans.  He's the guy they acquired in the Aaron Miles trade.  He just turned 28 years old and hads a little MLB experience.  Fangraphs has his fastball at nearly 95 mph last year and we know how much Lou loves the right handed flame-throwers.  Odds are pretty good we'll hear Lou rave about his fastball early in spring training.

According to Fangraphs, he threw that fastball about 73% of the time and most of the other pitches were sliders that averaged an impressive 86.6 mph.  He also throws a few curveballs and an occasional changeup.  I'm skeptical of Fangraphs' numbers so I checked out Harry Pavlidis' Cubs F/X page and since he's covered every pitcher on the planet, it was no surprise to see he had discussed Gray back in December.

Of the 8 rookie relief candidates HP looked at, Gray's 95 mph fastball was 2 mph better than Caridad's.  HP is much more accurate than Fangraphs and here's what he has for Gray.

Only 6 change-ups thrown, but 91 mph.  That's an indication of just how hard Gray can throw, but it's not a large enough difference to the fastball to be effective.  He throws both the 2-seamer and 4-seamer and he throws about twice as many sliders as curves.  Here's what HP has to say about Gray.

Gray was the key piece of the Jake Fox/Aaron Miles trade. He looks good, with one glaring issue. On the plus side, he gets a ton of ground balls with everything but his 4-seam fastball, which is intended to miss bats (.225 whiff) and get pop-ups (.10). His slider has a gaudy whiff rate of .417 and I have to admit I have a innate appreciation for 95 mph 2-seam fastballs. Problem: the curveball can't find the zone (.2 IWZ), but he uses it when ahead on lefties. Tends to give up pitcher's counts by throwing it for a ball. I'll have more on Gray in a separate piece, too much to go into here.

Gray did well in the American League and the NL Central shouldn't pose as many challenges. His chances for a job in April are as good, if not better, than anyone's in this group.

In my opinion, there is no one better at analyzing pitchers than HP is.  He hasn't yet covered him more in detail so I'm going to stop with this little introduction and wait for him to do it, because he'll do it better than me.

Mercurial Outfielder asked to see Gray's projections this morning and I always do what I'm told.  Initially I didn't think there would be many projections, but it turned out 5 of the systems had a projection for him.

That's only replacement level, but there is definitely reason to be optimistic.  Those home run numbers seem off to me.  He's given up more than his fair share at the MLB level, but the sample is very small.  He's a groundball pitcher who has kept the ball in the yard in the minors so I think we should expect to see fewer home runs than that.  Oddly enough, for a hard throwing righty, Gray doesn't get as many strikeouts as you'd think.  Larry Rothschild has coached a lot of strikeout pitchers in his day and it's one of the things he stresses to pitchers.  I'm optimistic that we'll see his K-rate increase a bit.

James and CAIRO's projections are for an AL team so that might be important here too, but I've made no adjustments for it.

We basically projected Gray to be the 7th reliever on the team and have him at 30 innings.  As I've said before, we will update these again.

We shouldn't expect much of a contribution from Gray, but that fastball and slider along with Rothschild might make him much better than he's projected.  There's certainly reason to think he will be.