George Klassen’s big league debut was a bleak one. He allowed seven runs in just 4 2/3 innings in early April, combined with a fingernail impingement, which sent him back to Triple-A Salt Lake for more seasoning. That doesn’t mean his future isn’t promising. The 24-year-old right-hander is ranked No. 2 on our Los Angeles Angels Top Prospects list, and No. 57 on our Top 100. In addition, he was described by Brendan Gawlowski as having “some of the best things [Angels] system.”
Not being able to continue to get his good stuff in the strike zone right now is Klassen’s bugaboo. He issued free passes to 10 of 32 batters he faced in two starts in the big games — one against the Reds, one against the Mariners — and while big-league jitters were a factor, George Kirby was not. As Gawlowski wrote in his scouting report, “Klassen’s command is consistently below average… [and] there are signs in his speech that suggest that his sense of place will probably remain impure.”
A few years ago, Klassen was Mitch Williams-wild. As Eric Longenhagen said in November 2024, the West Bend, Wisconsin native walked nearly every inning during his 2023 draft year at the University of Minnesota. But as our lead analyst also noted, “his feel for the strike zone immediately improved in pro ball.” That was in the Phillies’ plan. The Angels later acquired a sixth-round pick from Philadelphia in the July 2024 deal for Carlos Estévez.
His arsenal is five deep, and that was the first thing I asked him about when we spoke at Tempe Diablo Stadium during spring training. In a January test report, Gawlowski stated that “the cutter looks like a solid slide and the slide looks like a sharp power curve.”
How does Klassen differentiate his pitches?
A hard-throwing righty told me he throws a “four-seamer, a four-seamer with a sinker, a slider, a curveball, and a changeup,” and I replied, “No cutter?”
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“It’s not a cutter,” he replied. “It’s a gyro. I tried the whole slider thing in college, but I was jerking it or it would be two seams. So I made a spiked catch, threw it like a fastball, and got that gyro shape.
“The hardest thing is what I call a slider – a gyro, a cutter, whatever you want to call it – it’s north and south,” he explained after being told about Gawlowski’s take. “And then the curveball, which I think is like a slider, more like an 11-5. Maybe a slurve, but a big shape. What he said makes sense.”
A Statcast breakdown of the 145 pitches Klassen has thrown so far in the majors has 56 four-seamers, 36 changeups, 21 sliders, 16 curveballs, and 16 sinkers.
The last one in that pitch is what Klassen calls the “sink four-seamer.”
“When I was here [at the Angels’ complex] in October, we worked on a simple quarter turn with my four-seam,” explained Klassen, whose warmups averaged 97 mph and reached triple digits. I actually did it by accident sometimes, but now I can do it on purpose.
How can it be by accident?
Sometimes you can over-pitch,” Klassen said. “One of my Minnesota teammates, Brett Bateman, is playing for the Cubs now. He said their scouting reports were the arm-side run, the arm-side sinker, and that day I was just throwing fly balls. I said, ‘I don’t know.’ Then, the next time we faced them, it had sunk. We saw that through teaching, and now I can use it to my advantage.”
Change is also new.
“We worked on it a ton last year, and I got comfortable with it the last five weeks of the season,” said Klassen, who was playing a fastball when he turned pro (he had just started playing with a gyro slider). “It’s like a baby split. I tried to change the circle and the die caught it, but having the pressure between these two fingers when I throw it works better for me. I don’t throw it as a split. I throw it as a changeup, but just a baby split.”
And again, constantly putting his good stuff in the strike zone has been a problem. Not surprisingly, Klassen quoted the command when I asked if he had any final thoughts about his continued growth.
“For me, being in the bullpen is the biggest thing,” said Klassen, who struck out five batters and didn’t go more than 4 2/3 innings in one Triple-A start. “Sometimes I don’t come out with it, but I can be lazy in my delivery and come out. That’s a big thing we worked on in the fall, landing on my back leg. We also went over to the third side of the rubber. The back stability makes everything come in time, and the third side of the base helps my fastball play better, because it goes from this little ball; the outside corner [against right-handed hitters]but that’s something I have to work on. As a striker, there are always things to work on.”
