Jump to content

vs. RED SOX, 4/19


OFFNY

Recommended Posts

  • Replies 803
  • Created
  • Last Reply
o

4 more shutout innings, and Gonzalez will have had a quality start.

7 out of 8 outs.

He's got this.

10 out of the last 13, now.

He's groovin'.

13 out of the last 17, now.

I'm not sure if Showalter will bring him back for another inning, so he may not get the quality start that I asserted that he would.

Good enough though, considering how horrible the 1st inning was for him. :o

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.


  • Posts

    • He is such an interesting case. Obviously the extraordinarily late “breakout” age, but you also just almost never see a true one-pitch pitcher in today’s game. Aside from the splitter, he has no ML-quality pitches. The 4-seam fastball is mediocre at best in velocity for a reliever (94.6 MPH), it’s on the straighter side, and it gets tagged to the tune of a .405 wOBA (with a .400 xWOBA to match). It’s a bottom-tier 4-seamer.  And then he throws a cutter 27% of the time. A cutter which is so bad that I can only imagine Palmer would have a coronary watching him continue to throw it. It is arguably the worst pitch in baseball this season, and over the course of his two ML seasons, hitters are posting a .486 wOBA against it. What’s most shocking is that StatCast suggests he’s been lucky to get that outcome, with a staggering .511 xWOBA on two seasons worth of cutters.    Ah, but then you have that splitter. The gift from God. And it really is, to be honest. This is a dude who would be working some every day job like the rest of us if he didn’t somehow master that splitter. But he did, and now he’s making bank playing a game. So far this season, 81 PAs ending on a splitter. Opponents have 4 hits against it (.056 BA). All those hits have been singles. 53 of those PAs ended with the hitter slinking back to the dugout (a cool 65.1% K rate), and it carries a 58.1% whiff rate. The average EV against the splitter this year is 76.7 MPH. The two-year wOBA on the splitter is .133, with a .137 xWOBA to match. Those are goofy numbers. Those are the numbers my 5-year-old nephew will put up against my best wiffleball arsenal this afternoon.    In sum, really interesting guy. Only having one effective pitch concerns me — on the days when the splitter is not splitting, he’s useless. The splitter has gotten more effective this year, not less, so that does assuage some of my concerns about the league eventually getting the book on him and spitting on the splitter in order to wait for a chance to pulverize the other junk he tosses. But is he a guy you can run out 4-5 times against the same elite hitters in a short span in October? It just seems like they’d have to get a solid feel for him after seeing a few times back to back. But if all it would cost is someone like Billy Cook, there’s really no harm done in finding out. 
    • Hopefully it extends Adleys longevity as well.  
    • Raylin Ramos returned to action today.
    • Fred Biletnikoff!  King of Stick.  Lol.  The refs hated him because every time he touched the ball it got the gook all over it and then the refs got it all over themselves.  Lol  And I agree that it should be allowed in a modest way in MLB. Just because you say it, doesn't make it so. What year was it before they started checking Pitchers after every half inning for sticky substances?  There was a year where it was pretty clear that pitchers were using something... tacki-goo?  I forget what year that was.  Were arm injuries up that year?  It might sway me a little if they were, but otherwise I don't think the the firmness of the grip is indicative of the spin.  The firmness of the grip is the control of the ball itself.  A harder grip would diminish spin.  Think of it as "english" in tennis.  The racquet glances the ball, but its the speed of the racquet that determines the spin.
    • We could be the Astros who have won 2 WS appeared in another. And been to what FIVE consecutive ALCS? With the extreme approach that we took to amass this kind of talent, I would rather set the bar high. We didn’t need to undergo the misery of extreme tanking just to have a team that could qualify for the playoffs each year. The Brewers and Guardians have that and they didn’t employ the extreme tank tactics. What we did forced MLB to change the rules to prevent it from being done again.
    • Agree.  It’s almost universal amongst all sports that size is valued when evaluating amateurs for projection.  
    • Burnes, Westburg, Ohearn, Grayson, Kimbrel, Santander. In that order.
  • Popular Contributors

×
×
  • Create New...