Troy has already covered the statistical side of things, so I'm going to look at what we see from the PFX sides of things. Each of the groups of graphs will have one pre and one post DL chart showing each of the components that I'm looking at.
To start off let's look at the end speeds of his pitches.
I don't see anything telling here other than a slight overlap in the speeds of his off-speed/breaking pitches. This could be an issue if the movement of his pitches aren't that great, because then everything becomes batting practice. We'll talk about that later. Since there doesn't appear to be much else let's look at the next component, which is release point.
I remember hearing multiple stories around here that after his DL stint was up and he was sent down to AAA it wasn't for any reason other than to work on his arm slot and get a consistent arm slot. This difference clearly shows up on these two graphs. Pre-DL and AAA he was consistently releasing the ball on the horizontal axis between 0.5 and 1.5, now post DL it's between 1 and 1.75 roughly. Vertically he's also changed. Pre-DL there was basically nothing released under 6 foot while post DL his fastball is consistently at or under 6 foot. I need to note here that this may be more of a conscious effort to really throw low in the zone, but at the same time it's concerning in that he changed something and now he's not as effective anymore.
To make the above graph look a little clearer, I plotted the vertical release point across innings to see if he was beginning to tire earlier in the game.
Now as I noted before the curveball will appear to be released higher on every chart because this is measured at 50 feet from the plate and not the true release point. With that being said, studying the graph shows that pre-DL he was clearly releasing the ball higher, averaging about 3 inches higher on the fastball. So again, while this may be a slight difference in planning, it's also likely that he's dropping down a little more.
These two are the movement of the pitches. It a little hard to tell but his pitches after the DL are not moving as much as the ones before the DL. These next two graphs show the vertical movement on each type type of pitch during those dates.
Here I see major differences on all of his pitches. Pre DL his fastball was consistently above 10, now it's around 10. His curve was mostly around -10 while now it's more towards -5. His change and slider were more between 5 and 10 pre DL than after. This to me is one of, if not the biggest reason for his lack of success recently. Instead of a vertical range of 22 inches of break, the hitter only has to worry about 15, or roughly 2 diameters of the baseball less.
Finally these last 4 charts are here to reinforce what Troy mentioned about his losing control of his pitches.
and
With all these charts you can see that most recently, he has really started to trend towards throwing more balls and less foul balls. On the top two charts, he's throwing more balls that hit into play and more balls overall.
Summary: I don't necessarily think something is wrong physically with him. His end speed is still excellent and there has been no problems mentioned physically about him since the DL. (unlike Beckett who you can read about here, shameless plug I know) I think that he has lost his feel for the pitches once they made him focus on changing his arm angle as a method to help protect him. This is why I strongly believe that once a player reaches this level, his body and arm basically only knows how to pitch one way and it can only be changed over a long period of time, usually at least an off-season. I really feel that all of his issues are a result of the changing of the arm angles and possibly not trusting his stuff right now. Again, I do not think there is anything wrong with him physically though.
0 comments:
Post a Comment