Today at Cleveland, Glen Perkins converted to his old ways. This is a graph of pitch number vs pitch speed from his appearance today, from Brooks Baseball:
As you can see, there was a series of 21 pitches all within 4 mph of each other with the exception of two pitches (red circle). This is not good and it coincided with his 3-run third inning (red bar below.) Perkins just cannot do that if he wants to be effective. He cannot throw 19 out of 21 fastballs in a row and survive in the bigs. I think that his problem is clear, he should know it, Anderson should know it, the catchers should not it and he just got to stop doing it. Otherwise, I am afraid, that he will be the Perkins of old, who is not that good...
5 comments:
Thrylos,
Any chance part of the problem was lack of control?
From what I could tell, Perkins was having trouble locating pitches.
Disappointing outing by Perkins, but, overall, sweeping any team at their home ballpark is tough to do.
For now, I'm going to put it off as "one of those days."
-Blake
Blake,
that's exactly what was happening last season. Perkins could not find the plate with his off-speed stuff and started throwing straight FB. The point is that even if his off-speed stuff is not there, he still should mix and match, and try to adjust to make it work. Otherwise, bad things will happen.
Thrylos,
I see. It's the old "winner mentality" in that winners find a way to win, even when they're struggling.
Btw, looks like Kubel is headed for a breakout season.
And Crede's bat is coming around.
Shaping up to be an interesting year.
-Blkae
Excellent follow-up to your earlier post regarding Perkins' pitches. Very few pitchers in this league can 'blow away' the batters with excellent stuff. Mixing things up is the only way to be successful for most. Hope he can get back to that.
As Blake says, Crede is looking better. And is this the Kubel we had hoped to see when he was a kid? An interesting year, indeed.
Yes, interesting year. I think that the Central is weaker than the last 3 seasons, as well...
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