Baseball Toaster was unplugged on February 4, 2009.
Show of hands, how many of you out there were excited to see Joba Chamberlain enter the game with two runners on and nobody out in the seventh inning? Joba struck Willy Aybar out on three pitches, including a fastball that hit 101 mph on the scoreboard radar gun. According to Sean Brennan in the Daily News:
Did Chamberlain think his triple-digit fastball got into Aybar's head?"I think a little bit," Chamberlain said. "But you can't rely on that because then you get too complacent and you leave one over (the plate) and it doesn't matter how hard you throw to these guys. They can come in 101 and it's going to leave at 140 and go about 500 feet."
...In all it took Chamberlain 16 pitches to nail down six outs, and the righthander seems to have grasped the notion that low pitch counts may be more effective than logging strikeouts.
"I'm probably a little smarter," Chamberlain said. "I'm still young and dumb sometimes but that works for me. I just try to attack the zone and be aggressive. I'm a little more experienced (though), not necessarily any smarter."
Leave the smarts to Joe G, son, everything else will fall into place.
i somehow wish the they could just thrown wang/joba/mo all 162. : )
Hey, do any of you find yourself subconsciously counting Joba's innings ??!! Unfortunately, I have.
(raises hand)
But please, Joba, throw some more sliders! And that curve for a strike... a thing of beauty- might be that Phil and Joba are exchanging notes!
OTOH - Posada said to Kim Jones after the game ended, that he kept calling for lots of breaking pitches from Wang to keep the Rays off-balance. Perhaps that's why he went fastball-heavy with Joba.
Oh, they've been playing Seattle, the only team in the perhaps worse than them. That makes sense.
4 he does seem to be using the slider more sparingly - will be interesting to see how his pitch selection goes for a while - he didn't seem to be shaking jorge off that much yesterday
rob neyer has two interesting links today-
http://tinyurl.com/2rqtcu
one is on the mlb blackout rules
http://tinyurl.com/5ocky2
and the other on phil's mechanics
http://tinyurl.com/46vesd
Girardi can't make them hit, but he has I believe put them in nearly the best opportunity to win in each game. That's all you can ask from a manager.
OK, back to baseball...
And, more likely he never threw as consistently hard as the legendary rumors suggested, so we are not really witnessing much if any drop in velocity. That he was hurt last year is indisputable, and is the most probable explanation for the dip in his velocity.
Pags' webpage is hysterical, though.
LOL, sound analysis with caps lock on for a word. Its true, Brian Cashman is not the pitching coach. However, you have to think Dave Eiland, you know, the guy that's been with Phil since he turned pro would notice a drop in velocity and, since he IS an expert on pitching take steps to fix it. But then what do I know, I'm just a lousy theoretical physicist ;).
However, according to Gameday, which ought to have velocity exactly right, yesterday his fastest pitch was 91 MPH. Often, his fastball came in at 89 MPH. He still held the Yanks to 2 runs in 5 innings.
Let's see where the velocity is in June.
12 i don't get the hand-wringing either.
but it seems to be a cottage industry now.
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