On August 2, had a chance to see what was perhaps Michael Pineda's last (real) start of the 2010 season. We're at the end of an 80-hour workweek, so apologies if the prose is more worthless than usual.
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=== Work In Progress ===
After an inning or two, we asked Cindy what her impression was of Pineda's attitude on the mound. "Carefree," she said. (Cindy can answer any question in the world with a single word -- and usually does. Eat your hearts out, gentlemen.)
Like the AAA Felix was carefree?
"Felix was careLESS. Pineda is carefree."
Oh.
Pineda, by the way, steps on the chalklines walking to and from the mound. Between pitches, he sometimes looks into the crowd. Taking the sign, his shoulders are as relaxed as if he were sitting in a cinema watching a movie. He gets the sign and, without visualizing the pitch beforehand, he hucks it at the glove.
He just flat enjoys pitching, and it doesn't change much if people get on base or score runs. It's quite remarkable, the lack of stress. Just a big ol' country guy playing ball.
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=== AT&T Telegraph Dept. ===
About ten pitches in, we picked up his first disgusting tell. When Pineda throws a fastball, he YANKS his shoulders around with his head. The head motion is sideways, explosive, and violent.
Then on any offspeed pitch, the head stays smoothly on centerline.
Um, ok. By the way, the young Felix did very similar things with his head, YANKING his shoulders into the pitch with a violent leading head. Note that his velocity did not drop when he abandoned the practice.
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Pineda also cocks his arm behind his body higher, and farther, for a fastball, visibly so. Cindy imitated the movement for me with an up-and-down shrug in her seat.
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As Taro aptly put it, his entire delivery slows down on any offspeed pitch, and we're not talking "a little bit" here. Cindy in the 3rd inning, watching his motion and not the ball, called several pitches in a row correctly (against the MPH readings on the scoreboard that I watched.
We're not talking about subtle tells here. If my wife can call the pitches from the stands while not particularly caring whether she gets it right, what are the hitters doing?
And as we mentioned last week: I watched all 86 pitches and did not, a single time, see a Reno batter swing in front of a change, or behind a fastball. Not 1 pitch. 0 pitches were they in-between.
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=== Good News Bad News Dept. ===
Pineda's tells are (1) distant cousins to Felix' mechanical weirdnesses when he was 18, and (2) routine fixes for the coaches. We mean "routine" in the dictionary sense of the term.
Pineda will get this fixed, and when he does, what then? He has fanned 61 AAA batters in 51 innings, when they knew what was coming. What happens when they don't?
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=== More Comedy Jokes ===
With any runner on base, Pineda sets his lead foot way over to 3B, sits back awkwardly on his rear buttock with bent knee, and his head is tilted wayyyyyyyyy over to 3B. This all pre-delivery.
He then does manage to step down the centerline, but gets a "coming around the corner effect" that, in one case, produced a swooooooop on the slider that the catcher had to almost dive for. A legit Jeff Nelson pitch.
One of those drop-down pitches got hit for a home run, though. Gotta get the stretch delivery together, dude. Greg Maddux took all his bullpens from the stretch "because in a game, all your most important pitches are from the stretch."
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