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In our makeshift bullpen, we will very soon have these pitchers I would be happy to count on:
Aardsma
League
Wright
Pauley
And in June we may get Kelley back...which would help immensely. We need one or two more.
Jamey Wright's Sickening 1-2-3 Hold
JAMEY WRIGHT marched out of the bullpen in the 8th with a 5-4 lead in Fenway Park.
Facing? These guys:
- Adrian Gonzalez LH -- 152 OPS+ last year
- Kevin Youkilis RH -- 157 OPS+ last year
- David Ortiz LH -- 137 OPS+ last year
- Jed Lowrie RH -- 183 OPS+ this year
- This will occur in Fenway Park
The best reliever in baseball would have a rough ride with that. Big? This inning would mean the series, probably.
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Wright, coming off two terrific outings, glared in at The Great Adrian Gonzalez and cracked off a 15"/14" change curve Right. Down. the Heart. and was up, 0 balls 1 strike.
Wright threw five pitches to AGone: two "show" fastballs well off the zone, and three change curves inside the zone. One out. Tom Gordon, eat your heart out.
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Against Kevin Youkilis, tour through pitches 1-6 carefully and notice the way that Wright changed eye levels on him:
Imagine a circle* inscribed in the box, touching all four sides. Which of the pitches would have been inside the circle? And yet 4/6 of the pitches were strikes. That's how you avoid losing in Fenway Park.
Note also that in 6 pitches, Wright used each of his Mike Marshall pitches twice. Marshall used to actually roll dice to generate pitch sequences. In this AB, apparently Wright threw 1d6 six times and got 3,1,4,5,2,6.
By the time he broke off a 2-2 curve on the hands, Youk was well-and-truly hypnotized.
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(Here, by the way, is a saber article on Dr. D's beloved High FB / Overhand Curve sequence. Erik Bedard only does anything else because he has to. Jamey Wright is also using it for fun and profit.)
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Against Big Papi, who actually is an ex-Mariner Sully :- ) Wright threw a curve for called strike one and then a "same-plane" high fastball to induce a popup.
Gonzalez, Youkilis, Ortiz, Fenway Park, one run lead .... 1-2-3 three up three down. It's a shame that they give the save to League, isn't it?
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The question is merely whether Wright can continue to execute these pitches. There is no question as to whether these pitches, if executed like this, would make Wright an excellent reliever.
We know that Wright can continue to throw the snake-tongue screwball/cutter, and the change curve. The shapes of those pitches are natural for him.
As we discussed in the Snake Tongue article, there are only 8 or 10 pitchers in the majors who throw two 90 mph pitches, one breaking right and one breaking left, same vertical drop. Those guys are Roy Halladay and similar.
It seems clear at this point that Wright is also going to elect to use the Marshall Dice Roll. His fastball percentage is down from 61% last year to 44% this year. It is because he did not throw fastballs to the Sox stars that the Mariners won on Friday.
The only question left is Sandy's: whether Wright will keep throwing strikes. If he does, he's a key reliever on a good team.
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=== And You Thought ARod Cared About Stats, Dept. ===
Brandon League then faced the very bottom of the Sox' lineup and managed to get them out.
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Bill James once observed that the "Save" statistic was the one stat in baseball history which actually changed the way the game was played. He didn't mean it as a compliment.
One man and Truth make a majority, so James courageously fought against "the Save shibboleth," but when he got to Boston and they tried using their ace in the Big Situations (like Jamey Wright's Friday), James got media-lynched.
Of course Mariano Rivera should be used in situations like Wright's, not like League's.
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Right now it's not a winnable fight: you've got to represent a Relief Ace, and you've got to use him in low-leverage situations. The writers won't accept anything else. Often, the players won't, either.
The only way you can profit from The Save Shibboleth is when you have an underrated reliever who is pitching great. That's what you just saw.
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BABVA,
Dr D
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