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IF YOU JUST JOINED US
Hisashi Iwakuma detonated the Angels on Sunday afternoon.
It went far beyond a simple six inning shutout, three hits, eight whiffs. In 90 pitches, the Angels swung and failed to make ANY contact 17 different times. Remember, the baseball is coming through an area about the size of your computer monitor. And MLB cleanup hitters say, "if the catcher can catch it, I can hit it."
Not Hisashi Iwakuma, they can't. They whaled and whaled and whaled away, and the airfan off their bats was keeping WBC-san's brow dust-dry. About the fifth inning, Iwakuma tossed in a 71 mph change curve, freezing some feeb or other. Blowers laughed. "I think he throws those just because he's bored." Dude! Great line!
For one game, WBC-san did look bored. … with major league competition. We said, he looked bored. Seriously.
I knew a guy whose first job at Boeing was Level I Factory Assistant, or some such. He hadn't X-Acto knife, a box full of blades, and a barrel full of brackets that needed the paint scraped off. He had a table, a chair, and a huge clock on the wall right in front of him. No iPods allowed, either.
Sometimes you really need one. An iPod, as in.
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JUST THE FA'AX, MA'AM
Stat of the Day:
| PITCHER | Swinging Strike % |
| Iwakuma, 4.28.13 |
18.8 |
| Iwakuma FASTBALL, 4.28.13 | 25.0 |
| Cole Hamels, 2012 |
12.9 (MLB best) |
| Felix, 2012 | 10.6 |
| R. A. Dickey, 2012 | 12.2 (KNUCKLEBALL) |
| Yu Darvish, 2012 | 11.8 |
| Clayton Kershaw, last 3 years | 11.0 |
| Stephen Strasburg, last year |
11.2 |
| Aroldis Chapman, career | 16.0 (In Relief) |
For this year, Iwakuma-san's swing-and-miss percentage is #7 in baseball. That's not a lot different from saying that he has pretty much the best stuff in baseball. Except for Yu Darvish, who shares certain obscure similarities with Iwakuma. Darvish's SwStr% is an otherworldly 17.3% right now ... higher than Aroldis Chapman's has ever been. In relief.
But. Don't miss the takeaway here. In terms of blowing away hitters, Iwakuma is pulling away from the Clayton Kershaw, R. A. Dickey and Chris Sale pack.
And blowing away hitters is not what Hisashi Iwakuma does best. Those other pitchers do not walk 1.19 batters per game.
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TAKE OUT A NUMBER TWO PENCIL
WBC-san is getting better swing-and-miss outcomes on his fastball than Justin Verlander, Clayton Kershaw, Felix Hernandez or Stephen Strasburg. It has nothing to do with anything probabalistic. It has zero to do with anything sabermetric, so don't bother looking for F/X muons to help out on this one. It has to do with the batter-pitcher matchups.
The Angels, on Sunday, were behind his fastball on many, many occasions. Let's say you had a CGI tape of the game, with the baseball edited out of the image. If you just saw Iwakuma's arm and the batters' swings, you would have thought the pitches were 102 MPH. We're totally serious. That's what the swings looked like. If you didn't have the baseball to watch, you would imagine Iwakuma's fastball to have more velocity than Aroldis Chapman's.
Can you explain that?
How does Mike Trout swing behind two straight letter-high 90 MPH fastballs, to fan in the FIRST inning ...
And then the very next hitter, Albert blinkin' Pujols, here comes another 91 MPH fastball right down the pipe and he swings way behind it?!
to serve.
Any takers? How does Hisashi Iwakuma, with rather modest "stuff" objectively speaking, throw 17 of 90 pitches by a lineup that --- > cost Arte Moreno the gross national product of Idaho?
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And all of this with a blister problem. Geoff says they have to lance it during the game and they know, right then, that they've got one more inning before he's done. Here is hoping that the extra off days they plan to give him get that finger healed up.
1.
Harvey, M
NYM
0.69
2.
Iwakuma, H
SEA
0.69
3.
Darvish, Y
TEX
0.80
4.
Villanueva, C
CHC
0.82
5.
Zimmermann, J
WSH
0.86
This is ill in the X-Games sense; Kuma is cleaning house on the stat that Cliff Lee made famous, the WHIP. If Harvey and Kuma have the same WHIP, why does the tiebreaker go to Harvey? Smell that? The putrid stench before your nose is the sickly sweet smell of East Coast Bias.
But the light pitch counts have done wonders for the zip on his fastball.
Used to be, some pitchers, they'd just skip a turn every once in a while. There was this thing called a "spot starter."
That WHIP is just crazy. One runner every other inning,* that's not to the offense's advantage.
Yep. At this rate, I hope that blister sticks around all season. Seems not to be adversly effecting Kuma's game and provides Wedge with an excuse to remove a pitcher before they tire and blow their start. Perhaps the other SPs should develope an ingrown nail or something ;-)