Mike Moustakas
hitting #3 in the first inning

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The #3 hitter in the game, the Royals' only good hitter, Mike Moustakas.  The pitch sequence is above.  Marco does get behind 3-1 but then what does he throw?  That's a 92 MPH jam, perfectly on the black, half the baseball in off the plate and half over it.

That's a bad pitch?!

Are you going to tell Marco, "Never throw 92 MPH on the inside black."

Moustakas crushed it into the power alley, pulled the jam pitch?! for a double.  What is going on here?

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The #4 hitter in the inning was a strikeout, K.

The #5 hitter in the inning was Marco's one bad pitch, a changeup waist high.  It was a line drive right back up the middle, BP style, for a single.

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NEXT

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Comments

1
tjm's picture

I'm not convinced Marco has the control you ascribe to him. In both starts he has been unable to get ahead, unable to throw his fastball for strikes, then gets unlucky. Actually, same thing happened to Felix; if you can't command a medicore fastball you're going to pay the price. This is Pitching 101.

What's the Branch Rickey line? Luck is the residue of design. Marco is s putting himself in situations to get unlucky.

2

... in the first game he threw 64 strikes and 28 balls, so what are you talking about, both starts?

... in this game the six hits described were off a 1-1 count, a 1-1 count, an 0-0 count, a 2-1 count, and two hitters' counts.  And he threw good pitches in those counts.  Mike Leake gives up his hits in better counts?

Gonzalez' CTL ratio is 36:12 in 45 IP.  That's despite needing to be fine with his command, needing to aim at the corners unlike Paxton.  With his mediocre stuff, where would he be if he didn't have command?

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The game was pretty cold, everybody in their terrorists' masks, and hair-fine control is tough with a cold baseball.  But yes, will cheerfully admit Gonzales has a lot to prove.  It will be a while before there is consensus about his command, and that's fine.  At SSI, readers are interested in tomorrow's news today ;- )  ;- )

What we're doing with this series, is demonstrating that he wasn't out there hanging waist-high curve balls that didn't break.  That's a rather important point, I think.

3

Everybody else, he struck out.

:- )   ... well, there were the two lineouts in the 2nd, where there were no runs.

But I'll leave the crowd to judge whether these 6 pitch sequences, as the *worst* of the game, are worse than some other pitcher's.  If they browse GameDay very often after games, I doubt the readers will have much trouble judging these as very decent sequences, considering they're the bottom half of his AB's.

4
tjm's picture

I also thought he was being squeezed. Somehow, though, when you throw 64 pitches in 2 1/3 innings it's hard to credit him with pin point control! I like him long term, just not yesterday.

5

As evidenced by his ball-strike count.

As you know, if a pitcher gets 20 Quality Starts out of 32, he's among the league leaders.  Ron Shandler tracks DISaster starts, KO'ed before the 5th (or horrible slash line in a lucky start), and the average is about 25%.

James Paxton's first start this year was a DIS, with 4+ innings and 6 runs with 4 BB and 2 taters.  He and Marc-O are both 1-for-2 in that stat.  And Felix.  SP's get knocked out early a lot.

6

Pitchers with homer problems are almost universally guys who throw plenty of strikes but are wild in the zone.

See: Marco Gonzalez, 2017.

Whether he's fixed that...I'm uncertain.

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