Friar Watch

Jake Peavy: Jake didn’t have his best stuff tonight, it seemed like he had trouble locating his slider and it didn’t have the usual bite. He had trouble with his slider in his last start as well, I mentioned in the Game Notes that I suspect arm problems and tonight did nothing to dispel that. Jake still pitched well but there was some talk that Kuo was getting all the calls while Jake wasn’t. Let’s look at the charts:

Jake Peavy
Green = ball
Red = called strike

That’s pretty ugly but it’s not actually as bad as I thought it would be. You can see where Jake was trying to hit that outside edge to lefties and just not getting it. On the right hand side there’s a few borderline pitches that were called balls but nothing egregious. Mostly what I see is inconsistency from the umpire.

Hong-Chih Kuo

Not surprisingly we see that Kuo’s pitches aren’t as tightly bunched. We also see the same inconsistency on the left side of the zone. Note: For some reason Gameday didn’t register all of Kuo’s pitches. We’re missing 8 balls and 4 strikes. Based on what we see here I’d say both pitchers were affected equally but Kuo was a little more effective in hitting the edge of the zone.

Back to Peavy. Take a look at his velocity vs. movement chart.
Red = Tonight
Blue = 5/27, the last time Jake looked right

Vertical axis is MPH, horizontal axis is what Gameday calls “break length”*:

The velocity is about the same but the movement is way down on all pitches. Again, I’m worried about Jake’s elbow. That slider he throws has to put a lot of torque on the elbow and it could be taking it’s toll.

* Defined as the measurement of the greatest distance between the trajectory of the pitch at any point between the release point and the front of home plate, and the straight line path from the release point and the front of home plate. - Gameday Blog