Friar Watch

Chris Young: Well he gave up 5 runs but I don’t think he pitched all that badly. Terrmel Sledge badly misplayed a bases loaded deep fly ball off the bat of Pujols. Only one run scored, same as if Sledge had caught the ball, but the failure to get the out was […]

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Chris Young: CY bounced back from a poor outing to have his best start of the year. In his last start Young looked very uncomfortable between pitches, he spent a lot of time stepping off the mound to regroup. Tonight he was in a groove early, working quickly and confidently. He had […]

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Chris Young: Another rough outing for Chris. He had a couple of effective innings but left too many balls up in the zone and had a lot of trouble controlling his slider. When he doesn’t have the slider I’d like to see him go with fastballs almost exclusively rather than continue trying to […]

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Chris Young: CY’s best outing so far. His slider was really breaking and he threw a lot of them along with his fastball. He was in the strike zone all night long, 72 out of 101 pitches were strikes leading to 7 Ks and 0 BBs.
Matt and Mud mentioned that Darren Ballsley noticed […]

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I noticed that Chris Young seems to have had more groundballs this year than we’re used to. In particular I remember Omar Vizquel somehow getting on top of some neck high fastballs. I just checked the stats at MLB.com and sure enough:

Year Ratio (GB/FB)
2004: 0.57 (28/53)
2005: 0.59 (126/223)
2006: 0.49 (115/253)
2007: 1.00 (16/16)

Small […]

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Chris Young: Young just didn’t have it tonight. He wasn’t able to locate his fastball and his curve isn’t developed enough to bail him out when that happens.
Here’s a chart of his fastballs tonight.
White Triangles = ball
Red Circles = foul
Yellow Circle = Hit in play
Red Triangle = Called Strike

A lot of high fastballs but […]

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Inspired by this article at Baseball Analysts I’ve started digging through the XML data in the MLB.com Gameday archives. What you’re looking at here is a graph of the release points of the three Padre pitchers last night, Chris Young, Cla Meredith and Trevor Hoffman:
A few surprises here, at least to me. Despite […]

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Chris Young: Young looked even sharper than in his debut. He truly has no-hit potential every time he takes the mound. He looks like he’s growing more confident in his curve (he threw some real nasty ones) but his command of that pitch is still inconsistent. 7 very strong innings for the Princeton […]

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Chris Young: One of the most interesting pitchers in the big leagues, Chris Young is a power pitcher who is lucky to break 90mph on his fastball yet routinely blows guys away with the high heat. He uses his height to maximum advantage with a big leg kick and raises his glove hand almost […]

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