Jameson Taillon struggling to execute with two strikes

As good as he is and as good as he can become, we often forget that Jameson Taillon has a mere 49 major league stars under his belt.

With each start, even though he can make it look easy at time, Taillon hopefully learns from his mistakes.

One of the things plaguing Taillon this season is the inability to put hitters away with two strikes.

It’s become a problem and it just goes to show how tough it is to pitch in the major leagues, especially for a young guy.

Taillon simply is not executing his pitches with two strikes and it has burned him on multiple occasions.

Team Wide Problem?

The Pirates aren’t among the best teams in the league in terms of getting outs with two strikes, but honestly a lot of that is on Taillon, which I will get to in a bit.

Here’s how the Pirates have performed this season when they have two strikes on a barter.

The first column is the overall stats with two strikes and then I break them down by count.

As you can see it’s not great across the board except when Pirates pitchers have the opposition in an 0-2 count they have the lowest batting average against in the National League.

Taillon’s Struggles

This is where Taillon has struggled this season.

Here is how the league has hit Taillon with two strikes this season.

In most cases the numbers aren’t pretty.

To compare him against other Pirates starters, Ivan Nova has given up the next highest batting average with two strikes at .232.

The league has hit .207 against Chad Kuhl with two strikes, .133 vs. Trevor Williams and surprisingly just .083 against Steven Brault in two strike situations.

How does Taillon fix things?

It’s really just a case of baring down and executing better late in counts.

We started to see a little more of that last night against Washington as Taillon went to two strikes on 16 different batters in the game, retiring 12 of them.

Of course two of the two-strike hits brought in runs, but overall it was a better outing for Taillon.

You can really break down his season to date into two different three-game stretches.

Here’s a look at how Taillon performed in two-strike situations during his three-game stretch to open the season.

Now here’s a look at Taillon’s last three starts in the same situation.

Clearly the biggest difference is the fact that Taillon has getting pounded with the sinker as of late.

That’s just a matter of locating and executing the pitch better, which should be correctable.

It’s also a matter of turning to different pitches in those situations.

It looks like Taillon’s changeup was hit pretty good the past three starts, but he only threw four of them against the Phillies and six against the Tigers. He threw 15 of them Monday night against the Nats.

Taillon is simply too talented of a pitcher to be getting pounded around, especially with two strikes.

A little adjustment here and there and we should see Taillon get back to the way he looked his first three starts.

Monday night was a step in the right direction.