The main story out of this one is of course going to be Charlie Morton’s great outing and it well should be. He went six innings and held the Cubs to just five hits and two runs with four of those hits and both runs coming in a rocky fourth inning. He struck out three, walked zero, and got 10 groundouts and just five flyouts. The exact kind of start that we all knew he was capable of and a second straight big stride forward for him.
The question I had going in, though, was whether or not he was tipping his fastballs out of the stretch. I was having trouble distinguishing the glove movement Matt mentioned prior to the game on MLB.tv, but what I thought was obvious was that his fastball didn’t fool anyone in the fourth inning once Derrek Lee’s single put a runner on base. In the approximately five innings that he threw with the bases empty, his fastball got seven called strikes, one swinging strike, four foul balls, and just five were put into play. In that fourth inning? Four balls were put in play, four balls were fouled off, and the only other strikes were two called strikes against Aramis Ramirez who was ahead in the count and clearly looking for a pitch to crush, which neither called strike was.
*These numbers are not perfect because I cribbed them from GameDay on a notecard while I was watching the game, but they do reflect what I saw when I was watching, which was that hitters were fouling the fastball off when they couldn’t put it in play in the fourth and that that was the only inning I saw something like that happen.
Conclusive evidence of tipping? Certainly not. The singles weren’t hit that hard and he did get out of the inning without much of an incident. Still, there’s something going on there. Whatever it is, though, was greatly diminished tonight and the guy the Pirates traded Nate McLouth for was on full display. He threw a hard, dropping fastball between 93 and 95 all night to get ground balls and he used his curve like a hammer to finish hitters off. He really was a pleasure to watch. Hopefully he can put those ugly early season blowouts behind him like the rest of the team and nights like tonight become less of an exception when he’s on the mound.
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