Trevor Bauer is coming off, what could be argued, the worst start of his young professional career this past Monday against Detroit, as he allowed seven runs on nine hits over just three innings. He struck out three but walked four against a division rival the Indians need to start beating on a consistent basis.
In that game this past Monday, he faced 22 batters and threw 86 pitches over 3 innings of work in what was the shortest outing of the season for Bauer. A closer look at Bauer’s evening reveals an interesting pitch selection and location:
(chart courtesy of Brooks Baseball)
A quick glance reveals that either the Indians or Bauer’s game plan against the Tigers was to keep the ball low in the zone and force the prolific offense to hit the ball on the ground in hopes that the new left-side of the Indians infield would make plays behind the young hurler. In this regard, Bauer executed the plan perfectly as all 86 pitches were down in the zone.
Obviously, command was not an issue for Bauer in this game as he did not leave a single pitch up in the zone. Of all the pitches Bauer throws, he only used four of them in this game: four-seamer(52 times), slider (18), curve (12) and splitter (4).
Give credit where it is due, the Tigers did a great job of getting wood on the pitch and getting enough of the pitch to hit it hard. Of the 9 base-hits Detroit had on the evening, 5 of them were hard hit ground balls.
That is a mark of a good offense, the ability to beat up the opposition when the opposition executes on it’s game plan.
As mentioned earlier, Bauer only threw 86 pitches and Pitch f/x recorded that he threw only four of his 17 (exaggerated) pitches. What’s interesting is that he included his slider in that repertoire.
His slider has been steadily declining in movement since last season. According to Brooks Baseball, While his slider velocity has increased from 82.43 mph in ’14 to 85.83 mph on 6.22.15, it flattened out tremendously. The horizontal movement went from 6.02in in ’14 to 3.18in last Monday and the vertical movement -0.05in to 2.68in.
In other words, his slider became an 85mph batting practice pitch on Monday.
This is an overall trend as his slider is becoming very hittable. So far this season, the horizontal and vertical movement has been 3.56 and 1.77 respectively.
While his other breaking balls have remained consistent, his slider obviously has not.
Until he can work on getting sharper break with it, I would recommend scratching it until he can once again fool hitters and get them to chase it with 2 strikes.
If he does not, we’ll see a lot more games like we saw against Detroit.
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