I got to see a bit of last night’s Pirates/Phillies game since it was free on MLB.tv, and so I got to see Ohlendorf’s final start of the spring. I’ve seen him pitch quite a bit; he threw in a game that was televised earlier on the MLB Network, I saw him in Fort Myers against the Twins, and I saw him last night. Last night he got into a jam in the first and then, as Frank Coonelly noted in the booth, reached back and found his fastball (the gun wasn’t being shown on the screen, unfortunately, but the broadcast team said he was hitting 94, which is where he needs to be with the fastball) and seemed to be settling down, except that Ryan Howard and Chase Utley then started sending the ball out of the park.
This is going to Ohlendorf’s biggest problem this season in a nutshell; he needs to throw harder to miss more bats, but when he does there seems to be a tendency for the ball to fly out of the park. I don’t much care about the home runs he gave up in the Grapefruit League given the extreme wind that can affect some games and I’m not necessarily hugely concerned about last night since it happened in Philly to two great left-handed pitchers, but I think it bears repeating that this is what’s worth watching.
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