Pittsburgh Pirates SP Jeff Locke was outstanding in his complete game victory over the Miami Marlins. Can he find repeatability?
While nearly all of Pittsburgh was likely watching the Penguins win Game One of the Stanley Cup finals, Pittsburgh Pirates fans were being treated to the finest start of Jeff Locke‘s career.
Locke’s complete game shutout was the first of his career, and was also the first for the Pittsburgh Pirates since Vance Worley in 2014.
Long thought to be a pitcher whose chief struggle is consistency, many fans are now asking themselves if Locke can use the gem as a springboard to find a means to become the reliable back-end starting pitcher that he showed he could be back in 2013.
Put simply, can Jeff Locke find repeatability?
Sometimes, It Just Works
When looking at the pitch f/x data from yesterday, there is no magic bullet that can explain why Locke was so dominant. Contrasting against Locke’s previous outing – a win against the Diamondbacks on May 25th – also does not provide answers. That start was seen by many as the “typical” Locke start. Though he lasted 6.1 innings, the left-hander gave up four runs on seven hits, including two home runs.
The data from that start shows that Locke relied on his sinking fastball, accounting for 43 of his 86 pitches. 51.2 percent of those pitches were strikes, and only one pitch induced a swing-and miss. Hitters put the sinker in play a total of 10 times.
In yesterday’s start, Locke used the sinker for 40 of his 103 recorded pitches, again getting a minimal amount of swings misses (2) and similar ball in play numbers (12 total balls in play).
One key difference is that the velocity on the pitch saw a slight uptick – 92.6, up from 91.6 in the previous start – as well as better break both horizontally and vertically. Does that really matter, if the results were similar?
To be sure, the Miami Marlins are not an offensive powerhouse. Their best hitter – Giancarlo Stanton – was out, and with him they average 3.96 runs per game, landing them in the bottom-third of the 15 team National League. Still, you play who you play, and Locke was magnificent last night. There simply was nothing about his performance, mechanically speaking, that points to a new trend emerging.
The Human Element
One of the reasons for baseball’s staying power is its vast amount of data that make it easy to quantify anything and everything.
Almost everything.
Though we can’t find a particular aspect of Locke’s start last night to project an improved level of performance, we can still point to perhaps the one aspect that will likely never be fully quantifiable: the human element.
Professional athletes are people, too. As much as they try to avoid negativity by not allowing public opinion to affect how they do their job, it can’t help but creep in. Locke’s post-game comments were very telling.
https://twitter.com/fugimaster24/status/737665828112498688
Locke clearly understands how he is perceived by Pittsburgh Pirates fans and observers alike. Last night’s start could have been a case of facing a mediocre team without its best hitter. It could have been a case of Locke hitting the pitcher’s mound while highly motivated to show the promise that has kept him in a Pittsburgh Pirates uniform despite some truly rocky patches. With the next batch of starting pitchers breathing down his neck, the human element to Locke’s game may be taking center stage.
If he can channel it into performances that come close to last night’s, Locke can be a mainstay in this rotation.
Featured Image Credit – Daniel Decker Photograhy
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