Good First Outing for Clay Buchholz (pitch f/x)
Posted by redsoxstats on April 5, 2008
5 IP, 6 H, 2 BB, 7 K, 0 HR
Mixing up his fastball, curve, change-up and slider, Clay Buchholz got off to a good start in 2008 even though the defense (Sean Casey at 1b, Manny Ramirez in LF) failed him.
Clay’s fastball was sitting 93-95, curve 75-77, change-up 76-80, and slider 82-85. All with good control as he threw 64% strikes.
Also encouraging was the way he was mixing up his pitches, something that we need to watch with Jason Varitek. Buchholz, like Daisuke Matsuzaka, should really be “pitching backwards” by setting up their fastballs with off-speed stuff.
One fun thing to look at with Buchholz is the movement of his devastating change-up. It falls into the aqua circle, which usually indicates a cutter, because it doesn’t have the classic tailing movement, it just drops straight off the table.
Please excuse my photoshop-shrunken graphs; I need to resize them in Excel to eventually fit in the blog posts.
Posted in Pitch f/x, starters | Tagged: baseball, clay buchholz, daisuke matsuzaka, jason varitek, manny ramirez, red sox, sean casey | 1 Comment »
