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.
April 6, 2008 at 10:15 am
Actually, Clay’s changeup movement *is* the classic straight change; the change that rides in 8″-12″ (3″-4″ more than the 4-seamer) is that brash newcomer the circle change, which has become far more common. Clay has said that he’s working on a circle change, which would be different enough from his straight change that it would be well worth adding to the repertoire if he could learn to command it as well (a tough order, figuring that he threw 22 of 27 changes for strikes, getting as many swings and misses as balls in play, 8 each).