In case all one of you who read this thing haven't quite noticed, both myself and my North Side counterpart have been conspicuously absent from contributing to the site, despite the fact that a new season has taken off in full swing. This is not without cause; the plain and apparent truth is that, at this point, my team sucks.
I have pangs of guilt saying it, but at times I honestly question whether being a truly devoted fan to one team is honestly worth it. Unless that team is the Yankees, or in some years as of late the Red Sox, being a true baseball fan is for the most part a difficult and painful thing.
Take today, for example. I actually got in the car after playing in my own game (1-2 with a RIP of an RBI single over the shortstop's head, 1 walk, 1.000 in the field) and was feeling pretty good about life when I happened to turn on the radio. The Sox were on against the Blue Jays, and it was the bottom of the 8th, and insurance runs were being tallied for my team. Life was good... the sun was out...
Within fifteen minutes, that fat piece of crap Bobby Jenks had given up 4 runs total off of 4 hits, and recorded approximately 0 outs. And then Ozzie brings Scott Linebrink into the game- the pitcher in the bullpen who we are supposed to turn to in "give up the booty" scenarios when we're losing 12-1. That was quite enough for me. I turned off the radio... now that's closing.
We should have traded Jenks at least a year ago, and I fear that by now every Major League scout knows exactly what any Sox fan with a logical or slightly analytical mind has known for a while now; Bobby Jenks has lost it. Unfortunately, he was never peddled off onto any other franchise while he had decent value, so we're stuck holding the bag on this one.
Analysis time! Here's why Bobby Jenks is sucking shit/huffing dong/yanking wang/et al: (Follow my theory, and what I'm using as my evidence, here.)
Jenks' average fastball velocity is at the lowest point it has ever been- roughly 94.1 mph. That is fast as hell, yes, and even faster than average for a MLB pitcher (average being roughly 88-91 mph)... but when you stop and consider that when Jenks first came up, he was clocked at 102 mph, this is a worrisome statistic. To any normal human being, standing in on a 94.1 mph is something incomprehensible; you would just hear the seams cutting the air as it whizzed by you before you could react. It would probably knock a bat right out of your hands. Major League hitters, however, are not normal human beings- and a 94 mph fastball is slightly more demanding than routine to them. Furthermore, if it's not a particularly slick pitch and isn't darting all over the place with good movement, they're going to knock the shit out of the ball, plain and simple. This is Jenks' predicament; he's not blowing it by anyone anymore, and he's not fooling anyone with movement. He couldn't even strike out the cast of fucking Cocoon: The Return. And I don't care if they're mostly dead; my statement stands.
Yet Brimley lives on. Say it with me, phonetically: "dia-BEE-dez." Hey, speaking of Cocoon: The Return, do you know what debuted just about six months after it came out? That's right. Omar Vizquel.
I'll let you have a moment to absorb that fact. Watch the video again. See how old and shitty it looks? Does this remind you a little bit of watching Omar Vizquel play baseball in the year 2010? Yeah... me too.
Old men aside, what I noticed in Jenks' PitchFX numbers is that he is relying more heavily than ever on his straight change, by an amazingly large margin. From 2007-2009, Bobby Jenks threw roughly 28 changeups out of 2,168 pitches which he threw. This breaks down to somewhere around 1.3% of his pitches. So far, this year, Jenks has thrown the change 9.3% of the time. Why?
The changeup is a wonderful thing, a great pitch, especially to compliment the fastball. Ideally, a changeup should be roughly 10 mph slower than the speed at which a pitcher hurls a fastball. In Jenks' case, his change comes in at 9.7 mph slower than his fastball, on average. This is good. Bobby Jenks is spot on in this regard.
But there's another edge to Jenks and his change. The necessary element to a good changeup is that the fastball needs to get up on the batter more quickly than he can reasonably react to it. This comes either with overwhelming velocity of the pitch (for example, a 102 mph chuck) or some form of deception/hiding the ball well through the delivery. Jenks pitches from the stretch, so no crazy windup is happening. He's coming at the batter, straight up. No flourishes, no awkward timing, no keeping the ball screened by using his gigantic, gigantic fat ass... no nothing. Just... increasingly average stuff. Batters can afford to sit on his off speed pitches more often now.
If you haven't read between the lines, here is what I'm digging at: Bobby Jenks' fastball isn't getting up on anybody nowadays. It's not even moving all that much, so they can just foul it off all day and/or take the fastballs he doesn't get over the plate to get him into deeper counts. And when he gets down in counts, he's gotta come with the pitch that he can locate: the fastball. In the legendary words of Austin Powers character "Fat Bastard": "It's a vicious cycle."
Couple this collective problem with yet another problem for Jenks: he's shying away from his stellar (or at least it was at some point in the relatively near past) breaking stuff. He's throwing roughly 24% less sliders now than he did three years ago, and an alarming 41% less curveballs. Sandy Koufax may have been able to get by on two pitches; Bobby Jenks won't.
Major League hitters, sitting on changeups, and getting them? It's like hitting off of a tee. And when the Sox go up against teams who can actually hit, take for instance anybody who's not in the AL East or who isn't Seattle, Jenks is going to get positively hammered on. Value? Gone.
Jenks' recent history as far as injuries goes makes it quite possible that he might just be breaking down. Kerry Wood, he of the "broken down long ago" fame, had a theory that every pitcher had a limited amount of "bullets" in their arm. Once you hit your number, the arm was up. I don't think that's true for all pitchers, (take Jamie Moyer or Greg Maddux or any knuckleballer as examples) however in the case of most of your 100-mph threshold gunslinger types, I think that Wood may be right. I read somewhere that the force generated by your body to throw a fastball 100 mph is right at the line where, if it were much stronger, the joints and connective tissue would just blow out. If that's true, and Bobby Jenks has thrown fastballs 72% of the time since 2007, he's flirted with an exploding arm about 1700 times in the same span. And this figure doesn't incorporate the two years prior- 2005 and 2006- when Jenks was really bringing it.
Inherent risk aside, Don Cooper needs to figure out something, and quickly. Bobby may find himself having to do a reinvention of personality on the mound. He's simply not the pitcher he used to be.
Matt Thornton, come on down!
-=-=-
All congratulations to Dallas Braden, who took enough time out of his extremely busy schedule- which as of late has consisted of everything between bitching about Alex Rodriguez running across the mound the last time he threw against New York to bitching about Alex Rodriguez running across the mound the last time he threw against New York- to pitch a perfect game; the first since Buehrle. Strangely, it happened to the Tampa Bay Rays as well, who've been nothing short of red hot thus far on the season...
I get that Alex Rodriguez is a complete douchebag, I really do, and that he has two reported oil paintings of himself as a centaur and all of that business, but man- Dallas Braden, just shut up and throw. Oh wait, you kind of just... did. Either way, that's awesome.
No comments:
Post a Comment