It was like Christmas.
Sportsnet, essentially the Canadian FSN, decided to air the Red Sox / Yankees game on one of their alternate channels. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy watching the Jays, but I felt like watching professional baseball tonight (ZING!). The Jays are currently hosting the AL-West leading Anaheim Angels and I’ll probably make it down for a game tomorrow or Sunday, but tonight featured M. Rzepczynski and S. O’Sullivan — No thanks.
Jerry Remy also returned to the NESN broadcast booth — Good on ‘em for that.
The Sox are getting trounced, however. The Yankees have a 12 to 1 lead and Bowden’s already thrown 40 pitches after two-thirds of an inning. It’s not Bowden’s fault though, it’s Big Fat Brad Penny’s.
This is an article about Brad Penny and why he’s so damn mediocre. It’s also a story about Radar Guns, and why never to trust them.
For Penny, the wheels were put in motion five starts ago against the Baltimore Orioles. Penny went six strong, yielding a single unearned run. Penny’s fastball was jumping out of his hand and touched 98mph for the first time in a couple years. Penny was overthrowing, of course, and while he continued to throw hard in his next start against the Athletics, he also allowed seven earned runs. Penny’s next two starts were also disturbing as he could barely touch 95mph, let alone average it.
Then came tonight’s game, in all of it’s Multi-Major-Market alliteration hype. Penny was pounding his fastball in there, hitting the high-90′s regularly against the Yanks. The pin-stripers still managed to crush fastball after fastball, turning on Penny’s 97mph cheese as if he were Jamie Moyer.
Even former ROY Eric Hinske was crushing Penny’s fastball, which got me thinkin’.
Pitching obviously has three factors: velocity, deception, and movement. The velocity was there, but the Yanks knew Penny was bringing the cheese because he couldn’t locate his off-speed stuff, so the deception clearly wasn’t. More importantly and this shouldn’t surprise Red Sox fans, Brad Penny throws one of the straightest fastballs in the league. In Brad Penny’s hey-day, both his curveball and his fastball were positive pitches in that they were worth negative runs.
In 2008 as a Dodger, Penny’s fastball was predictably awful as it had slowed a full mph to average 92.4mph, but his curveball was still effective. In 2009, his fastball has regained it’s velocity and effectiveness, but his curveball’s the proud owner of the Worst in Show award.
-- okay, so it was partially Bowden's fault, the Yanks now have a 15-5 lead --
Brad Penny’s fastball has 11.4″ worth of vertical movement whereas the league average is 8ish. If you’re unfamiliar with pfx, more isn’t always better. In this case, more is worse, much worse. Penny’s fastball is as flat as they come, as the backspin counteracts gravity quite severely. The horizontal movement is even worse, and in this case more is better. Penny’s fastball only has 4 inches worth of horizontal movement versus the 6″ average.
We’re not talking straight as an arrow, but it’s damn close. With Penny firing 97mph darts — lawn darts, not precise darts — was it the velocity detracting from the movement?
Ubaldo Jiminez throws hard, and he wasn’t having these issues. Justin Verlander’s fastball had similar vertical movement, but almost double the horizontal movement. Edwin Jackson and Josh Johnson are next in line, and we begin to find some similarities. Jackson’s fastball has been fairly average and the same goes for Johnson; it’s their off-speed offerings that’ve kept them dominant. The same goes for the rest of the league leaders in fastball velocity.
Penny’s curveball has maintained it’s vertical drop from previous years, it’s just been epically bad in 2009. It more than likely has something to do with the massive deterioration of his change-up, a pitch that rarely dives like it used to.
All of this reiterates how important it is for a pitcher to be able to deceive a batter. Brad Penny’s fastball and change-up are insanely flat and his curveball realistically only has vertical movement. If you’re a pitcher and you can only control one axis at a time, you’re going to have a lot of games like tonight.
Somehow I’ve made it through 8 innings of this game, even with this 16-7 score.
