Parker Hageman

[ATTACH=CONFIG]4160[/ATTACH]Figuring hitters out, a baseball lifer told me recently, is like trying to untangle a giant knot. At first you just try to attack it in the easiest manner possible. If that does not work, you pick another course. And then another and another. You keep trying different things until something gives and you attack that spot until the knot becomes and unraveled mess of string with a sub-.200 batting average and a ticket back to Triple-A. That, in short, is how teams approach players who are new to the league. Pitchers go right after hitters until the method proves fruitless. Then they start pitching away. Or they pitch up. They change speeds. Or they feed them breaking balls until they go cross-eyed. Meanwhile, the good hitters – the Joe Mauers’ of the world – adjust with the pitcher. They take that pitch on the outer-half to the opposite field. They lay off the high ones. They wait on the breaking ball. Those less experienced may fall right into the game plan of the other team. Take Danny Valencia and Brian Dozier, for instance. Both of those players enjoyed immediate success but fell apart as teams began to exploit their tendencies to pull everything. Valencia has hit .234/.274/.365 since that exciting rookie season while Dozier is a career .226/.265/.319 hitting in almost 500 plate appearances. Chris Parmelee enjoyed his month of September back in 2011 but has been a pile of yarn in the batters’ box ever since, hitting just .218/.284/.351. This brings me to the latest hot-hitting young Twin, Oswaldo Arcia. Arcia began the month of May with an 8-game hitting streak. Within that stretch, he hit .438 with four doubles, a triple and a home run. That performance, spread out across three series, undoubtedly had advanced scouts saying “uh-oh, we’ve got to deal with this.” In a USA Today article, Bob Johnson, an advanced scout for the Braves who the Twins just finished burning them hardcore on Twitter getting swept out of the south, explained a bit about his technique: "I'm looking for tendencies," he explains. "If a guy sets his hands at a different position on different counts. I want to know his stance. Does he close up? Is he an open-style hitter? Does he dive into the pitch? … I first check his hands, then his feet. Then I check where his head goes on certain pitches." {snip} Back at the hotel, he writes up reports on the game and then emails them to the team's video coordinator, who compiles the various streams of research. The team's manager and staff will ultimately share the information with the players to help them prepare for future match-ups. What advanced scouts saw with Arcia, is a hitter who has a great ability to keep his hands inside his swing and plenty of his power is generated that way. He is a hitter who has no trouble going to all fields, in fact he has hit the ball the opposite way (37% of balls in play) more than he has pulled it (31%). Teams realize that they need to get him to move his hands away from his body which requires avoiding pitching him middle-in. The assumption may be that he is seeing fewer fastballs but the reality is he is seeing roughly the same number of fastballs, just fewer of those for strikes. Take a look at this animation of his swing on fastballs from the beginning of his season to when his hitting streak ended compared to his past 10 games. http://apps.startribune.com/blogs/user_images/theeight_1369375354_Arcia_Fastballs.gif Notice the cluster of fastballs near the heart of the plate in the first series and the lack of anything there in the second series. The amount of in-zone pitches Arcia has seen has shrank significantly (his in-zone pitch percentage is 46%, well below the near 50% mark and has been at 39% the past two weeks). Arcia, so far, has not been the type of hitter in his professional career who takes walks. He is a power hitter who is ready to swing (his 54% swing rate is also well above the MLB average of 46%). During the Atlanta series, Ron Gardenhire held Arcia out of the lineup, saying that the rookie was “misfiring” at the plate. True, the above numbers indicate that he is pressing hard at the plate with little to show in the past few weeks. Plus, his ninth inning pinch hitting appearance which resulted in a foul out to end the game was a prime example of why he was mired in this offensive quagmire. On a 1-0 pitch, Arcia was sitting dead-red on a fastball. While the Braves gave him one, it was on the outer-half, running away and the contact resulted in an easy third out for Justin Upton in foul territory. http://apps.startribune.com/blogs/user_images/Arcia3.PNG In that situation, under those conditions, you can expect that the manager wants his player to be teeing up on a better pitcher - particularly when ahead in the count. Prior to Thursday’s game against the Tigers, Gardenhire informed the media that his starting lineup would not include Arcia for a fourth consecutive game. When pressed for an explanation, the manager said that he wanted to play the matchups and that Ryan Doumit was 4-for-10 off the Tigers’ starting pitcher, Rick Porcello. This reasoning, based on absurdly small sample size, is likely the cover for the manager and coaches wanting Arcia to slow down and recognize how pitchers are approaching him. He had fallen into a pattern of trying to force everything. Don’t swing so much, don’t expand the zone and let the game come to him. Based on his tools, Arcia has a bright future. In order to realize this potential, Arcia will need to refrain from chasing after everything that moves. His mechanics are solid and his strength will ensure that he will blister pitches that come into his swing path. As major league pitchers continue to pick at his weakness, he needs to adjust with them.

[ATTACH=CONFIG]4140[/ATTACH]Who IS This Guy? At six-foot-six and just 175 pounds, 18-year-old Trey Ball from New Castle High School in Indiana has an extremely projectable frame, one that experts agree will fill out nicely as he matures. The consensus, however, appears split between where he should play: Pitcher or outfield. Who Could He Be? The majors have few left-handed power arms that average mid-90s fastballs. Tampa’s David Price, Texas’ Derek Holland and Los Angeles’ Clayton Kershaw are a rare breed who can dial up that kind of velocity from the port-side. Because of that, Ball’s immediate future may be as a pitcher. In 2012, during the Area Code games, Ball was averaging 92 with his fastball but peppered in a slow curve at 74. This year he was reaching upwards of 96 at times. If he is able to maintain the arm speed and release spot with both pitches, the discrepancy could be downright criminal. Kershaw has struck out 67 batters in 64 innings this year thanks to the same variation between his fastball and huge hook. Landing a Kershaw-like arm would be a phenomenal get for the Twins. On the other hand, if things should go awry with his pitching development, Ball’s positional skills have been highly thought of as well. Because of his big arm, his future in the field would most likely be as a right fielder. At the plate, Ball’s abilities and style have reminded MiLB.com’s Jonathan Mayo of Shawn Green. Green displayed 30+ home run power at the peak of his career, something that Ball may be capable of once he adds some muscle. It should be noted that Ball has been playing his senior year using just a wood bat instead of a metal bat where he could put up ridiculous video game-type numbers. His decision to challenge himself should speak well for his overall makeup. How Soon Could He Be Playing In Target Field? It’s never easy with pitchers. The Twins have had several of their high profile selections (Kyle Gibson, Alex Wimmers, etc) require major surgery which sidetracked their path to the majors. The adage “there’s no such thing as a pitching prospect” applies. Still, Ball’s mechanics are relatively clean, his arm action is good and -- judging from the available game footage of him online -- his delivery looks fairly repeatable for a tall, lanky pitcher. One area that may take some polishing is his breaking ball. To avoid any injury to his arm in his formative years, Ball’s father would not allow him to throw a curve rather focusing on a changeup – which is a plus pitch for him and one of the more difficult pitches to develop later on (just ask Vance Worley). This edict meant Ball just recently began throwing curves last year during his junior season and reports are that while the movement is good, the consistency is not quite there. If The Twins Draft This Guy, They Messed Up Because… On the whole, drafting hard-throwing high school southpaws has not been a great return-on-investment for major league clubs. Back in 2007, the Hardball Times published a study that showed as a group, high school power-armed lefties had an extremely poor track record of making it past Double-A within six years of the draft. Between 1996 and 2000, just 25% of those drafted made it past Double-A, it said. The theory is that talent evaluators focus too much on the hard-throwing arm and overlook some of the other faults of a player. Could selecting Ball result in the same disappointment as like a high percentage of high school lefties before him? If The Twins Draft This Guy, They Nailed It Because… Ok, so hard-throwing high school lefties are a big risk. So what? They are also a big reward if you hit on one. Mid-90s chucking lefties are hard to come by. Ball’s skill set, too, presents a unique built-in safety net in the event that he does flame out as a pitcher. Previous Twins Daily Draft Profiles: Monday, May 20 - Sean Manaea, SP Tuesday, May 21 - Austin Meadows, OF

[ATTACH=CONFIG]4076[/ATTACH]In what is thought of as one of the greatest Simpsons episodes of all-time, Nuclear Power Plant owner turned softball manager, C. Montgomery Burns gave one of his ringers, Daryl Strawberry, an invaluable hitting tip. “You there. Strawberry. Hit a home run,” advised the decrepit hitting instructor. Strawberry took the counsel and smacked a dinger onto the Springfield Expressway. In a perfect world designed by major league hitting coaches, life would be that easy. Certainly, the Minnesota Twins’ newest hitting advisor, Tom Brunansky, would likely agree with that. In reality, hitting coaches have to work with players who have different styles, personalities and needs. There is no “easy button” that fixes mechanics or gets them to recognize what they are doing wrong. Hitting coaches have to surf through a sea of information, digest it and then present it back to the players in a manner in which the players can relate to. Brunansky, much like a couple of his students, made the jump from the minors to the majors this year. In the minor leagues, you have buses and Red Roof Inns. In the majors, you have jets and the Four Seasons. Tools for hitting coaches have just as much separation between levels. In the minors, there are no extensive databases of pitch charts to turn to or PitchF/X cameras lining the walls of the single-tiered stadiums in the Eastern League capturing every bit of movement a pitching prospect has. Minor league hitting coaches work on instinct and experience. “Up here it’s a lot about the approaches and not about all the prep work you put into getting ready to do it because there is so much information, there’s so much video, everything you can have to get prepped and ready to go. Lower level, you don’t really have a lot, you just go out and play. Here you can really get a good idea what you’re getting into and set up a pretty good approach and have an idea what a [pitcher’s] got before you face him.” At the major league level, you can have anything you want supplied for you at the ring of a bell. Justin Morneau wants to know about every slider that the Yankees’ C.C. Sabathia has thrown to lefties before a game? Brunansky could have in that in charts, numbers, graphs or videos in the snap of the finger. That said, even with all the availability, Brunansky does not overindulge his hitters in the deluge of data and video. It’s not that he is advocating flying blind - it is that it can often be overwhelming. “You can get enough stuff here to choke a cow with,” says Brunansky wryly. “You can get anything you want here. There’s some in-depth stuff. You can get any stat, any number, anything you want to look at. But how does that apply? It’s taking it and seeing the [pitcher] and seeing how he pitches out there and translating all that information and breaking it down and going ‘OK guys.’ These guys don’t want to hear all that garbage. It’s my job to go crazy and decipher all that garbage and say, OK, look, this is what he does.” What about the job duty of being the swing repair man? After the first month of the season, Brunansky, it seemed, would have his plate full getting guys comfortable at home plate. The Twins offense in April was fairly anemic. They completed the month with a .239 batting average, 23 out of the 30 team, and a .355 slugging percentage, ahead of just the hapless Marlins. Rookie Aaron Hicks was posterized by pitchers. Justin Morneau provided very little punch in the cleanup spot. Ryan Doumit as well. How does a hitting coach retool on the fly during a sport which has about two scheduled off-days a year? Like a pit stop at Daytona, it seems that major league hitting coaches have just a few moments to tinker under the hood with the mechanics, then pat them on their butt and say go get ‘em. For example, Morneau, as was pointed out numerous times by the Twins broadcasters, was pulling his front side open like a screen door in the wind. This left him vulnerable to being pitched away, which teams happily obligated. When the month concluded, Morneau held a middle infielder-esque .253/.309/.379 batting line and fewer extra base hits than he had fingers on his hands. Would Brunansky set Morneau up with a video viewing room much like the one in Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange, holding his eyes open and re-watching his swing until the idea of performing that act would make him violently ill? No, although that would be an interesting technique that an experimental hitting coach should try someday (perhaps in the forward-thinking Rays’ organization). Brunansky’s philosophy revolves around executing a physical feel rather than driving home the appearance. “A lot of that goes to just the feel. And that’s what hitting is anyways. Like anytime you play the game – it’s feel. You want guys to not really dwell on what they look at, it’s what they feel. And feel is easy to replicate, the look is tough. You can see something that looks like it needs a mechanical change in the swing and we’ll go try to implement it in the cage or on the field with the rest of the team, but it is feel that is easy to replicate and take that back into a game.” Likewise, the season snowballed quickly out of control for Hicks in the early going. After one month of play Hicks was staring at a .356 OPS and had struck out in over a quarter of his plate appearances. Many openly wondered if he would benefit from additional seasoning in Rochester. Would it even be possible to correct course at this level? How do you straighten a player out like that on the fly? Brunansky says it goes back to reintroducing the feel of hitting, getting hitters like Hicks and others scuffling back to the point in the batting cage and drills where they have a fundamentally sound swing. Dozens of at bats may go by without reaping the benefits of the changes but the message is that the coach would like to see the seeds of success sown during prep time. “It’s not so much that it is ‘to take effect on the field’,” says Brunansky. “It is more or less ‘to take effect in the cage’. That’s all I look for. Look for replication in the cage, the feel in the cage and take it on the field for BP. And then after that I don’t them to think, I don’t want them to do anything. I want them to set the approach for the guy that they’re facing and the situation that they are in and trust what they did. If it works, it works. If it doesn’t, you have a [bad] swing. Heck with it. We go back to work.” Has Brunansky’s influence been a factor in the offensive resurgence in May? Obviously there are plenty of reasons for a significant rise in performance in a small period of time – some of that begins and ends with Joe Mauer. Yet the Twins find themselves with a .272 average in May, ninth-best in baseball, with a much improved .449 slugging percentage, fifth-best of the month so far. Individually, those struggling in the first month have rebounded nicely. Hicks has vastly reduced the amount of strike outs and put the ball in play with some power. Morneau is hitting .375. Doumit is slugging .500. It is nearly impossible to separate Brunansky’s contributions from the player’s talent, however, this month they are working well in tandem.

[ATTACH=CONFIG]4036[/ATTACH]On Saturday, May 4, Ryan Doumit, at .203, was not even hitting his weight. With a slugging percentage of .291 to boot, the Minnesota Twins’ switch-hitting catcher/DH was a few nights of binge eating hot wings from matching that number as well. As a regular guest of manager Ron Gardenhire’s vital fifth spot in the batting order, Doumit’s woes directly impacted the team’s offense. An offense, which had concluded April with just 92 runs scored – ahead of only the Chicago White Sox at 89. Last year, while providing crucial support in the heart of the order, the vast majority of his plate appearances came from the left side of the plate. His total numbers are buoyed by whether or not he succeeds as a left-handed hitter. In 2012, he hit a respectable .288/.335/.488 and dropped 13 of his 18 home runs from the port side. That carried him through the year and earned him his contract extension. This year, however, Doumit had yielded little returns from either side of the plate. That is until the trip to Boston. Despite leaving Thursday night without a hit, Doumit did a great deal of damage in a two-day span which included six hits in nine at-bats, two home runs and a double. Heading into Fenway, he was the owner of the sad .203 average and a middle infielder-esque .554 OPS. He had not hit one jack job all year. When the Twins left the city, Doumit’s average was 30 points higher and his OPS had 100 points added to it as well. He also smacked two dingers. What changed was his ability to square up on pitches…in the zone. [Pause while audience gasps.] Doumit entered the Boston series not necessarily chasing after pitches out of the zone at a higher rate than last year but he was making contact with pitches out of the zone. Opponents – fully aware of the fact that Doumit is a pull hitter – have attempted to defuse his powers by feeding him with pitches away, hoping he tries to pull them and, thus, turn them over for weak grounders. Here’s a better visual reference to understand what was happening during the series in Cleveland: http://apps.startribune.com/blogs/user_images/theeight_1368168501_Doumit_2-0.JPG http://apps.startribune.com/blogs/user_images/Doumit_3-2_1.jpg As a pull hitter, it is not a surprise to see teams attacking him with pitches away. Additionally, they had increased the usage of changeups on him (from 15% to 22%) in order to see if he will roll over on those offerings. These past few games, however, we have seen something different out of Doumit. Compare those points of contact to the ones he made while in Boston most recently: http://apps.startribune.com/blogs/user_images/Doumit_HR1.JPGhttp://apps.startribune.com/blogs/user_images/Doumit_1B.JPG http://apps.startribune.com/blogs/user_images/Doumit_HR2.JPG Clearly, when a hitter makes contact with pitches in the zone, they are better able to square the ball off the barrel of the ball. Doumit’s poor pitch selection may indicate why he has had an inordinate amount of grounders put into play this year %) in comparison to his career average (43%). Without the elevation, he would suffer a power outage. Heading into the Boston showdown, Doumit was put the ball on the ground 35 times versus the 31 times he got underneath it. That changed significantly in Massachusetts when he went vertical eight times and bounced three times (save for Thursday night’s game). It is no surprise, then, that when we witness Doumit accumulate extra base hits, he is elevating the ball much better. Also a curious aspect to Doumit’s inauspicious start has been his inability to make pitcher’s pay when he has been in favorable counts. In 2012, when he had been up on pitcher’s, he absolutely raked - posting a .327 average and a 1.026 OPS ahead in the count. This year, that average is down to .154 with a OPS of .584. The results in those situations circle back to his expansion of the zone where two of the three examples above came in hitter’s counts. Is this a corner-turn moment for Ryan Doumit? It is definitely plausible that the Twins are seeing the old Doumit return with his swing decisions exercised in Boston. It would be wildly beneficial as the team has suffered with his lack of production in the heart of the order. Keep an eye on his swing location through the upcoming home stand to see if this output continues.

[ATTACH=CONFIG]4017[/ATTACH]On Tuesday night in Boston, Aaron Hicks compounded his issues with the manager with a seemingly innocuous action on the field in the eighth inning with the Twins securely up by six runs. With Jonny Gomes up at the plate, the Sox’s beefy right fielder lifted a fly ball into short center field. Hicks came racing in from the deepest regions of center field Fenway (which is also shallow Maine) and in one motion nabs the falling sphere and flips it to second baseman Brian Dozier. Afterwards, the Fox Sports North camera transitioned to the ancient Fenway dugout to capture manager Ron Gardenhire mimicking Hicks’ maneuver to one of the coaches and displaying general displeasure for what his center fielder just did. The broadcast team went over the play several times and then provided a close-up of Hicks who seemed to be peeking towards the direction of the dugout while his manager fumed. Here you can find a quick glimpse of the play in question: When he came in after the inning, Hicks was greeted by Gardenhire, who, if he had any sense of Lou Brown/Major League humor at all, would have said “Nice catch Hicks, now don’t ever f**king do that again.” Instead, in the far corners of the green dugout, Gardenhire subjected Hicks to a Twins Way re-education seminar. Again, it is simple enough. Nothing overtly flashy or egregious. It was not as if the rookie has flipped the ball behind his back or between his legs at Dozier. He did not take a pen out of his back pocket and sign it or did the Sam Cassell “big ball” celebration dance. While one cannot say for certain, this feels like a move that Torii Hunter and Carlos Gomez have at least done a handful of times during their tenure with the Minnesota Twins. Still, when you are put on Gardy’s double-secret probation list, the slightest indiscretion triggers these types of reactions. Hicks’ recent defensive gaffes had pushed him out of the lineup on Tuesday. On Monday, the center fielder allowed a seemingly catchable fly ball drop to the earth while, later, he overshot his cut by four states – a play that was only salvaged because Pedro Florimon was able to make a strong throw home and Joe Mauer was able to sell the fact that he applied the tag when no tag was made. Ron Gardenhire thought the play should have been much easier than that. Monday night was not the first time this year in which the manager had to take a moment to lecture his young player on the merits of hitting the cut-off man. During spring training, Hicks missed his cut and Gardenhire talked to him afterwards in the dugout. "It was perfectly understandable why he got into me," Hicks told reporters after the spring training game. "I have to be able to hit the cutoff man. That's my job. That's what needed to be done, and I didn't do it." Overall, his defensive performance has been even more troublesome than just those two isolated instances. According to UZR/150, his mark of -14.2 runs is 18th out of 23 qualified center fielders. Meanwhile, his Revised Zone Rate (RZR) of .862 ranks 22 out of 23 – meaning that he is making just 86.2% of in-zone plays that center fielders should make. Last, Baseball Info Solution’s Plus/Minus has his contributions at -5. Certainly the small sample size warning applies but the three metrics all agree and appear to confirm the eye test that Hicks is not a defensive wizard to this point in the season. There is no question that Hicks has the speed to cover copious amounts of real estate and an arm to shut down opponents’ running games. He still has a lot to learn about how the game is played at the major league level. Gardenhire wants him to understand that you cannot have a million dollar arm and a ten cent head.

[ATTACH=CONFIG]3957[/ATTACH]After a slow start in the season’s opening week, Joe Mauer was once again cracking line drives – right on schedule – but has more recently found himself in one of the worst stretches of offensive baseball of his career and quite possibly the worst since he was a fetus. Pardon the arbitrary endpoints, from April 6 to April 20, Mauer had collected 18 hits in 35 at bats (a whopping .514 batting average). In that time, the Twins catcher was blistering the baseball to the opposite field, accumulating five of his seven extra base hits that direction, including both of his home runs (per the Mauer norm). Then, as quick as the flick of his wrists for an outer-half offering, his production disappeared. Since April 21, he has he has gotten just three hits (including Tuesday night’s single off of Verlander) in his last 33 at bats, making this nine-game span’s batting average a puny .090. According to Fangraphs.com’s Splits Leaderboard, over the last seven days Mauer’s .077 batting average is the fourth-worst in baseball, besting only Drew Stubbs, Ryan Raburn and Adam LaRoche. While it may be easy to dismiss this output as a product of the baseball gods correcting his absurd balls in play average over the previous stretch, Mauer’s drought may be structural based. Far be it from me to deconstruct one of the smoothest, most mechanically sound swings the game has ever seen. That would be like a St Cloud State art major trying to criticize the painting on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Ron Coomer, on the other hand, presented his thoughts on what has suddenly happened to this beautiful motion. During last night’s broadcast on Fox Sports North, Coomer observed that Mauer is opening up slightly, thereby elongating his swing. This, he said, altered his contact point to some extent and has been causing him not to square up on the ball. It is hard to see clear evidence of this in available video clips yet there is no denying Mauer has taken some of his most un-Mauer-ian cuts at pitches as of late and those have resulted in very few line drives over his past 33 at bats. In fact, last night’s line drive single was just the second line drive he has hit since April 21. Hell, over the weekend we nearly witnessed him pop out to the infield – an event that has occurred just once in the last three seasons. Consider this awkward swing in this screen grab from his strike out last night: [ATTACH=CONFIG]3959[/ATTACH] Notice how far Mauer’s head moved offline in order to track Verlander’s curveball. Full disclosure, Justin Verlander makes a lot of great hitters look stupid. That said, Joe Mauer - with his career 1.072 OPS against Verlander - is typically not one of them. To Coomer’s point, Mauer has taken more swings at pitches middle and in during this cold streak compared to his hot streak in which he had swung at more pitches middle and away – those kinds he was driving to left field. Part of the reason for the increase on the swings on the inner-half of the plate could be due to pulling off the ball a bit. [ATTACH=CONFIG]3958[/ATTACH] The teams have also changed their approach with him too. Perhaps the reports from the advanced scouts indicated that there was less to be concerned over with Mauer at this point because, beginning in the Rangers series, opponents simply stopped missing the strike zone. In his 14 games leading up to April 26, pitchers had landed 59% of their pitches for strikes against him. Since then, that rate has shot up to 76%. In theory,he has been seeing tons of hittable pitches. What is going on with Minnesota’s $184 Million Dollar Hit Man? The simplest answer is that it is a short timeframe and everyone is susceptible to these statistical anomalies in a small sample size over 38 plate appearances. Within that regression lie a handful of drivers that is pulling his numbers down – a subtle mechanical flaw here, poor swing decisions there and topped off with the strike zone aggressiveness of the opposition. Success in baseball is fluid. Those like Mauer who have been able to hit consistently over .300 in their careers are able to do so because they can make changes and corrections relatively quick. If we all just breathe for a second, at some point in the near future he will snap out of this dry spell.

[ATTACH=CONFIG]3861[/ATTACH]Just a month removed from being celebrated for his amazingly quick recovery from Tommy John surgery less than 11 months ago, Mike Pelfrey’s numbers through his first four starts in a Twins uniform have been extremely disappointing. This raises the questions of whether or not Pelfrey is completely ready for reintroduction into the major leagues. After all, this follows step with the plight of Joe Nathan in 2010 who rushed through his rehab only to hit a wall a month into the season. Despite being the owner of a 7.94 ERA through 17 innings in 2013, the notion of removing Pelfrey from the rotation at this point appears moot. The idea was quickly shot down by manager Ron Gardenhire following his most recent start, said Pioneer Press beat writer Mike Bernadino. Clearly, Pelfrey has a lot of things going wrong right now. If you were listening to the broadcasts, you would be told that the reason that the big right-hander is struggling is due to his decline in velocity. But let’s be honest here: It’s not as if Pelfrey is sudden throwing the Henry Rowengartner floater pitch to every batter he sees. It’s less than a mile per hour of difference. In 2011, his last full season at the major leagues, he was throwing his fastball at 92.2 miles per hour. This year, it has been at 91.3. All things considered, that is not substantial. Let’s take a look at the things that are really plaguing him in 2013. (1) Command. Experts and those who have gone through the procedure agree that command is the last skill to return after Tommy John surgery. Last week, Jeff Zimmerman of Fangraphs.com interviewed Kansas City Royals’ pitching coach Dave Eiland – someone who had gone through the surgical process and recover in his playing days – echoed that sentiment. “One of the last things to come back is the command.” Eiland told Zimmerman, “You might feel strong. You might be fast. You might be good to go. Pitching off the mound and competing in a game is all together different then throwing sides and batting practice. My suggestion is if you think everything feels good, take another month.” Pelfrey’s return was heralded as nothing short of miraculous. And in many ways, it was. No other pitcher on record had comeback from the surgery in less than 12 months and competed in a major league game. However, what we have seen is his struggles to command the ball. Like Eiland said, you can feel great in many other facets of the game, but once the real games start, your precision may not be all there. In Perlfey’s case, his ability to locate the ball in the strike zone has been one of the worst in the league. In after his first three outings, Pelfrey’s in-zone percentage – the number of pitches he has thrown in the strike zone – is at 39.8%, the sixth-lowest in baseball. To make matters worse, the five ahead of him throw a high percentage of breaking balls – pitches that are harder to command and are often suppose to be out of the strike zone -- while Pelfrey has throwing his fastball/sinker 70% of the time. Fortunately, Pelfrey found the zone more frequently in his start against the Marlins on Tuesday (58 of 94 pitches) to increase his zone presence. What is more worrisome than not throwing the ball over the plate is his missing his spots. Here is a recent example of this malfeasance. This sinker to Rob Brantley was supposed to be down and away, per Ryan Doumit’s request, but wound up in the middle of the zone: [ATTACH=CONFIG]3862[/ATTACH] [ATTACH=CONFIG]3863[/ATTACH] This particular pitch was lasered to the right field gap for a two-run double. Some are not nearly that detrimental but a lot of the contact allowed, even on the ground, has been loud. (2) His pitches are staying up in the zone. What the noise off of the bats may tell the ball guys around the stadium, the data from pitch f/x confirms: Pelfrey’s pitches just are not moving the same way they did prior to the injury. When it comes to his sinker, the pitch is staying up in the zone – on average – above an inch high than it had in the past. Where it was coming in at 5.5 inches in 2010, 6.7 in 2011 and 6.2 in 2012, it has shot up to 7.5 inches this season, meaning there is less of a sink. Less sink from a sinkerball pitcher is not a good thing. Results wind up like the aforementioned example above. His slider, his most often used secondary pitch, has had less vertical drop compared to previous season. In 2010, his vertical finish was 3.4 inches. Same in 2011. This year, it is 6.8, a little over three inches higher than his last two healthy seasons, meaning less downward movement. This is very comparable to Joe Nathan during his recovery with the Twins in 2010. Prior to heading back to Rochester, his slider stayed in the 6-to-7 inch range after being much more substantial prior to that. Lastly, his split-finger change, a pitch he throws mainly to lefties, has been splattered across the field the few times he has thrown. Opponents are 4-for-6 off of it and, you guessed it, it too is staying up in the zone. This has translated into a whole lot of contact and a whole lot of well-struck contact – even if the majority of it has been on the ground. That is how you “scatter” 29 hits over 17 innings. (3) Release point. This ties into the first two items and that is his release point is measurably lower than his 2011 season. Two years ago, Pelfrey was releasing his pitches a little over six feet high. That has since dropped to under five-feet-nine-inches, according to BrooksBaseball.net. [ATTACH=CONFIG]3864[/ATTACH] [ATTACH=CONFIG]3865[/ATTACH] The angles are different, but the release point is captured well in these examples. In 2011, you see the taller release point – a great thing considering his overall large stature. In 2012, that is leveled out some. While a few inches may not seem like much, this lowered released point is likely one of the reasons he is not seeing the movement as his sinker and slider flatten out when his arm angle drops and his unable to stay on top of the ball. (4) Mound Presence. Sinkerball pitchers are a finicky lot. Former Met teammate and once-upon-a-time sinkerballer, R.A. Dickey, told reporters in 2011 how easy it is to completely lose the feel for the pitch after Pelfrey continued to have issues that spring. “There’s so many different things that can impact the movement of the pitch,” Dickey told reporters, “that you do, sometimes, lose it for a period.” Dickey went on to say that the slight change in the grip or the arm action could cause a loss of movement that he would struggle to regain. The Mets have discovered that Pelfrey is someone who has a history of needing to readjust regularly. Early in his career, he had kept his glove at his chest level when he started his windup. He changed that to keeping his hands at belt-level before his windup. In spring training of 2012, he went to bringing his hands over his head in order to get better downward plan and stay on top of his sinker, the same motion he uses today. Additionally, after being a guy who had worked off the third base side of the rubber for most of the previous two seasons, he swapped that practice for the far left side of the rubber, pitching instead off the first base side. Take a look: [ATTACH=CONFIG]3866[/ATTACH] It may be minor, but when you add up all these changes and alterations in the past several years in addition to the recovery from the Tommy John surgery, it may be affecting his ability to repeat his mechanics consistently to the point where he can command all of his pitches effectively. (5) Tempo. Mike Hargrove, in his playing days with Texas and Cleveland in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, was affectionate known as “The Human Rain Delay” for his . Meanwhile, Mike Pelfrey, a few decades and sixty-feet-and-six-inches away from the batter’s box, is doing his own version of that in 2013. While not nearly as OCD as Hargrove, Pelfrey’s pace on the mound is staggeringly slow. After maintaining a normal pace of around 22 seconds per pitch, the right-hander is lulling opponents and fans to sleep with his 27.5 seconds between each pitch. By comparison, Houston’s Bud Norris, the next slowest pitcher in the majors, is nearly two seconds quicker with his delivery to home. Is this a lack of confidence in his stuff, not being on the same page as his catcher or simply a paced slowed by 11 months of rust? There is a lot to be read into the fact that Pelfrey has been holding the ball a lot longer than usual. **** Pelfrey has an extensive list of things that are not going right for him. Lack of command, movement, a noticeably lowered release point, a revolving mound presence and a tempo problem that is wearing down his own defense and spectators alike have been just part of the reason he has struggled so much to open the season. At this point, management is convinced to let him fight through his own issues. That said, a few more outings like the one against the lowly Marlins don’t be surprised if Pelfrey himself trying to figure out what is wrong in Rochester.