A Zero in the Second Column
Before last night, Red Sox fans have always had unreasonably high expectations of their top prospects - call it “The Fred Lynn Effect”. Well, things are not going to change anytime soon.
Just in case you fell asleep early and are just waking up: Clay Buchholz threw a no-hitter last night.
Clay featured three pitches:
- A fastball around 94 MPH, which he located very well last night (fastball command has been his biggest “weakness” throughout his young career).
- A changeup, which seemed to be fat at times, but featured deceiving arm-speed and was baffling when used in tandem with the pitch described above.
- And last but not least: a curveball. My writing talents are insufficient here; I cannot adequately describe this pitch to you with text. It’s something you really have to see. The pitch to end the game, fittingly, was one of the best specimens of the night.
Now, a decision will need to be made regarding the role Buchholz will play for the remainder of the season. A no-hitter is a rather arbitrary event, and shouldn’t really have any more bearing on this decision than a 7 inning quality start. However, it would be very difficult to argue that Clay is not a more effective pitcher than several guys on the current major league pitching staff. Stay tuned.
September 3rd, 2007 at 4:13 pm
I’ve watched both of Buchholz’s starts end to end so far, and there are a couple things I noticed about each of his offspeed offerings. Both of them have two variations - the pitch for a strike and the pitch for a swing and miss. With his changeup, the ones that look “fat” are the ones that he’s throwing for strikes - from my POV, they all look to be located on (or intended for) the outer half of the plate to LHH, and they do seem to fool guys more often than not; Buchholz had a few called strikes on those, especially during the no-no, and one or two that really should have been strikes. When he keeps the change down, you can tell from hitter reactions what a great pitch it is; it can’t be the movement because it doesn’t have much, so it’s clearly a very deceptive delivery. The curve, on the other hand… the big overhand fooled umps a few times in both of his starts, dropping down the middle of the zone and freezing hitters. That seems to be his preferred location, but he frequently alos keeps it down so that it dives out of the zone - looks for all the world like K-Rod’s slider, but slower. Both are pretty devastating pitches, and he gets most of his strikes with them, it seems, at least so far.