Despite going 5 for 13 in the Houston Astros series, this isn’t the start of a positive trend for Eric Hosmer. If you want all of hit at-bats you will see three of those hits were fluky in nature. Also, a lot of the contact he made was weak contact in nature.
Fernando Rodney has battled command issues all year. One thing I’ve noticed is he taps his left foot on the ground multiple during his delivery. The problem is the toe taps are inconsistent and causes his mechanics to get out of whack. If you don’t own Joel Peralta already, you should.
Speaking of the Rays, Jeremy Hellickson threw a lot of strikes (69 percent) and limited the walks. The biggest take away was command of the curveball. For most of the year he’s been leaving it up, in the middle of the zone, but he had a good feel for the pitch and threw down in the zone. He gave up too many fly balls (70 percent), but he thew a lot of quality strikes. He’s still not the same pitcher as he was last year, but it’s a step in the right direction.
Francisco Liriano pitched fairly well, throwing a good number of strikes (65 percent), but was aided by his defense and had some luck on his side. There were several hard hit balls that found defenders and there were three remarkable plays by Pedro Alvarez that prevented from the first batters to open each respective inning. Also the poor approach by the Cubs hitters create a lot of easy outs. I’m still not a believer and next week he gets to face Detroit.
Tyler Lyons’ future is probably in the bullpen. His fastball sat 89-91 and touched 92 once or twice. He has an easy and clean delivery that’s conducive to a repeatable delivery, allowing the opportunity to have good command. His best secondary pitch was the slider, which he only threw to righties, which had a nice break. Last night he threw the fastball 88 percent of the time and threw a lot of strikes with it (65 percent), but for one reason or another he was reluctant to use his secondary pitches. Maybe it’s because the Padres poor approach at the plate made it unnecessary to deviate from the fastball.
