To begin the game it was vintage David Price. He was pounding the strike zone, working both sides of the plate while striking out two. However, this was short lived as the next six innings the Blue Jays had runners on base every inning. Some of the hits allowed were of the bloop variety and he pitched well enough to win the game, but this wasn’t, yet again, another Cy Young performance from Price. His fastball averaged 93-94 mph, which is still down from last year, but the best takeaway from the game was he threw a fastball at 95 mph with his 108 pitch of the game. The biggest trend about his fastball is not the velocity, but the substantial decrease of times he’s throwing it. Last year he threw the fastball 55 percent of the time to righties and 81.5 percent to lefties. This year its 41 percent to righties and 77 percent to lefties. His fastball still has enough velocity to be used a lot more and if he starts using it more he should see better results than he’s had this year.
Of course after the day after I write an article chronicling Eric Hosmer’s hitting struggles, he goes out and hits a home run. If you watch the home run you’ll notice the ball was on the outer half of the plate. Hosmer’s problem isn’t with pitches on the outer half; .439 slugging since 2011. Instead it’s pitches on the inner half. Yesterday he didn’t see any pitches on the inner half, but I’m glad he got his first home run and I want to see the adjustments he continues to make.
Like Price, R.A. Dickey pitched well enough to win the game and flashed (in bursts) the pitcher we saw last year. The knuckleball, at times, had great breaking movement and other times it fluttered in the zone. The velocity of the knuckleball was primarily in the mid to upper 70s and not the 80s we saw last year.
Since being acquired by the Royals on Jeremy Guthrie, in 21 starts, 2.86 ERA, 1.15 WHIP, 15.4 percent strikeout rate and 5.9 percent walk rate. I’m believer and he should be owned in all leagues.
After his start yesterday Ryan Vogelsong increased his ERA to 7.78 and WHIP to 1.73 for the year. If you read my fantasy guide you will have seen I saw this coming. I’ll admit I didn’t think he would be this bad, but the the low three ERA pitcher of 2010-11 was not coming back.
