Game 141, Yankees at Mariners
Ponson vs. Ryan Rowland-Smith.
In the spirit of Dave’s Graphing Weekend, and since a few of you guys liked the ones I did for Morrow’s start last night, here’s a graph of Rowland-Smith’s last start versus Cleveland. Velocity is still on the vertical axis and pitch count is on the horizontal axis.
There are basically three distinct areas where you’ll see mostly consistent values – his fastball in the upper 80s, his change-up around 80, and his breaking ball around 70. Despite the fact that he doesn’t throw very hard, as you can see, he throws a ton of change-ups to keep RH batters off balance. Against lefties, he threw 9 fastballs and 8 curveballs with no change-ups. Against righties, it was 48 fastballs, 33 changeups, and 9 curveballs.
The change-up is really the pitch that allows RR-S to get RH hitters off balance, and if he succeeds as a starter long term, that pitch will be the reason why.
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Oh well, at least the NFL starts for real tomorrow…night all…