It's not my favorite baseball movie – it probably isn't in the top 10, sorry – but I do find the whole thing kind of charming. But there is one drawback, at least from the perspective of my job: No Statcast data. That's especially annoying in Thursday's game, because the starting pitchers in that game actually gave us a couple of potentially noteworthy performances.
On the Phillies side, Aaron Nola had a turn-the-clocks-back kind of performance, striking out nine and allowing just one run on a single solo homer over five innings of work. It's Nola's highest strikeout total in a start since early April, and the kind of performance that could be pretty eye-opening if it came with some kind of skills change. Nola has been a bit better in general lately, putting up a 3.28 ERA with 21 strikeouts in 19.2 innings over his past four starts.
He's done that while throwing fewer curveballs and more changeups, an interesting strategy that I'd be interested to see if it continued in this start. On the other side, we saw Taj Bradley continue to struggle, putting up one of his worst starts of the season. He was tagged for five runs over just four innings, giving up seven hits, including a couple of homers, while striking out just three and walking four.
It's his third middling (or worse!) start in a row, and he now has 12 strikeouts to just 10 walks in 15 innings in that span. Did Nola have a velocity bump? Did he continue the more changeup-forward approach, or did he revert to his more whiff-friendly curveball amid the nine strikeouts?
Did Bradley struggle with his own velocity in a notable way? Did he change his pitch mix, or struggle with his feel for a specific pitch? Even watching the game, there was no velocity reading on the scorebug – though there did appear to be some when they would occasionally cut to an angle with the stadium screen on, weirdly – so these are pretty much impossible questions to answer.
My hunch is, Nola just had a game where he was unexpectedly locked in against a beatable lineup. It happens sometimes, even for pitchers who aren't particularly good anymore. You probably don't need to add him at this point.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
