"The few guys that made it to first [base] said this guy's absolutely nasty," Carlos Delgado said with a smile.
Heh.
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All advice and opinion offered in this blog should be followed to the letter by Alderman, Collins, and all uniformed members of the Mets.
4 comments:
He definitely had some filthy movement on his breaking stuff last night. Even his fastball has some late break in it. That was always my frustration with him: he clearly had the talent to be doing better than he was. It's great that it seems he has finally crossed whatever mental barrier was keeping him back.
It was partly mental, but I think the decision to use the 4-seamer was a necessary component of him attaining the success that helped restore the confidence.
That wicked 2-seamer is going to induce a lot more swings with Pelf ahead in the count. When he's behind in the count, most hitters are going to be like, "I can't hit it anyway, so I might as well see if it dives out of the zone". Much of the time, it will. With 2-strikes, that pitch becomes almost impossible to lay off. As word gets around the league, you're going to start seeing a lot more first pitch swings at the straight fastball.
You saw Pelf adjusting to that adjustment already last night. His 3rd time through the order, he started using the curve and the slider on the first pitch, just to spin one into the zone. While neither is a viscious breaking ball, they're both effective because the hitter is way out in front, waiting for the 96 MPH four seamer.
Whether or not Pelf can consistently throw his 3rd and 4th pitches for strikes (he was about 50% last night) will dictate how quickly he's able to go from reliably good to reliably dominant. The league's better hitters will eventually start to slap the first pitch fastballs for hits.
Or they'll pull a quintanilla like last night and just slap foul away all his out pitches and wait until he has that one mistake pitch. A breaking ball that doesn't quite break.
As a great Sith apprentice once said, "they will try."
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