As you gear up once more for exhibition mode, having already tasted the common season, heading into the Freeway Sequence, listed below are a number of Dodgers tales to cleanse your palate on a Sunday morning.
13 of the 45 complete pitches Teoscar Hernández noticed within the first two common season video games towards the Padres had been sliders. Six had been balls, two had been known as for strikes, 4 had been fouled off. The lone slider put into play by Hernández was a innocent flyout to shallow heart.
These sliders had been thrown to him 28.9 p.c of the time representing a slight downgrade over final 12 months, when pitchers attacked Hernández with the pitch 32.4 p.c of the time. The 868 sliders — counting each sweeper and slurve even within the slider definition — thrown to Hernández had been essentially the most confronted by any hitter in a season courting again to at the least 2008. Zach Crizer at Baseball Prospectus checked out how Hernández pitched in 2023 , and changes made alongside the best way.
Crizer discovered that Hernández has improved by hitting extra sliders, but it surely has come at the price of with the ability to punish fastballs:
To do this, nevertheless, he made sacrifices. Unconsciously, or possibly generally deliberately, Hernández was coaching his eyes and his bat for a slider when he nonetheless had the strategic license to concentrate on fastballs.
The end result was precisely what the pitchers had been going for, actually. The advance in squaring up sliders meant that 17.8% of his swings in them led to flying balls or line drives-the most efficient kind of contact. In opposition to fastballs, nevertheless, a career-low 14.5% of his swings become fly or line balls. Good slider swings gave him a .410 common and .699 slugging share, however the fastballs got here with a .588 common and 1.325 slugging share.
Outdated buddy alert
The Mets made their one-year, $12 million contract with designated hitter JD Martinez official on Saturday morning. To make room on the 40-man roster, reliever Phil Bickford was designated for task.
Bickford, who was traded from the Dodgers to the Mets together with Adam Kolarek final August 1 for money concerns, had a 4.95 ERA and 4.46 FIP in 61 video games in 2023 between Los Angeles and New York, with 76 strikeouts and 39 walks in 67⅓ innings. .
Once more, on the wires
When you haven't learn Mack Astin's fan publish concerning the completely different ranges of reducing errors with MLB uniforms this season, take a while to take pleasure in his write-up.
Paul Lukas at Uni-Watch appreciated the publish a lot that he featured it on his weblog Thursday, calling it “The funniest factor ever written concerning the MLB/Nike Fiasco (or anything).”
