Friday, April 18, 2008
Is Moose Cooked?
According to his page at baseball-reference.com, Mike Mussina has thrown 318 pitches so far in 2008. 212 of them have been strikes, which on the surface seems decent. But here’s the scary part. Of those 318 pitches, batters have only swung and missed at 11 pitches (5%). That’s an average of under 3 per game, and it’s going to make it very difficult for Mussina to have sustained success unless something changes. Even Chien-Ming Wang who supposedly can’t K anyone is at 7% this year and was at 11% and 12% in 2006 and 2007 respectively.
Because of the fact that Moose can’t miss bats anymore, I wasn’t really surprised to see him have a bad start against Boston in last night’s 7-5 loss. You could in theory say if he hadn’t made two bad pitches to Manny he’d have had a decent game, but if you can’t fool hitters you’re going to make lots of bad pitches.
I really hoped that Moose would get a little more velocity back this year or come up with a way to survive through another year but right now I’m pretty pessimistic about him doing much differently than he’s done to this point. I’d love to be proven wrong.
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