Clay Buchholz pitched 6 innings of 6 hit ball, only walking 1 batter and allowing 1 run, while striking out 4. Aside from the innings, that sounds like the kind of outing we'd expect from the opposing starter, one Roy Halladay. Instead, the offense scored 5 runs off one of the best pitchers in baseball, who pitched only 5 innings - maybe he should give up that famed T-shirt.
Now, from the stats, it appears Buch managed to outpitch Doc, but let's see how great he really was. A quick Pitch F/X breakdown after the jump.
First off, some quick numbers: Buch threw 94 pitches, 54 for strikes, and 52 of them fastballs (24 changeups, 13 sliders, and 5 curveballs). The fastball averaged 93.36 MPH, and touched 95.2 MPH - pretty good. Now let's see what those pitches actually looked like.
First up, the bird's eye view of his average pitch tracks:
That's an insane slider; the fastball has some nice tail on it too. We need to look at the side view of these to get the whole picture though.
Well, I guess that's the curve that all the scouts rave about. The slider and changeup drop from the fastball track pretty far, with the changeup waiting for the last 15 feet to start separating. Of course, it's not all about break - anyone can hit hit a hard curve if they can guess where it's going to end up - that's why we need to look at movement, which tells us how far the ball moved based on spin.
Fastball has more horizontal movement, but slightly less vertical movement. The changeup, like I said above, the changeup's got a lot of vertical movement, doesn't move horizontally much - you can see that in the tracks, as it is more of a straight change. The slider that looked untouchable is really quite average, it seems, with a few moving less horizontally. And then there's that wonderful curveball - 4 inches more movement than most pitchers are capable of. It appears he sacrificed a little horizontal movement, but a 12-6 change can be pretty damn effective (see: Beckett, Josh).
One of Buch's issues last season was control. He's got great stuff, but can he use it effectively?