It’s hitting the “shadow” zone - the area encompassing the edges of the plate - less than before, with all of the drop getting dumped into the “waste” zone, which are unambiguously balls. Rodón’s fastball locations have been scattershot, missing the zone more often and drawing fewer called strikes on top of the missing whiffs. Rodón nails his spot that time, but pounding the zone has been an issue this year. Kyle Tucker is typically an aggressive first-pitch swinger (47 percent), and he looks ready to pull the trigger on the first-pitch fastball he got after the home run, but it’s too far out for his liking. Unfortunately, Alvarez was able to time up the slider that followed well enough to find a barrel, and the next time Rodón threw a fastball, the score was 5-1 instead of 3-1. It was the second pitch in the sequence, as Rodón had missed with a rare changeup to open the at-bat. Here’s the first one, to José Altuve leading off the inning. I guess it is a sequence, actually, because we’re going to look at all of the fastballs he threw in his final inning against Houston before departing with a hamstring injury. I’m not sure what’s behind it - that’s a longer article - but I can show you what it looks like. 406 respectively, numbers reminiscent of his mediocre early years with the White Sox, when his fastball sat 93 mph and was mixed in with a totally unremarkable sinker. That’s all out the window this year, though, as those numbers have spiked way up to. The slider has always been his calling card, but his mid- to high-90s fastball helps it play up, inducing a lot whiffs over the last two years with well-above average wOBA and xwOBA numbers. I want to take a look at Carlos Rodón’s fastball, because it’s at the crux of why he looks nothing like a pitcher who earned a $150 million contract over the last two seasons.
This is one of those weeks where we’re going to cheat a little bit and look at more than one sequence.
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