I have a final tomorrow, so here’s all I have to say about this game.
Manny Parra pitched extremely well for 5 innings, then everything that could have gone wrong did. It wasn’t a fantastic start all things considered, but he certainly didn’t deserve to have 6 runs hung on him today. That said, there appears to be an issue with his performance above 80 or 90 pitches, which is something I plan to look into at some point. I would consider today an encouraging start – his splitter was nasty through the first 5 innings, but if Parra can’t go more than five solid innings per start, what does that mean for this team – maybe go unorthodox and only allow him to through 80 pitches? I’m not sure. More on this at a later date.
Here’s the chart.
Don’t want to come off as a sore loser but if it wasn’t for that terrible second base call where Weeks tagged the guy out, we get out of that inning with a 3-1 lead I believe. And Parra’s pitch right up the middle on an 0-2 count didn’t help either because slap hitting DeWitt was waving wildly at everything. The series could have ended in a sweep and instead we lose in embarrassing fashion.
What I have noticed about Parra is that his velocity goes down fromthe mid 90′s to 92-93 around the 5th or 6th inning.
Additionally, he seems to get burned a lot on what I call bailout pitches. If a batter couldn’t catch up to a fastball for strike two, why would you throw an inside splitter, a pitch the batter should reach and catch up to? I don’t know if the problem is that he doesn’t know how to pitch to major league hitters, Lucroy doesn’t know how to call a game with a pitcher who throws over 90, or if both are following a philosophy dictated by Peterson/Macha.