Jack's Flash - AA Diamonds in the Rough

[Jackstraw]

Last night was a pretty interesting evening in Chattanooga. The Lookouts matched up against the Carolina Mudcats with the two top pitching prospects in the Southern League pairing off. Daryl Thompson took his 2-0 record, 0.76 ERA, to the mound for the Chattanooga Lookouts. Ryan Tucker took his 1-1 record and 1.64 ERA to the mound for the Mudcats. And I took my six year old nephew to his first baseball game. It was a fantastic evening that ended with fireworks.



For everyone that is putting stars next to names for next year, I would definitely put a star with a bullet next to Tucker’s name. Last night he had awesome control over his pitches and his ability to change speeds was almost an anomaly. I had to question the radar gun several times after he pitched. According to the Lookouts display, Tucker effectively went from 53 mph to 78 mph to 91 mph on three consecutive pitches in the fourth inning. After watching him through the fifth, I could see it was the different pitches that he was bringing to the table. As a young pitcher he has a lot of tools and pretty good control over all of them. The only downside that I saw was him being pulled with two outs in the sixth when he wasn’t showing any real difficulties. It makes you wonder…



Now Daryl Thompson was a whole ‘nother pitcher altogether. Where Tucker was controlled and deliberate on the mound, Thompson was quick to the plate and showed a lot of arms and legs. The top speed that I saw on his pitches was 94 mph, but he was hitting between 89-93 consistently with very good control all the way until he was pulled in the eighth. His style as a fast worker with a lot of speed on his fastball kept hitters off balance the entire game. Thompson could have easily gone the entire game. Tucker could have also.



The only drawback that I saw with Thompson was his delivery. He could be injury-prone later on. He is taking the same pitching style that a lot of the young guys are taking. Instead of extending his arm and trying to get full momentum, he is using his elbow to generate power. If you read any of Mike Marshall’s stuff about pitchers, then you know that a good pitcher has to have strong back and shoulder muscles to stop the arm’s velocity. If the shoulder is weak then it can’t stop the arm motion and the pitcher winds up with rotator cuff injuries. One way that pitchers offset a weak shoulder is to compact the delivery so that the elbow becomes more of an axis of the moment than the shoulder. This way they can use more of their body to slow the arm down and prevent injury. The only problem is that the elbow is naturally a weak joint and doesn’t generate a lot of power for a long time. Hence, most of the pitchers who are using a more compact delivery don’t last as long on the mound and usually end up with nerve injuries. If Thompson can learn to straighten his arm out, then when he fully develops he may turn into a 97-98 mph pitcher and avoid the DL.



To me, I love a good pitchers dual. But I think that when you take someone to their first baseball game, especially a kid, there needs to be a lot of hitting taking place. Last night there were seven hits through seven innings without anyone really making contact. This is not the game that I wanted to take my nephew to for his first game. He surprised me though. We sat on the third base side near the field and we had a good view of the side of the plate. He watched every pitch and would say whether it was too high to hit or too low. When he started realizing what the strike zone was, he would yell “STRIKE!” on the pitches down the middle from our perspective. His eyes would light up whenever he called the strike and then the umpire would give his verifying call. There were times that I thought the ump might have been waiting on my nephew to call the pitch for him! The funny thing would be when my nephew would call strike and the umpire would call it a ball. He’d look at me like the guy in black was crazy. I had to explain to him that the strike zone also went side-to-side and not just up-and-down, but we couldn’t see it from our perspective.



It was at that point that he blew me away. He started watching the scoreboard and keeping up with the balls and strikes on the screen. For a kid who has never played baseball (I’m gonna kick his mom’s tail if she doesn’t start playing him in baseball instead of soccer), he caught on very fast to the numbers in the game. By the time the game was over he knew most of the players on the Lookouts and their numbers.



Whew, I think I may have gotten him off to a good start