It helps that there were only two other equally diminutive pitchers over the decades, but Viau could stand proudly, if not highly, on his record. He first took the mound in for the Cincinnati Red Stockings they became the Reds in and later played for the Cleveland Spiders, the Louisville Colonels and the Boston Beaneaters.
He was both a game winner and a game loser. Not unique in the annals of baseball, except Viau did it in the same season. He went for Cincinnati in When his pro career ended in after appearances, he had amassed a lifetime record of with an ERA of 3. The shortest pitcher of the modern era, 5'4" Dennis John Dinty Gearin had an equally short career. Gearin, a southpaw, played for the National League champion New York Giants and made the team again in He was traded to the Boston Braves in May of that year, made one appearance and disappeared into history or maybe into Jon Rauch's pants.
Lifetime, he pitched in 13 games and chalked up a record of But, at least according to his stats, Gearin wasn't as bad as his win-loss mark indicates.
After 53 total innings, Gearin retired with an ERA of just 2. And, as he would soon learn, getting noticed can lead to unexpected consequences. He hit into 22 DPs in , and over his career ranks 20th among active players in that category. Earlier in the game, Hunter had blasted a foot homer to dead center.
Collins starts him with a curveball. It comes in at 73 mph, about 20 percent slower than his heater. Hunter watches it drop in for strike one. Hunter fouls off the next pitch, a mph fastball, and then watches the next fastball miss. Strike three. He got bigger, he got stronger, and his fastball moved up to his current velocity in the low 90s. He started the season back in the Eastern League, where he struck out an astounding 43 percent of the batters he faced and walked fewer than 10 percent.
Here's a rundown of Collins's minor league stats. And then, in July, he got traded. If you have to get traded as a minor leaguer, Atlanta is the organization to which you would want to go.
Developing pitchers is a mysterious and unpredictable process, but the Braves manage to do it better than most. This time, he struck out almost half of the batters he faced.
In 8 innings, 7 guys reached base by hit or walk, and 14 went down swinging. So imagine his surprise when he got traded again that same month, this time to Kansas City. No player goes to bed at night praying for a trade to the Royals.
He caught some breaks—opponents hit just. Just turned 21, he was dominating hitters much older, much bigger, and much more experienced. If anything, his legend grew. Pitchers already challenge their lower-back tissues with incredible shearing forces every time they throw at high velocity. No point taking unnecessary risks in the gym. No barbell bench presses. No overhead presses of any kind. Collins will do sets of 4 chinups with 90 pounds strapped to his waist, but Cressey keeps him from doing more.
The conventional wisdom suggests that bigger, thicker-bodied pitchers will have a better chance of staying healthy while accumulating high workloads year after year. Before he was a trophy, he was the most dominant and durable pitcher of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Collins is helped by the fact that no one in pro ball has ever tried to use him anywhere but the bullpen. Pitching injuries tend to correlate to workload, especially in the early years.
In his three full seasons in the minors, he appeared in games and pitched innings, meaning he gets 4 or 5 outs per appearance, on average. College pitchers are especially susceptible because their coaches have every incentive to overwork their best arms before they lose them to the pros.
The pounder with the inch vertical jump is now rock-hard pounds with a The guy who was gassed racing against a couple of strength coaches now spends 8 hours a day in the gym, hanging out with the athletes and coaches before, between, and after his training sessions. True, Wells had played like a superstar in and , but in the two seasons in between he was merely good—an above-average player, but not the kind of guy who gets one of the most lucrative contracts in baseball history to that point.
The Jays traded Wells to the Angels after the season, which is why he now faces Collins. Thus to a batter, these pitches do not appear straight, but appear to be going sideways across the plate, which makes them harder to hit. You can see this in how the pitches in Figure 1 are still moving diagonally as they approach the plate. A typical four-seam fastball bends so that it approaches the plate head-on, even though the pitch's path has actually curved a greater amount.
Both the fastball and change-up have a large amount of "rise" - that is, the pitches' spin cause them to sink over 11 inches less you can see the actual amounts in Table 1 than you would expect these pitches to due to gravity as they cross the plate.
Thus it would be kind of surprising if either of these two pitches wound up as a ground ball pitch, as the pitches are more likely to wind up in the top parts of the strike zone.
The good news is that the other side of this is that the top parts of the strike zone are the parts where a fastball is more likely to get swing-and-misses, resulting in more strikeouts.
Oh, and the fastball has a pretty solid velocity for a left-handed pitcher's fastball: averaging over 92 MPH per pitch thrown. It's not an amazing velocity - I've seen some reports have Collins at MPH, which would fit that criteria - but it's pretty good, and only makes the pitch more deadly. The change-up's velocity of Then there's the curveball. Tim Collins' curveball has a ton of movement in both directions: the pitch drops almost 9 inches more than we'd expect the pitch to because of gravity - a very good drop, comparable to that of Adam Wainwright 's excellent curveball.
The pitch also has a really large amount of horizontal movement: it moves 6 and a quarter inches in on right-handed batters and away from left-handed batters. Thus the pitch is clearly not a 12 to 6 curveball, or even really as much of an 11 to 5 curve, but almost a 10 to 4 curve which still has the drop of 12 to 6 curveball, mind you.
For reference, this would make the pitch similar-ish to Adam Wainwright's curveball, though Wainwright would seem to get more horizontal movement on his curve than Collins. The one area where the curve isn't intriguing is in its velocity: the pitch has basically average velocity or below average maybe for a curveball. This should result in a lower GB rate curveballs near 80MPH have stellar GB rates and perhaps a lower swinging strike rate on this pitch. On the other hand, a guy with a curve with a similar velocity, Adam Wainwright getting the picture yet?
However, there's an elephant in the room in regards to Tim Collin's pitches, one that can't be ignored when talking about his potential: the fact that each of his three pitches has a distinct release point:. One thing that should have been immediately obvious from Figure 1 is the fact that all three of Tim Collins' pitches originate from a different point, especially the curveball. The data in Figure 2 has been corrected to show the proper release point locations as extrapolated from the data:.
Figure 2: The Release point of each of Collins' pitches this year. The numbers on each axis represent, in FEET, the release point's distance either above ground for vertical release point or from a position directly in front of the center of home plate with negative numbers being the third-base side of the rubber. The graph is shown from the point of view of a catcher.
Once again you can see: the curveball has a really extreme horizontal release point. In fact, the curve's release point on average is over 5.
This is clearly a different arm angle by the way, as we can see by the fact that the pitch actually has a LOWER release point than the fastball. Normally, curves appear to have a higher release point than other pitches due to how release points are calculated, so this is quite unusual.
0コメント