Imanaga

[Longhorn20]

True, Imanaga was impressive if you just look at the stats. BUT, how many homers would he

have given up if the wind wasn't blowing in??

[cl smooth]

[Tim]

1 minute ago, Longhorn20 said:

True, Imanaga was impressive if you just look at the stats. BUT, how many homers would he

have given up if the wind wasn't blowing in??

He's got a pretty broad pitch mix that he can go to under different conditions. The key to me was how much swing and miss he was able to generate with the 4 seamer, plus getting whiffs on 50% of the splits he threw. When you've got that much swing and miss with your two core pitches, it gives a lot of flexibility to tweak things as you go.

Certainly not every game is going to be in the cold, with wind howling in, and facing the Rockies. But nobody is expecting him to have a 0.00 era at the end of the year, either.

[squally1313]

The thing I have to remember is 'the wind not blowing in' =/= 'the wind howling out'. I found myself running those hypotheticals of an afternoon in July with 4 basket shots on 86 MPH pop ups, but those days are basically as common/uncommon as what Imanaga pitched in yesterday. Like Tim said, take the swings and misses, accept that there will be some bombs, hope he can get lucky on the sequencing side (strikeouts will help there). 

[Rex Buckingham]

It doesn't matter, because I'm sure part of his approach was because he knew the conditions were favorable for flyballs. 

[Tim]

10 minutes ago, Rex Buckingham said:

It doesn't matter, because I'm sure part of his approach was because he knew the conditions were favorable for flyballs. 

Yeah, he's not going to have a 0% ground ball rate all year. He's a veteran pitcher who likely optimized his game plan based on the conditions.

[UMFan83]

36 minutes ago, Rex Buckingham said:

It doesn't matter, because I'm sure part of his approach was because he knew the conditions were favorable for flyballs. 

This.

Imanaga is going to give up some long balls this year but I absolutely attribute much of that hard contact on Monday to pitching to the conditions.  Both pitchers gave up a lot of fly balls I believe.

[CubinNY]

I want to know which burner account you guys are responding to, because this is art. 

[imb]

i mean yeah, he definitely gives up 4-5 runs if those same flyballs are hit in june-sept. How much of that was him pitching to flyball contact against a bad team in insanely favorable pitching conditions, i guess we'll see. but if the strikeouts are real, we should be able to live with some of the home runs.