Blogservations: Sanchez helps the Braves’ cause
By Michael Jong
I wasn’t going to write a Blogservations for last night’s game versus the Atlanta Braves, but Anibal Sanchez’s performance deserved some serious criticizing. Let’s dive into that catastrophe of a start.
Anibal Sanchez walks eight, not surprisingly also loses.
Anibal Sanchez had one of his worst starts since returning from injury, striking out four while walking a staggering eight Braves and giving up a solo home run to Chipper Jones. Ultimately, it didn’t really matter all that much how many runs Sanchez gave up; he could have given up all but the Jones homer and it would’ve been enough to seal the Marlins’ fate.
You can likely consider all the sinkers as fastballs, as that’s the sort of pitches I’ve got Sanchez throwing. You can clearly tell that Sanchez was all over the place with his control. He was missing the strike zone high by up to 1.5 feet! As a whole, he only had 46% of his pitches go over for strikes. He didn’t have a whole lot of bad happen to him when he was in the zone, but no one was buying any of his pitches; Sanchez only had five whiffs, and only two of them were outside the zone. It was ugly debacle indeed.
Sanchez struggled the most with his changeup, only getting six strikes out of 20 pitches thrown. Here were his changeups for the evening.
There were definitely some borderline calls in there, but he missed a good number of those pitches by a lot. Keep in mind that this plot actually missed a pitch that was over the 5-ft mark as well. Sanchez’s change is usually his out pitch versus lefties, but in this game he couldn’t get anyone to bite. In fact, only one ball was put into play and only three were swung at out of 20 total changeups thrown.
Sanchez has thrown his fair share of promising outings since returning from his season-long injury problems, but this game was definitely not one of them. Hopefully, he can put this one in the past and move on, or otherwise us Fish fans are going to be in some trouble.