Jump to content

2023 Houston Astros Thread

Planet Houston

By Planet Houston
in Baseball

 Share

Recommended Posts

  • Replies 37k
  • Created
  • Last Reply

Top Posters In This Topic

  • tx 3 putt

    4683

  • Scraps

    2191

  • WBT

    2028

  • David Dennison

    1951

Popular Days

Top Posters In This Topic

Popular Days

Popular Posts

henrygandorf
henrygandorf
FartingDreamer
FartingDreamer

Am I the only one that can't stand the sight of Altuve, Bregman or Tucker?  Something about each one of them just pisses me off.  

The Dog
The Dog

Posted Images

WBT

WBT 20,563

Posted
Posted
59 minutes ago, UTexasFight said:

anyone got the athletic article on Pressly’s suckage?

Spoiler

By Chandler Rome

Jun 16, 2023

14

HOUSTON — Predictability is part of Ryan Pressly’s prowess. He is the type of power pitcher who doesn’t need deception and won’t disguise what makes him great. Pressly can bump 97 mph with his four-seam fastball and features two of the sport’s best breaking balls. His curveball averages more than 3,200 revolutions per minute, one of the highest spin rates in the sport.

Still, Pressly’s slider is his most trusted pitch. Opponents hit .152, slugged .182 and whiffed at a 51.7 percent clip against it last season. Pressly spun his slider 51.1 percent of the time during his 10 postseason outings. The Mariners, Yankees and Phillies produced a .105 batting average against it.

Pressly did not allow an earned run in the 11 playoff innings he pitched. He yielded five in his first 11 1/3 frames of this season but allowed just two singles against a slider he couldn’t stop throwing.

“I had, like, a .180-something batting average on it,” Pressly said before Thursday’s game against the Nationals. “Keep using it until they prove to me they can hit it.”

Proof arrived when Pressly took the mound Thursday. In the ninth inning of a scoreless game, he spun a 2-2 slider to Keibert Ruiz. The Nationals catcher redirected it into the right-field bleachers, continuing Pressly’s June swoon and prompting some concern about the two-time All-Star closer. He has allowed seven runs and eight hits across six appearances this month, one in which he might be too predictable with his pitch sequences.

Pressly is throwing fewer four-seam fastballs than at any point in his career, and opponents are starting to sit on his slider as a result. Dominic Smith whacked one for a tying triple Wednesday night. The one Ruiz smoked Thursday was, according to Pressly, “a pitcher’s pitch.”

“It’s not even in the strike zone,” Pressly said. “It’s barely nicking the bottom rail, down and in. I don’t know if you can make a better pitch. You can bounce it if you want. I don’t really know what else to say.”

The outing inflated Pressly’s ERA to 3.49. The 2.89 FIP accompanying it suggests some poor luck and is perhaps a better indicator of Pressly’s — or any reliever’s — overall effectiveness. Pressly is paid for his on-field results, not his underlying metrics. Opponents have 10 hits in the past seven innings he’s pitched. Three of them are against his slider.

“I feel like it’s a good enough pitch that you could tell them it’s coming and, if he executes it well, he’s going to probably have really good results. Some of the times he’s been burned recently, it hasn’t been an executed slider that’s burned him,” pitching coach Josh Miller said before the game.

According to Pressly and Miller, nothing about the slider’s shape, spin or overall effectiveness has changed. Pressly entered Thursday’s outing using his slider 48.8 percent of the time. He’s never thrown it more than 38 percent of the time in any other 162-game season.

“I’ve had so much success with it, so it’s like why change anything? But now the league is starting to make an adjustment — it’s all about making adjustments,” Pressly said before Thursday’s game. “They’ve started cheating to it, and now it’s like, ‘OK, we can make an adjustment now.’ Until a couple weeks ago, no one was making an adjustment to it, so why change anything?”

Pressly has blown three saves in his past seven appearances, including an inglorious ninth-inning implosion Wednesday. He squandered a three-run lead, overthrew home plate after fielding a routine groundball and yielded two extra-base hits into the right-centerfield gap.

The Astros rallied to walk off Washington in the home half, handing Pressly a win he did not deserve. All three of the runs he surrendered were unearned, perhaps the only solace Pressly can take from a forgettable outing. He entered the dugout and spiked his glove against the bench upon its completion. He took a tamer approach after Thursday’s game, slowly shuffling toward the dugout.

“I’ll be the first one to sit here and tell you that three blown saves in the span of two weeks is probably not the best thing in the world,” Pressly said before Thursday’s game. “It’s not my favorite thing to do, obviously. It’s a rough stretch. Everyone goes through it. It’s just a matter of how you get out of it and how you make an adjustment. That’s all it is.”

Smith’s tying triple Wednesday arrived on a thigh-high slider. A pitch earlier, Smith spoiled one foul in an almost identical location. Pressly threw 17 pitches. Ten were sliders, seven were curveballs and none were four-seam fastballs. Pressly entered Thursday’s outing using his four-seamer just 19.4 percent of the time. He threw it at least 32 percent of the time in each of the past three 162-game seasons.

“I think we have gotten slider-happy. It doesn’t mean I’m just going to stop using it all of a sudden,” Pressly said before the game. “Maybe we just need to set it up a little bit better. There is no exact pitch sequence that you can really nail on the head. It’s more of how we use it and how we get to it.”

The simplest solution is to throw more four-seam fastballs to keep hitters honest. Pressly threw nine of them Thursday after tossing none a day earlier. Washington took five swings against the pitch and whiffed just once, illustrating perhaps another issue with that strategy.

Hitters are 8-for-21 against Pressly’s four-seamer this season, and the pitch is generating just a 7 percent whiff rate. Pressly’s fastball has never been as elite as his curveball or slider, but because those two pitches play so well, it hasn’t been a problem. The whiff rate has dropped precipitously — it was 17.2 percent last season and 18.6 percent in 2021 — but if both breaking balls are performing as they should, Pressly has few problems.

“Fastball shape and fastball (velocity) has all been good,” Miller said. “There’s been maybe some opponent-dependent stuff and also throwing the slider maybe a little bit too much. Being unpredictable is good for the pitcher, and we aim to be that.”

And the Chron today had aggy Brent Z write about it

Spoiler

Astros closer Ryan Pressly was upset about a lone pitch – a good pitch.

“It’s a pitcher’s pitch, he just went down and got it,” Pressly said of Keibert Ruiz’s solo home run on a solid 2-2 slider in the ninth inning of the Astros’ 4-1, 10-inning loss to the Washington Nationals on Thursday night in Minute Maid Park. “It’s frustrating. If I do my job we win – just having a rough go at it right now.”

Pressly was speaking for himself, but in a wider range he could have been speaking for the Astros, especially in close, tight games. The Astros (39-30) dropped with a thud to 0-5 in extra-inning games this season, while the Nationals (27-40) won their first of 2023.

“I’d be even more upset if I would have left it over the plate,” Pressly said of his offering to Ruiz. “But it’s an executed pitch – a pitcher’s pitch.”

Pressly was angry because Astros starter Cristian Javier didn’t allow a run over six innings and Bryan Abreu and Hector Neris followed with scoreless innings of their own leading to the ninth.

“It’s frustrating that ‘Javi’ goes out there and does what he does and Abreu and Hector do the same thing, and I just can’t get my job done for some reason,” Pressly continued. “It’s frustrating, and it’s not sitting well with me right now.”

Pressly rebounded from Ruiz’s homer to lead off the ninth by striking out two of the next three batters. After the Astros tied the game on Yainer Diaz’s two-out single in the bottom of the ninth, the Nationals put away the game with three runs in the 10th off Astros reliever Phil Maton.

Maton said he’s been “kind of getting into some bad habits” of late and needs to “clean up a little bit of stuff” moving forward.

For his part, Pressly’s struggles on Wednesday were masked by the Astros’ 5-4 comeback victory in the ninth inning, so he was adding that annoying outing (three runs on two hits) to his grumpiness.

In truth pitching, even the relief pitching late, wasn’t the Astros’ primary issue on Thursday against a team that is 13 games below .500 67 games into the season. It was offense, and the Astros’ Jose Altuve, Alex Bregman and José Abreu were a combined 0-for-11 against the Nationals.

The Astros have been shut out in two of their last four games, and on Thursday made Washington starter MacKenzie Gore look like Spuds MacKenzie settled in and comfortable with a cold brew.

“We saw him in spring training, but it looks like he’s gotten his control,” Astros manager Dusty Baker said of Gore, the No. 3 overall selection of the 2017 draft out of a North Carolina high school. “He was 95 to 96 mile per hour with a good slider and a good curveball, so it was a pitchers’ duel until the very end.”

All is not lost, of course, for the reigning World Series champions, considering the Nationals avoided a sweep with Thursday’s extra-inning win. The Astros turn their attention to the revving Cincinnati Reds and hotshot infielder Elly De La Cruz, who recently dubbed himself “the fastest man in the world.”

Baker intends to rely on righthanders J.P. France, Brandon Bielak and Ronel Blanco against the Reds over the weekend, in a three-game series starting Friday night in Minute Maid Park. An Astros spokesman said starter Hunter Brown is “fine,” he’s just earning an extra day’s rest in lieu of a start against the Reds.

As for losing all five of their extra-inning games so far this season? Baker said there’s no prevailing reason.

“When we lost in Cleveland that was a battle and we scored and they scored, and it was a matter of who had the last at-bat,” Baker said of, for instance, the Astros’ 10-9 loss in 14 innings on June 9. “We had the last at-bat (Thursday), but we had a pretty big deficit that was the difference in the game. So, no, we just lost.”

 

  • Hook 'Em 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites
HtownHorn

HtownHorn 14,677

Posted
Posted (edited)

Lukz, that article shows Pressly's arrogance, which has led to his poor results. Eventually, MLB hitters will figure you out if you throw 1 pitch in the same fucking location over and over again. Even Rivera would locate his cutter all over the strike zone 

Edited by HtownHorn
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

×
 Share
Go to topic listing


Football ... Basketball ... Baseball ... Other Sports ... Futbol ... 🤫995🤫 ... Gambling ... Movies & TV ... Music ... Hobbies ... Lulz ... Food & Travel ... Daily Texan ... Business and Markets ... Cloak Room ... Help ... For Sale ... Board Discussion ... Subscribe!... Donate!... Advertise... COOKIE MONSTER!

×
×
  • Create New...