The Week in Bradenton: Another One-Win Week for the Marauders
Some good pitching, offense still missing
Bradenton lost five of six at Clearwater this week. Their record now stands at 4-17.
The offense remains an utter nightmare, and it is last in the league by considerable margins in most categories. One sign of how dismal things have been is that the Pirates released outfielders Jack Herman and Jauri Custodio. Releasing players at this stage of the season is unusual.
There have been a few barely visible signs of life from the bats. Omar Alfonzo drew notice from Baseball America for some very good Statcast numbers and currently has an OPS of .849. He has 12 walks and 13 strikeouts. Esmerlyn Valdez, who’d mostly been disappointing this season, finished the week well, going 4-for-11 with three doubles and a couple of loud outs. Eddy Rodriguez, just added from the injured list, started off 3-for-10. And Garret Forrester had a 7-for-16 week.
The rest of the roster, excluding the two just released as well as players who haven’t been around long, features guys batting .115, .154, .094, .143, .090, .171, and .095. You just don’t see numbers like that much.
The pitching continues to show more than the hitting, although it’s still not good. The staff is next to last in the league in ERA and tied for the most walks.
The Marauders are eerily similar to the parent club overall. Apart from the dumpster fire offense, they have some starters pitching well or at least showing promise, but the bullpen hasn’t been good. This week was a good one for Hung-Leng Chang, Carlson Reed, and Michael Kennedy.
Chang gave up two runs over five innings in his start, both of which were unearned. He’s allowed only one earned run in three starts and walked only four. He doesn’t miss a whole lot of bats, but he got nine whiffs on 25 swings in this one. Throwing strikes definitely helps him, as, if you credit Statcast, he throws six different pitches and mixed them thoroughly in this game.
Kennedy had his second straight excellent start after two shaky ones to start the season. In his last ten innings, he’s allowed two runs and six hits, with no walks and 14 Ks. His fastball averaged only 90 mph, but he still got a 26% whiff rate. He threw a lot of strikes with his slider, which got him eight called strikes out of 21 pitches. Like Chang, he will be far more effective when throwing strikes.
Carlson Reed had his best pro start. The results were similar to his first start this year — four and two-thirds scoreless innings as opposed to four — but in that first start, he threw only 34 strikes in 68 pitches. In this one, it was 46 out of 77. Much of the time his command was outstanding, but he had some stretches, especially late in the outing, where he’d suddenly be all over the place. The trend, though, is in the right direction. In this game, Reed’s fastball averaged 93.6 mph and he got a 63% whiff rate on his slider and 67% on his change.
The team’s other promising starter, Khristian Curtis, had a difficult outing on Sunday. That’s true in spite of the fact that he allowed just one hit, and left after four and a third with no runs in. The problem was, he walked six, including the leadoff hitter in four of five innings. He got away with it up to a point due to a GIDP and a couple guys caught stealing.
That stopped in the fifth and wo runs went on his ledger after he left. Curtis threw only half of his 76 pitches for strikes, which was a significant step backward from his last two starts. The velocity is certainly there — his fastball sat at 95-96 mph — but Curtis got his secondary pitches in the strike zone only 18% of the time.
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