Kikuchi S Blue Jays Debut Shows What Work Remains

A rocket here, a laser beam there. Fast balls up to 97 dashed by hand, black. Cutters down the belt for so-called bumps and ground balls. split-changeups lost by a mile. sliders rotated in the happy belt of right-handers. In the beginning, a hard contact parade. Then, suddenly, a snowball machine. Almost beheaded by a Josh Donaldson fan at some point. Won in the fourth on 84 pitches. And yet, only two winning routes are allowed. It will not always be such an adventure, for sure. Or maybe it will. Who knows? This is really fun as the Toronto Blue Jays see a three-year, $ 36 million bet that they could be the ones to help the funky left-hander realize his potential. Tuesday’s performance, with the Blue Jays 4-0 loss to the New York Yankees, obviously was not what the club ultimately envisioned. But it is worth taking a breath and remembering that it was the first, that it takes the fifth turn in a very strong spin, that Kikuchi is working on a list of adjustments and that these things take time. Well, it was a start. Both on a micro and macro level. It started with Kikuchi throwing mainly sliders that often landed on the plate and made contact with the ball, a terribly dangerous game, given the composition in which he put and the limits he set inside. And although Lourdes Guriel Jr. rescued him with a leap, he grabbed an Aaron Judge ball to the left, and Theoscar Hernandez saved his run by shooting Donaldson at home after Anthony Rizzo fired a double from the wall to the right. paid for his audacity, serving a two-run, 365-foot Yankee Stadium, special to Aaron Hicks from one of those plate sliders in the second. However, Kikuchi’s results were much tastier in the third, as he switched to a quick and heavy approach with the strange split-change in between, which brought the awkward swings and groundballs he would produce when everything worked together. “I feel that after I left this Homer race, it kind of made me start. “I started using my fastball a little more,” Kikuchi said through club’s interpreter Kevin Ando. “That was part of it – working the slider, the ball that breaks, low in the belt. I feel that when I picked it up, then they did damage “. But after hitting Giancarlo Stanton to open the fourth, everything collapsed behind him, as Matt Chapman could not find the ball between third and close, Gleyber Torres picked up a soft glow in the shallow left for a single and Tyler Heineman The catcher of Kikuchi, a pick-up attempt on the right field skyrocketed, leaving a non-winning run to score. Kikuchi’s night ended a few moments later, as he arrived at his stadium for a walk, ending an uneven night. The good thing: his irresistible fastball and cutter, the first of which did not come into play despite being the most used field. The downside: the slider position and change command, the first of which led to some of its most difficult contacts. The Blue Jays knew they were signing up for a project in Kikuchi. And this project remains very much in progress. “Obviously, I would like to go deeper into the ball game. “I feel like I was often left behind in the count,” he said. “Certainly, next time, I would like to be fastball striker from the first inning.” Of course, the reverse of Kikuchi is obvious. Fastball in the mid-1990s is unusually heavy among left-handed starts. Its hard cutter and bite slider move above average. His split-changeup produced almost 40 percent whiff rate last season, the fourth highest among MLB originals. Combining them consistently was his challenge, scoring ERAs below average in each of his three seasons at MLB and a discontinuous 2021 in which he was an all-star in July and the strongest MLB player in the second half. . The Blue Jays signed Kikuchi believing they could help him make the necessary adjustments to unlock it all. The process began this spring as the club tried to change the 30-year-old’s pitch use and encourage him to attack attackers in locations that had not been used before. They wanted more cutters in the body line for right-handers. More sliders quickly scattered balls on both sides of the squad. more split-changeups in two-hit counts. The Blue Jays also moved Kikuchi to the rubber band and improved his delivery, seeking to put him in the belt more often with his quadruple, and from the heart of the plate more consistently than anything else. “We have dug into some things that we think can help him. “We try to make him as comfortable as possible here as soon as possible,” said Blue Jays coach Pete Walker. “And trying to familiarize our fishermen – it helps a lot.” It shows the oblique injury suffered by Danny Jansen on Sunday in his last swing at his last at-bat. And clearly not in a good way. Jansen worked with Kikuchi on his many adaptations throughout the spring and would have caught him on Tuesday if he had not landed on the 10-day injury roster. And Jansen is not coming back soon, which means Kikuchi will have to continue the process with catchers unfamiliar with him. Every executive is unique and every athlete recovers at different rates, but it is safe to assume that the Blue Jays will be without Jansen until May. Given the time of year, the club will not return him in a hurry and risk further deterioration. And while previous injury data is by no means predictive, it’s worth noting at least that in 2020 catchers Kyle Higashioka and Mike Zunino each lost a bit of shyness for four weeks with their own sideways executives. This is probably an expectation at best for Jansen as well. So how do the Blue Jays fill the void behind the plate while Jansen recovers? Heinemann and Jacques Collins will have match-based opportunities, the former mainly against left-wingers and the latter against right-wingers. The fact that Heineman is more of a glove than a bat, while Collins is the opposite pole, will also inform their use. But the biggest benefactor of the playing time is the young Alejandro Kirk. And we forget how young he is. Kirk is the second youngest player on Toronto’s 28-man roster – unbelievably Vladimir Guerrero Jr., one year younger to enter his fourth season in MLB – and the fourth youngest in his 40s. The 23-year-old’s heart rate is so low on the plate, and he has shown such a balance in moments of high pressure, that it is easy to overlook how new all this is to him. Monday was only Kirk’s 72nd game in the MLB – his 48th as a key catcher. And it’s not that his appearance was intentional. Kirk caught 117 junior highs – none above high-A – before making his MLB debut at 21 late in a 2020 pandemic season. Thus, Kirk’s bat was unquestionable. And it continues to be. But with so little experience handling even early 20-something pitchers at the lower levels of the connected ball, there was no way he could be prepared to work effectively with 30-year-old veterans who performed incredibly detailed and dynamic game plans at the highest level of play. That’s why you’ve seen Kirk continue to make the growth leaps he has. It literally grows big. Every day brings a new lesson of reading swings, adjustments and shaping strike zones. New strategies, concepts, and even terminology. Kirk’s English has improved significantly since his debut, and he is gradually becoming more comfortable expressing and imparting knowledge during Toronto pitchers-and-catchers’ daily meetings. “It has a good relationship with all of our pitchers right now,” says Walker. “I think as soon as these younger guys get a little more experience, it looks like the real player is coming out. And I think you will see him grow more. He has very soft hands. And he handles the ball down in the belt, like anyone up to the frame “. Walker is right. Last season, Kirk helped convert 61.7 percent of the pitches he received at the bottom of the strike zone into so-called hits, the highest score of any fit catcher in the game. This Baseball Savant graphic is admittedly noisy, but what you want to see are Kirk’s above-average scores in the three most accurate zones, which represent low pitches, and especially Zone 18, which the graph is ranked by : Do you know who finished second in the so-called hits inside Zone 18 among the 266 MLBers who threw at least 1,000 pitches last season? Jose Berios. Do you know who finished fifth? Kevin Gaussman. Do you know who finished 11th? Kikoutsi. You can look for yourself. These are four types within the 95th percentile of MLB. And Hyun-Jin Ryu was in his 80s. The so-called hits at the bottom of the belt are incredibly important for this Blue Jays spin. And they will only become more if Alek Manoah continues to make his redesigned change as often as he did on Monday, trying to fade it into the corners of his knees. We have already seen how taking Kirk could help Gausman. We already know how he helped Robbie Ray win a Cy Young Award. Maybe the next move will be to pair Kirk with Kikutsi and find out if he can help the confused left-hander take another step. Of course, Kirk can’t catch every day. And durability is already a question mark given the informal composition of his body. The Blue Jays will not want to test their limits and risk another injury, such as the hip flexor problem that cost Kirk almost two months last season. Then a bad situation would become catastrophic. So, Heinemann and Collins will have to harmonize with the Toronto staff …

title: “Kikuchi S Blue Jays Debut Shows What Work Remains " ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-23” author: “Robin Ward”