Everybody has their specialty, and mine is late movement. “Everybody has their quirkiness about them. I think it’s one of those things where it kind of naturally comes out of my hand the right way. “Something that that works in my favor is that I’ve always gotten great extension out front - I’m above league average - and I think late movement happens with full extension, as opposed to when you’re cutting yourself off. Two-plane movement is better than one-plane movement. I’d always had run on my two-seam, but then I started getting sink and run. They were saying how he offset his two-seam because of Tim Hudson and how he got better action out of it. He offset the two-seam in a way that when he throws it, the hitters only see one seam. I was in college - I think this was 2008, my sophomore year - and one of the ESPN games was on. You have to be able to establish the strike zone with your fastball, whether it’s a four-seamer a two-seamer, so that you can get swings and misses on breaking balls outside the zone.” When you can throw strikes and establish all four quadrants of the zone… you have to get ahead of guys. Regardless of a starter’s repertoire - and everyone will tell you this - it boils down to fastball command. “The fastball is important for sustainability. You keep your fingers on top of the ball, spin it, and take it right through the glove. You try to be as relaxed as you can, and have the most-connected delivery that you can. “You try to locate it the best you can, knowing that overcooking the pitch - whether that’s overthrowing it or overthinking it - can cause you to maybe leak the ball over the plate or simply lose some of the quality of the pitch. I just try to keep my fingers on top of the ball and get after it, man. From a young age, I’ve thrown both the two-seam and the four-seam. I stuck with a good plan and started seeing more consistent results.” That was the year I kind of fine-tuned my repertoire. Then, in 2015, Kyle Snyder was in Triple-A as pitching coach. I don’t know what my spin rate is off the top of my head, but I’ve been told it’s pretty good. That’s if I want a swing and miss or a pop up. “The data we have now, the spin rate and all that stuff, shows that it works better in the top half of the zone, or above the zone. It’s not like I was learning a new pitch, because the four-seamer is something I already had. Since that time, it’s mostly been a matter of fine-tuning things. That helped me use my other pitches - my changeup, my curveball, and my slider - with more depth, instead of working side to side. “I started working more vertical, up and down instead of east and west. As a result, I kind of stopped throwing the two-seam. I thought my sinker was a good pitch - I was having success with it - but when I came to the Rays in 2014, the data we had showed that my four-seam was actually better. “I was a sinker/slider guy coming up through the San Diego system.
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