I hadn't heard that... I had heard it was mechanical, that he was dragging his arm. It's the pitcher's classic shitty mechanical error... get lazy, open the front too soon, drag the arm through, generate less torque, pitches stay up in the zone with less velocity and get hit hard.
Jd's right, Javy's going through dead arm. He talked about how he had arm strength last year thanks to playing in the WBC in spring.
I remember him saying that he hadn't quite built up his arm strength... I don't equate that with "dead arm" though. In any case, here's the passage I heard it from on the LoHud blog:
Vazquez pitched alright from what I saw last night. I did go to bed after the inning where ARod hit it into the Pacific though. Holy crap, did they ever give an official distance on it? Vazquez threw a nasty breaking ball I think it was in the second inning. It broke hard down and away to the righty batter. I liked that. This game was hopefully the step in the right direction he needed. As far as the series, now I'm clueless about what's going to happen. The pen got used a bit last night, which was my fear, but they didn't lose as I expected they would if we saw much pen use. Obviously it will depend a lot on how Hughes pitches, but I think I'm looking at a sweep now. I was wondering whether to trust my gut that told me Oakland's run diff (was +13) was just a product of poor competition so far. Well, now I know. Speaking of run differential, the only teams even close to the Yankees (+29) are Philly (+28) and Minnesota (+26). Even Tampa Bay is only +19. FYI, Boston is -18. And this is with Teixeira and ARod only now starting to hit and Vazquez's two poor starts. Wow.
^ For two weeks Philly was way ahead of the pack in run differential. They came back down to Earth. I think they lost a series to Washington...
"Dead Arm" my ass. He's not pitching well. You can't use the fact that you didn't have an extra tournament before the season as an excuse for you not pitching well. What about the rest of the rotation? Not buying it, he needs to pitch better. Period.
If the starting pitching stays on track this could be one of the best teams of all time. Seriously. 110+
Actually, he pitched pretty well last night. His velocity isn't there, obviously, but his breaking stuff looked sharp. Unless he's injured and keeping it from the team or something, I think it's almost guaranteed he'll pitch better. But even on the off chance that he doesn't, he'll still win plenty of games.
That's why the win-loss ratio for pitchers in baseball is one of the most overrated statistics in all of sports. I agree with you that he will eventually pitch better, but I'm not buying this dead arm crap. Seems like they were just trying to sugarcoat a poor start to the fans as well as the media.
I agree this team appears capable of winning more games than any team before. As long as the rotation stays healthy, I can't see this team not winning 105+ (and probably a lot more than that.) As far as Vazquez, who cares if it's bullshit? I mean, really. What's the difference? It doesn't help or hurt his past performance. As long as he doesn't continue to make excuses, I'll let him have this one. Especially given that he pitched better last night than the previous starts. I'm not worried about him. I think he'll probably win ~14 games. That's not bad for a #4 starter.
