PITTSBURGH — Talk about getting thrown straight into the fire.
The Pirates will select the contract of right-handed pitcher Chad Kuhl today, and he is expected to make his first Major League start against the Los Angeles Dodgers tonight.
The Pirates and Dodgers are playing on ESPN’s Sunday Night Baseball, so Kuhl’s first outing will have a national audience beyond the 30,000 or so expected to be in Pittsburgh.
To make matters worse, Kuhl’s mound opponent will be three-time Cy Young Award Winner and current MLB ERA leader Clayton Kershaw.
No pressure or anything.
“I knew for a while that it was going to be a Kershaw matchup,” Kuhl said Saturday. “It’s definitely exciting. I should have a lot of family and friends in the stands. It’s going to be a really special day. It’s just going to be a lot of fun to be out there.”
Kuhl, a 6-foot-3, 23-year-old from Bear, Delaware, was the Pirates’ 9th-round pick in the 2013 draft and he was immediately regarded as something of a project. A three-year starter at the lightly regarded University of Delaware, he came with decent numbers, including a 3.75 ERA as a junior. But the stuff didn’t seem to match up with the potential that the Pirates saw.
That’s when minor-league pitching coordinator Scott Mitchell went to work.
“When I got here and Scott Mitchell got his hands on me, I owe a lot of my success to him,” Kuhl said. “What they’ve done. If you go back and look at video of me in college, I would say I’m a completely different pitcher just from a mechanics standpoints.”
The biggest difference has been the introduction of a two-seam fastball to his repertoire that can now be counted on as his primary offering. He’s able to use it to keep his ground-ball rate hovering at about 50 percent.
“I really didn’t throw it a lot in college,” Kuhl said. “I threw a four-seamer. I got in the short season bullpen and [Mitchell] was there for my first one. I started working with it and haven’t really looked back since.”
The two-seamer is a pitch that can take some time to master. Every pitcher throws it a bit differently and some have a unique break, tail or tilt at the end to it that can take some time control. Kuhl said that once he learned the pitch, it’s mostly been four years about learning how to command it, control it, and get outs with it.
“It takes a lot of practice being comfortable with it,” he said. “I threw it every day in the bullpen, got used to the break on it, and also my mechanics, being able to get on top of the ball and drive the ball down. That helped a lot. There’s no magic grip. Doing a lot of things mechanically really helped.”
Kuhl is making a spot start while Gerrit Cole remains on the shelf with a right triceps injury, and he’ll likely return to Triple-A to continue building up his innings — he’s gone over six just twice this year — and refining his craft. Even thought it’s a pressure-packed situation under a national spotlight, he doesn’t feel any extra pressure to succeed, knowing that his fate for his next start is likely out of his hands.
“I think they had a good plan of getting me set up, getting my locker set up and getting me comfortable,” he said. “I’m getting used to be around these guys. I’ve been around them in Spring Training, so I’m familiar with a lot of faces around here.”
