MORGANTOWN, WV – On May 8th, Steven Brault pulled up lame running out a base hit. He had been chugging down the baseline at full speed.
“I hadn’t done that in a while, I guess,” he said. “I’m not going to be doing it, necessarily, next time, but it was just a freak pop right when I hit first base.”
He had to be helped off the field, and Chad Kuhl entered the game as a pinch runner. He was promptly picked off.
“We made fun of him a lot for that afterwards,” Brault recalled. “Even in my pained state, I still had to make fun of him because it was just terrible.”
That would be the last bit of joy before a long, arduous recovery for Brault. An MRI revealed a “pretty significant” injury to his left hamstring. Team doctors diagnosed him with a strain and predicted his recovery would take 6-8 weeks.
“As a pitcher, hurting a hamstring, you can come back pretty quick as long as you do the rehab,” Brault said. “Still, it’s too much time, more time than you want to take off.”
Brault completed his entire recovery in Indianapolis, working closely with the trainers and coaches he has been with all year long. He threw two simulated games, one with two innings and one with three, before being assigned to the West Virginia Black Bears (hereafter referred to as Morgantown to avoid confusion with the West Virginia Power) for live ball.
As a left-handed pitcher, a left leg injury is particularly troubling. Much of the pitcher’s power and drive comes from the back leg (for lefties, the left leg) propelling the body toward the plate.
“You use your leg more than you use your arm, really,” explained Brault, quickly following that up with, “It feels fine.”
He looks fine, too. Brault got his first rehab start in the Black Bears’ fourth game of the season. He was locked in a pitchers’ duel for the duration of his four-inning start, but his command and velocity improved as the game went along. He allowed only one baserunner, on a weak single to shallow center field, and his GO/AO was 7:1.
Brault finished his shutout appearance with five strikeouts but felt no pressure to strikeout everyone.
“There’s no problem throwing and letting them hit the ball on this team because this team knows what they’re doing,” he said.
Perhaps most impressive was Brault’s command. He fell behind on only one batter and threw 40 of his 53 pitches for strikes. That means 75 percent of his pitches went for strikes, the highest rate he has had all year. Of course, this is at a much lower level than Indianapolis, but many of the swinging strikes were in the strike zone, not poor pitches that batters chased.
Brault located his fastball particularly well, often throwing right at knee level, but his slider gave him some struggles. It took him until the fourth inning to figure out the timing and consistently throw the slider effectively, but with more time on the mound, that control should come back.
Morgantown manager Wyatt Toregas echoed that sentiment.
“He was able to locate [the fastball] where he wanted to, elevate it where he wanted to. He had the off-speed — the changeup and the slider were both working,” he said after Brault’s start, “but in the third and fourth inning, his off-speed was better than in the first two innings, and I think that’s the six-week layoff.”
Brault’s fielding also does not seem to be affected by the injury. Twice he had to range to his left and jump to catch some choppers back to the mound, and he fielded them with ease and flipped them on to first for the out.
The Pirates already seem to have a plan worked out for Brault’s path back to the higher levels. He is set to make one more start for the Black Bears on Saturday, and then, according to Brault, he will rejoin the Indianapolis Indians. On a regular five-day rotation, Brault would be ready to start on the road trip to Toledo around the first of July.
