PITTSBURGH — By Tony Watson’s standards, he’s having a pretty poor year.
That trend continued Tuesday night, when he blew his fifth save of the season in spectacular fashion, giving up four runs on three home runs with two outs in the ninth inning to hand the St. Louis Cardinals a 9-7 victory at PNC Park.
Watson’s struggles are across the board. He’s given up a career-high nine home runs. His 3.22 ERA is the highest since his first full year in the majors in 2012. The same goes with his 3.1 BB/9 and his 1.13 WHIP. His 7.6 K/9 is also below his career average.
Walking more batters, allowing more hits, striking out fewer batters and allowing more home runs is a pretty good recipe for failure as a pitcher. In fact, it’s probably a testament to Watson’s talent that his overall numbers aren’t worse.
Watson said on Tuesday that his fastball command seemed to be the culprit.
“Yeah, I just went and looked. I wanted to look at the pitches and see,” he said. “The command was off. The one to [Jhonny] Peralta was really the only one that wasn’t up in the zone. But if you’re behind the count 2-0, you’re not getting ahead of hitters. It’s really contagious when hitters see that. Balls start flying out of the park and into the gaps. They’re fighting to the bat racks.”
Even though his walks are slightly up, Watson’s bigger issue is command, not control. He’s getting way too much of the plate, and that’s what happened with the home run balls he served to Matt Carpenter and Randal Grichuk Tuesday.
Let’s take a look at a couple trends. First of all, Watson has almost completely stopped using his four-seam fastball.
It wasn’t getting a lot of swings-and-misses (something most pitchers use that pitch for), so it seems to make sense a bit that he abandoned in favor of the two-seam fastball, a pitch the Pirates preach the use of anyway.
The problem with that change, is that much like the ones to Carpenter and Grichuk Tuesday, Watson has been grooving his two-seamers. A lot.
There’s an interesting trend there with what happened to his four-seam fastball at the end of 2015. It’s possible that fatigue is factor. Watson has pitched over 70 innings in three consecutive seasons and is on pace to get there again this season.
It’s interesting to note that the changes — dropping the four-seam fastball, and the two-seamer getting grooved more often — happened just after Watson was moved to the closer role Aug. 1. Watson’s overall numbers aren’t that much different before and after the move — his ERA was .01 lower as a closer coming into Tuesday.
There’s nothing to suggest that Watson’s struggles are related to pitching in the ninth inning. But Watson has dramatically changed his pitch selection. Whether that is a result of moving to the ninth inning or something else remains unknown. It does highlight the importance of remembering that the change in role didn’t happen in a vacuum.
