Jordan Hamm
There’s no two ways about it, the Philadelphia Phillies have mashed the Diamondback pitching in the first two games of the National League Championship Series.
They jump on pitching early and are relentless throughout the following nine innings on a given night.
The Diamondbacks’ two most proven pitchers in Zac Gallen and Merrill Kelly gave up first-inning runs, and now it’s on rookie Brandon Pfaadt to stop the offensive onslaught to and help dig the Snakes out of their 2-0 hole.
Diamondback pitching coach Brent Strom believes taking Pfaadt’s ability to throw strikes – and enhancing it – could reap short and long-term success for the young pitcher.
“One of the his greatest strengths is his strike-throwing ability,” Strom said of Pfaadt. “I have always believed that if you can throw strikes, you can intentionally throw balls. The ultimate is to be able to throw pitches that are balls that people swing at. That would be the ultimate pitching program.
“When (Dallas Keuchel) won the Cy Young award for me in Houston, he threw 48% strikes all season long and won the Cy Young award. But they were just close enough — what we call pressure pitches — they’re just close enough to where the hitter has to make a decision whether that’s going to be called or not. When you do that, you induce more soft contact, and it just usually benefits the pitcher.”
Pfaadt and Strom made an adjustment on the rubber to give some – at least perceived – extra velocity.
“A 90-mile-an-hour fastball that is coming into a right-hand hitter is a lot faster to the hitter than a 90-mile-an-hour fastball that’s down and away,” Strom said. “They’re two separate pitches, completely separate.”
The D-backs have seen first hand what that manipulation can do and how it can keep hitters off-balance.
“Everybody talks about velocity, but if you look at the Wheeler game, if you watch Wheeler, he threw that two-seamer in on right-handed hitters really hard, and it comes out at 95, but it actually plays at 99 to 100. And then you throw the sweeper off of that, which is a huge discrepancy.
“I like it when hitters think they can cover everything in the strike zone. When they think they can cover everything, then it’s to our advantage. Where we run into problems is when these veteran hitters, these good hitters kind of sense that they have you locked in a box, and they’ll take that strike zone and kind of shrink it into a certain area. And then that’s where they do the damage.”
The plan for Pfaadt is to only go 40-50 pitches and see a max of 18 Philadelphia batters, or two times through the lineup. The young starter found success in his last start against the Dodgers in the NLDS, giving up two hits on 42 pitches and facing 14 batters.
Arizona is hoping for a similar result on Thursday and ultimately a hometown win.
“They’ve done some damage against us partly because we’ve fallen behind in counts,” Strom said. “We have a plan going into today that hopefully will deal good results for us.”
