Hot Take: Clay Buchholz Wasn't As Bad As His Stat Line Vs. Orioles
By Michael Hurley, CBS Boston
BOSTON (CBS) -- It's an opinion that, on its surface, is likely to get dismissed out of hand or laughed out of the ballpark. Hence, the self-deprecating headline.
But, although I would not want the man to pitch for my team tonight if I did indeed own a team, I swear to you this: Clay Buchholz was not as bad on Tuesday against the Orioles as his stat line suggests.
No, really.
For those of you still here, perhaps it's because you don't know the exact stats. They were: 5+ IP, 5 H, 5 ER, 3 BB, 2 HR, L.
OK, so for those of you STILL here, let's explore where and how things went wrong.
MARK TRUMBO HOMER
Buchholz was having a solid outing through five innings, allowing just two runs on a J.J. Hardy home run, which we'll get to later. But it all unraveled in the top of the sixth when Mark Trumbo strode to the plate with a runner on first base and nobody out.
Leave aside the missed foul pop-up by Blake Swihart and/or Hanley Ramirez, because those things happen. It's baseball and it's April and it's windy and sometimes those balls fall. It happened to A's closer Sean Doolittle later in the night, and sure enough, he served up a gopher ball right after a ball fell in the spacious foul territory in Oakland.
It happens, and when it does, it's up to the pitcher to show some mental fortitude and make the pitch needed to get that out.
And that's the thing -- Buchholz pretty much made his pitch.
Buchholz threw a 91-mph two-seamer. Per FanGraphs, Buchholz's average two-seamer velocity is 91.8. The pitch was right on the black of the inside edge. If anything, it was a little inside. It caught the bare minimum amount of the plate.
It's the right pitch.
Plus, if you look at Trumbo's heat map, you want to pitch him inside rather than away. Here it is from the pitcher's viewpoint, again via FanGraphs:
In this case, when Buchholz said he made the pitch he wanted to, he is not lying.
Trumbo just A) is swinging a hot bat, B) likely guessed right, C) put a damn fine swing on the baseball, D) drew the ire of Goose Gossage with a REPREHENSIBLE bat flip, and E) smashed a window at the House of Blues, likely interrupting a concert.
For as confounding and infuriating as Buchholz's weekly "I made my pitch/their hitters just found holes" speeches to the media might be, he was actually right this time. That pitch wasn't a bad one. Trumbo was just better.
J.J. HARDY "HOMER"
This is how Buchholz allowed his first two runs of the evening, and it came with two outs and one on in the fourth.
It's a Fenway home run. Need it really be explained more?
Of course, the fact that it was a 327-foot mash doesn't mean it didn't happen. It most certainly did, those runs sure do count, and Hardy gets to add a checkmark in the HR column (actually, two, but the second one wasn't off Buchholz, so it doesn't apply to this conversation).
But you're not going to condemn a pitcher for giving up a home run that glances off the short right-field fence at Fenway, especially not on a pitch that was up and out of the strike zone.
Once again, that's exactly where Buchholz wanted to put it. Hey, FanGraphs, hit me with another heat map!
Ten times out of 10, you just shake that one off and never speak of it again. Of course, Buchholz being Buchholz, it tends to get magnified. But this one really shouldn't. You can't let the fact that it was Buchholz pitching somehow remove all reason from the discussion.
FALLING APART
This is where the Twitter outrage really reached a boiling point. And, really, rightfully so. Buchholz had surrendered the lead on the Trumbo bomb, but he was still at just 88 pitches and could have settled things down while facing the 5-6-7 spots in Baltimore's lineup and kept the score at 4-4. Instead, he walked Matt Wieters and gave up an 0-2 double to Pedro Alvarez, thereby ending his evening in disappointing fashion.
Look, Buchholz is no doubt an enigma, and as I noted myself on Tuesday night, he hasn't done much over the past two-plus seasons to get many people to believe in him on any given night. Responding to adversity has not exactly been his strong suit, and it's the area in which he most needs to improve.
But in this particular instance, in the case of losing a 2-0 lead in the fourth and a 4-2 lead in the sixth, it's hard to hammer Buchholz too heavily this time around.
You might as well save that for next time.
You can email Michael Hurley or find him on Twitter @michaelFhurley.
