Daniel Palencia has taken over the closers role and I wanted to post a quick blog about him because we talk a lot about him this week on the MMCS.
The general ethos is that I want to see a cleaner delivery and more direction towards homeplate because I think it will help with his offspeed even at the expense of some velocity on the 4 seamer.
Think of like hitting a drive. You would rather be center of the fairway every time vs 15 yards further and behind a tree. The trade off is having rhythm to repeat your shit and that’s when hitters make bad swings. You have to control the fight and I think Palencia can overthrow which then renders his secondary useless.
Mostly because the hitter gets a good look at the pitch when you’re overthrowing. You’re loosing deception and flying open, which causes the arm to flatten out and the ball comes in like a fucking pizza.
Imagine throwing a punch. You want to keep a tight closed fist that you can repeat. You don’t want loose wrist slop coming from behind your shoulderblades. You want nice tight clean punches.
Palencia has the tendency to open his body and throw loose wrist slop and that’s why the secondary was trash despite overwhelming talent.
That said.
Last night I saw a better rhythm from him and cleaner direction towards home.
This was reflected in a number of chases and that has his statcast values moving up. It’s been a nice trend since blowing the Miami game about 10 days ago.
You want to look at the blue bars:
Still too much hard hit and exit velocity when you throw 103. And I want to see better chase and whiff xBA down the road but the mechanical adjustments have to come first.
As such, I don’t mind him dipping down to 100 consistently if it means he has tighter control on the slider which you can see here in the yellow dots
some observations here:
- I want the yellow moving closer to the X that I marked here. I want more horizontal and downward break, which can only happen if he stays on good direction to home so his hand can ride the top of the ball.
- Right now it’s so obvious from the pitch spread here that he’s flying open. That’s why his pitchers skew heavy to the right for a 4-seam and slider. They should be multiple deviation points left but the mechanics lead to this.
- The 4-seam has natural arm side run because of the bad mechanics. It’s kind of a split decision if that’s a good or bad thing. In my opinion it’s a good thing that comes from poor execution
- We don’t need to overcorrect this too much. Just understand that shifting things a little left here would represent a more fluid and rhythmic tempo from Palencia and I think that’s much more important than breaking the radar gun
- That said it’s nice knowing he can reach back for 103 when he needs it
You guys don’t have to believe me but I think I’m onto something here and I’d like to see Palencia continue to mix in some adjustments down this path
For more you can listen to this week’s Monday Morning Cubs Show