Stop Throwing This Pitch to Nolan Arenado
Pitchers know hitters. They’ve got to. Sure, for the most part, pitchers want to trust their stuff and hit their spots and any deviation too far from one’s comfort zone is a concession to the hitter, but pitchers have got to know hitters, lest they be made to look silly. Example: pitcher faces high-ball hitter, throws high ball, gives up dinger. Well, duh. We told you he was a high-ball hitter, dumb-dumb. Why’d you put it there?
This is why pitchers read scouting reports, and watch videos, and look at heatmaps, and converse with their peers, and use their human brain to rethink past matchups against whichever opponent looms next on the docket. So they don’t look like a dumb-dumb. That’s all anyone’s trying to do, really. Competitive edge, work ethic, drive, determination — those are all just codewords for “Please don’t let my peers judge me.”
That’s why Mike Trout stopped getting the low fastball last year. It wasn’t for baseball reasons. It was so that anytime a nearby group of people shared a laugh over This Week’s Meme, the group’s laughter would no longer be misconstrued by the dumb-dumb pitcher who threw Mike Trout a low fastball as a public and personal lampooning.
But it turns out nobody is perfect, and that’s why we’re all insecure. Mistakes are made, constantly, by every kind of person at every kind of job. Making mistakes is one of the things humans are best at. All we can do is try to be better at learning from mistakes than we are at making them, and oftentimes it feels like an uphill climb.
Say, speaking of which, plenty of pitchers made mistakes to Nolan Arenado last year. Did you know he hit 42 homers? Don’t believe me? Look, here they are!
Now we have something different to talk about. Now we have something different we have to talk about. You’ll notice I’ve drawn a red line that splits the field in two, and you’ll notice that 40 of the black dots representing home runs are to the left of that dividing red line. You could say Nolan Arenado has a type.
