Brian Duensing’s baseball future is tenuous. The 33-year-old southpaw is currently an Oriole, but his time in Baltimore could be short. Signed off the scrap heap a few weeks ago, he’s failed to impress in five outings. He could easily be the odd man out the next time a roster move is made.

Duensing was cast aside by his long-time team over the winter. A member of the Minnesota organization since being drafted out of the University of Nebraska in 2005, Duensing hit the open market when the Twins “opted to go in another direction.” It didn’t come as a shock. He’s never been overpowering, and last year he was more underwhelming than ever. His ERA was 4.25 and his 4.4 strikeout rate was a career low.

Free agency didn’t go as he’d hoped. Quality offers weren’t forthcoming, and opt-out clauses have subsequently become a meaningful part of his life. There’s a chance he will remain an Oriole, but he could just as easily be elsewhere in the not-too-distant future. He might be wearing a new uniform in a new city. He might be at his home in Omaha, with his wife at his side and three toddlers in tow.

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Duensing on first-time free agency and his future: “This was the first time I was a free agent. I was somewhat excited to see what would happen, but it didn’t really pan out like I’d hoped. I ended up signing with Kansas City, a non-roster minor-league deal, and then didn’t make the team out of spring training. I began the season in Omaha. That’s where I’m from, so I was able to live at home with the wife and the kids.

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Dillon Gee isn’t a Met anymore. Nor is he a starter (at least not as his primary role). The 30-year-old right-hander is working out of the bullpen in his first season with the Royals. No longer needed in New York, he inked a free-agent deal with Kansas City over the winter.

Gee was a solid, albeit unremarkable, starter for the Mets from 2011 to -14. Then the deGroms, Harveys and Syndergaards burst onto the scene (the ageless Bartolo, too). That made it time to move on, and Gee is now a long reliever making spot starts for a new team. He’s adapting well. In 12 appearances for the defending World Series champs, he has a 3.98 ERA and a career-best 8.2 K/9.

Gee talked about his transition earlier in the season.

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Gee on transitioning to the Royals and a relief role: “I’m probably a better pitcher now than I was in my earlier years. This is just the role I have now. I kind of got phased out in New York. They obviously had some young studs coming up, and I lost my spot there. I had a few opportunities to remain a starter with other teams, but I chose to come here and contribute out of the bullpen for a winning team.

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Casey Meisner is having a fairly decent season. The 21-year-old Oakland A’s prospect has allowed three or fewer earned runs in nine of his 12 starts. That’s even more impressive when you consider that he’s pitching in the hitter-friendly California League.

His W-L record is 0-10.

Fortunately for his sanity, the righty understands that wins and losses are largely out of a pitcher’s control.

“It’s obviously really bad to be (0-10), but I can’t do anything about that,” said Meisner, who has been taking the mound for the Stockton Ports. “I’ve deserved a few of the losses, but we’ve scored more than two runs in only two of my starts. As a team, we’re not having a very good season.”

Meisner projects to have a good career. A third-round pick by the Mets in 2013, he came to Oakland two years later in exchange for Tyler Clippard. Six-foot-seven with a fastball-changeup-curveball mix, he went 13-5 with a 2.45 ERA last season between two levels.

The Cypress, Texas product is satisfied with the quality of his pitches — “Everything is good on that end” — but he’s not pleased with his 4.9 walk rate. He attributes the free passes to two things, only one of which he can control. Read the rest of this entry »

Huston Street isn’t an expert on analytics. Nor does he claim to be. But he’s by no means a neophyte. The veteran closer is more knowledgeable about advanced stats than the average player. He also has some strong opinions.

A little over a year ago, Street shared his negative view of FIP in one of my Sunday Notes columns. This past spring, I approached him at the Angels’ spring-training facility, in Tempe, to get his thoughts on shift strategy. I ended up getting a lot more than that. A simple question segued into what might be best described as a stream-of-consciousness look at the state of analytics, in classic Street style.

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Street on defensive shifts: “I’m a big believer in match-ups when it comes to shifts. When they’re done really well, they’re based on the individual match-up and not on a general approach to shifting. Half the league throws 96 and the other half throws 93. Then there’s me, who throws 90.

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PJ Conlon doesn’t fit the profile of a New York Mets starter. The defending National League champions have a rotation populated by deGroms, Harveys and Syndergaards. Conlon, meanwhile, isn’t a power arm. The 22-year-old pitching prospect is your prototypical finesse lefty who relies more on guile than gas.

Twenty-seven games into his professional career, Conlon resembles a half-his-age Jamie Moyer. He looks hittable, but squaring him up is often an exercise in futility. Since being drafted in the 13th round last year out of the University of San Diego, Conlon has allowed a grand total of nine earned runs in 84 innings. On Saturday, he took the hill for the Low-A Columbia Fireflies and breezed through 10 innings on just 97 pitches. He flirted with a no-hitter and held Hagerstown to a lone tally.

Soon after that start, Conlon was named to the South Atlantic League’s mid-season All-Star team. He leads the circuit in both wins and ERA, and ranks second in WHIP.

Conlon was featured in this past Sunday’s Notes column, with his Irish heritage being the main focus (he was born in Belfast). Today we hear from the southpaw on his pitching prowess.

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Conlon on pitching: “I’d describe myself as a shorter lefty who doesn’t have great velocity. I’m about 6-foot and will top out at 91 on a good day. I’m usually between 87-90, but I can run the ball and do different things with it. I don’t really throw anything straight.

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Jon Gray had one of his best starts of the season on Sunday. The Colorado Rockies right-hander fanned 12 while limiting the Padres to two runs over seven innings. It was his third straight solid outing following a a nine-run dud against the Cardinals on May 19.

A few days after his St. Louis shelling, the 24-year-old University of Oklahoma product threw a pre-game bullpen session at Fenway Park. On his way back to the clubhouse, he stopped in the outfield grass and conferred with his pitching coach, occasionally mimicking his pitching motion.

After the confab concluded, I approached him to ask what they’d been working on. I had other questions in mind as well. I’d interviewed Gray a few months after he was taken third overall in the 2013 draft, and a lot of development had occurred since that time. A follow-up was in order.

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Gray on his development and needing to stay in sync: “There’s a lot more to this game than it might seem. You’re constantly making adjustments in order to compete. I’ve done a lot of things with my delivery, as well as mentally. You have to make adjustments a lot faster at this level. If I know something isn’t right in my delivery, I have to change it as soon as possible, otherwise it’s going to get bad. Same thing mentally. I have to really keep tabs on myself, with each pitch, each approach.

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Jon Harris had a rocky outing a week ago. After allowing just one run over his previous 32 innings — an unearned run, to boot — the Blue Jays pitching prospect was kicked around for eight runs in a loss to South Bend. The reason for his poor performance was as much mental as it was physical.

“I was in a funk,” explained Harris, whom Toronto selected 29th-overall last year out of Missouri State. “I couldn’t really get comfortable — I couldn’t get a rhythm — and I let the game speed up on me a little. I was in my head a lot, worrying about what I was doing wrong instead of just focusing on making my pitches. South Bend is a good hitting team and if you make a mistake they’re going to jump all over it. And they did.”

Harris didn’t allow the implosion to linger. In his next start for the low-A Lansing Lugnuts, the 22-year-old righty allowed just one run over five innings against Dayton. His prior-game hiccup in the rearview, he took the mound with his chin held high. Read the rest of this entry »

Lance McCullers puts a lot of thought into his craft. The 22-year-old right-hander fashions himself a bulldog — understandably so; his father was a big-league closer — but in between starts he puts on his pitching-theorist hat. In many respects, he fits the analytic Astros’ paradigm to a tee.

Selected 41st overall by Houston in the 2012 draft, McCullers features a mid-90s fastball and a killer curveball. His lack of a consistent changeup has been a cause for concern, but to this point he’s thrived with the two plus pitches. Twenty-six games into his big-league career, McCullers has a 3.44 ERA and has averaged over a strikeout per inning.

McCullers talked about his pitching approach, which focuses more on spin than location, following a mid-May outing in Boston.

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McCullers on his adaptive approach: “I don’t like putting labels on people, like, ‘He’s a finesse guy’ or ‘He’s a power guy.’ The game will dictate how I pitch. If a team is trying to jump on my heater early — they’re really hunting fastballs — I have no problem throwing 60-70% offspeed and using my fastball for effect.

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Heading into the 2012 season, Baseball America wrote of DJ LeMahieu, “Most scouts see him as a singles hitter who doesn’t provide enough beyond his batting average.” BA added that “his fringy speed and quickness don’t fit at second base.”

The latter turned out to be patently false. The 27-year-old won a Gold Glove at second base with the Rockies in 2014, and he remains a solid defender. He doesn’t look like a middle infielder — LeMahieu is 6-foot-4 — but his plus-2 DRS over the last two years puts him solidly in the gets-the-job-done category.

From an offensive standpoint, the singles-hitter label has a grain of truth to it. Despite calling Coors Field home, LeMahieu doesn’t leave the yard very often. Extra-base hits aren’t his forte (last night’s home run and pair of doubles notwithstanding). And while he’ll accept a free pass — his walk rate is a respectable 8.3% — no one is about to compare him to Eddie Yost.

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Chad Bettis throws both a cutter and a slider. Or maybe he throws cutters but not sliders? That determination largely depends on how you parse pitches. Whatever your opinion, you probably won’t get much of an argument from him. The Rockies right-hander isn’t 100% sure himself.

“Both,” was Bettis’s initial answer to my ‘Cutter or slider?’ question. That was followed by less-than-definitive elaboration.

“It’s the same grip; it’s just me manipulating it to make it shorter or bigger. With one, I’m more behind the ball and with the other I’m a little more on the side of it. When I want to make it a little sweepier, I can. When I want to make it short and tight like a cutter, I can do that too.”

Bettis had a slider at Texas Tech, although he’d already begun developing a cutter by the time Colorado selected him in the second round of the 2010 draft. Prior to last season, the cutter is all he’d thrown in pro ball.

The reintroduction of a slider — if that’s what you choose to call it — came about mostly by accident. Read the rest of this entry »