Previewing Tazawa’s First Start

by
August 11, 2009

Tonight, Junichi Tazawa is slated to make his first major league start against the Detroit Tigers. Tazawa made his debut last week against the Yankees, facing nine batters allowing a home run, walking nobody, and striking a pair out. He tossed 35 pitches, 24 for strikes, with most of them being fastballs although he also threw an assortment of breaking pitches and even a pair of off-speed pitches.

The Tigers lineup figures to look something like this:

Granderson CF
Polanco 2B
Thomas LF
Cabrera 1B
Guillen DH
Ordonez RF
Inge 3B
Laird C
Everett SS

Only three lefties (Guillen is a switch hitter) but it probably won’t matter too much. According to MinorLeagueSplits, Tazawa struck out a quarter of the left-handed batters he faced in the minors while walking eight percent. Against righties his strikeout total was down to 18%, but his walk rate halved.

The scouting report on Tazawa includes a fastball in the low-90s that cuts into righties; a 81-83 MPH slider that serves as Tazawa’s out-pitch; a curve that sits around 76-78 and has two-plane movement; and a change-up that also sits 81-83. That repertoire seems to agree with the numbers in saying he can be effective against any batter, including the abnormal species known as left-handers. One thing to watch is Tazawa’s release points, check the separation from his reliever outing on his breaking stuff and fastballs, they seem to be slightly higher:

tazawa

You Aren't a FanGraphs Member
It looks like you aren't yet a FanGraphs Member (or aren't logged in). We aren't mad, just disappointed.
We get it. You want to read this article. But before we let you get back to it, we'd like to point out a few of the good reasons why you should become a Member.
1. Ad Free viewing! We won't bug you with this ad, or any other.
2. Unlimited articles! Non-Members only get to read 10 free articles a month. Members never get cut off.
3. Dark mode and Classic mode!
4. Custom player page dashboards! Choose the player cards you want, in the order you want them.
5. One-click data exports! Export our projections and leaderboards for your personal projects.
6. Remove the photos on the home page! (Honestly, this doesn't sound so great to us, but some people wanted it, and we like to give our Members what they want.)
7. Even more Steamer projections! We have handedness, percentile, and context neutral projections available for Members only.
8. Get FanGraphs Walk-Off, a customized year end review! Find out exactly how you used FanGraphs this year, and how that compares to other Members. Don't be a victim of FOMO.
9. A weekly mailbag column, exclusively for Members.
10. Help support FanGraphs and our entire staff! Our Members provide us with critical resources to improve the site and deliver new features!
We hope you'll consider a Membership today, for yourself or as a gift! And we realize this has been an awfully long sales pitch, so we've also removed all the other ads in this article. We didn't want to overdo it.

Detroit is a middle of the pack offensive team, but Fenway favors hitters and is practically a doubles haven, so there’s a decent chance Tazawa gets touched up a bit. If he doesn’t, I’m sure we’ll hear about him non-stop from ESPN for the next two years.





 

17 Comments
Oldest
Newest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
Steve
16 years ago

Not sure if this was a complete anomaly, but he threw a big looping curve ball in the first the checked in at 69. I think he was channeling his inner Wakefield.

0