Odorizzi and de la Rosa: 2012 Debuts

by
September 25, 2012

After looking at Chris Carpenter’s 2012 debut yesterday, today I will look at two other pitchers that made their 2012 debuts this past week, Jake Odorizzi and Jorge de la Rosa

Jake Odorizzi – Jake made his debut on Sunday night for the Royals after being called up from AAA. His start was good and bad. Through 5 innings he allowed no runs. Then when the Indians saw him for the 3rd time, they lit him up for 3 runs in 6th with only 1 out recorded. He ended the game with 3 Runs, 6 Hits, 1 HR, 3 K and 1 BB. It could have been better, it could have been worse.

The death blow was a Carlos Santana 2-run home run. I think home runs will issue for him for several reasons. First, his fastball averages around 90 MPH. Not good enough by itself. Second, it doesn’t have a bunch of life as seen here:

Finally, he has a tendency to leave the ball up in the zone which led to fairly low 30% GB rate in AAA. These factors all add up to only 4 ground balls out of 19 batted balls in his major league debut.

Jake may end up being a decent 3ish major league starter. The key for him is to try to keep his fastball as low as possible in the strike zone.

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Jorge de la Rosa – Jorge had his first major start of the last Thursday since late May 2011. He has been recovering from Tommy John surgery. The start was not pretty. Only 3.2 IP with 6 Runs allowed on 7 Hits, 1 HR, 1 BB and 1 K. Hopefully his start tonight will be better.

His main issue is a decent drop in fastball velocity.

His velocity is down 4-5 MPH from his recent peak. It is not a good sign that a power pitcher has lost his power.

Besides the loss in velocity, he had problems throwing strikes. Only 33% to 40% of Jorge’s pitches were strikes. He was able to get some swing and misses, but not enough to record more than one strikeout.

Jorge gets the start again tonight at home in Denver. I see no reason to start him this season.





 

Jeff, one of the authors of the fantasy baseball guide,The Process, writes for RotoGraphs, The Hardball Times, Rotowire, Baseball America, and BaseballHQ. He has been nominated for two SABR Analytics Research Award for Contemporary Analysis and won it in 2013 in tandem with Bill Petti. He has won four FSWA Awards including on for his Mining the News series. He's won Tout Wars three times, LABR twice, and got his first NFBC Main Event win in 2021. Follow him on Twitter @jeffwzimmerman.

3 Comments
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byronMember since 2016
13 years ago

Odorizzi is in the right stadium for a fly-ball-prone RHP.

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ecp
13 years ago

I seem to recall that Odorizzi’s FB averages more than 90 MPH. He’s never pitched this deep into the year or as many innings before, though, so perhaps he’s getting a bit tired?

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Paul
13 years ago

Odorizzi’s velo is what we saw in his start. Pitching in relief he could probably touch 95, but a 90 mph avg. is what is he is.

However, I completely disagree with the take that the FB does not have movement. Perhaps is does not have a LOT of movement, but even in the gif above you can see that he gets good late movement. Watch the entire highlight vid over at MLB.com and you can see that first of all, the late movement on the FB is very effective, and second, he works a very slow CB that is also a nice pitch.

I was highly skeptical of him after being surprised by his smallish stature at the Futures Game, but after watching the highlight vid I’m very encouraged. I can understand the Greinke comps now, at least stuff-wise. He’s also a very good athlete, but Greinke has a much bigger and sturdier frame.

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