Dive, Dive

MLB.com must be getting desperate for material.  I mean, they actually did a story on a submarine pitcher.

 

That would be the Giants’ Tyler Rogers, who had a nice cup of coffee with SF last September (17.2 innings pitched, 1.02 ERA and 2-0 record).  This being a puff piece, everybody quoted only had the nicest things to say about the 29-year old right-hander and his style of delivery, which has his pitching arm coming pretty close to scraping the mound.  Now, if this were serious baseball, the writer might have posed a question along the lines of: What would happen if a team paired a submariner with a knuckleball pitcher?

 

Imagine Ted Abernathy and Hoyt Wilhelm coming in out of the pen today.  Aaron Judge and company would literally swing themselves out of their shoes.  That’s how I’d put together a pitching staff once I bought a team.  Analytics-bound front offices would go nuts trying to figure out how to counter pitches that float or come from down under.

 

Most likely, they’d instruct coaches to tell hitters to swing harder; plate discipline is so yesterday.  That would be the approach for three-four years, at least.  Of course, both submariners and knuckleballers are easy to steal off of; one has a time-consuming windup, the other throws a slow pitch with a nasty habit of bouncing in the dirt.  But guess what?

 

Analytics doesn’t believe in stealing bases.  So, you go, Tyler Rogers.  The powers that be have no clue how to stop the likes of you.