We’ve all been there: You’ve started reading a book for pleasure, only to get interrupted by reading for work. By the time you get back to the novel you were looking forward to, you have to start it all over again. Chapter One is still a pleasure a second time, but it’s too familiar to be a thrill. It’s going to take another session or two in order to get locked in.
That’s how I felt watching Michael Kopech’s first outing of this spring, which came 364 days after his first and only outing of the 2020 season. Both were 1-2-3 innings with one strikeout. The differences were subtler — 11 pitches then, nine pitches now; 101 mph max fastball then, 99 mph now.
The biggest departures were visual. In a nod to his season-opening assignment, he worked exclusively from the stretch, and he went fastball-slider-curveball on his first three pitches. He explained his delivery and arsenal as a deliberate attempt to acclimate to relief, preparing for appearances where the windup isn’t an option, and enjoying the luxury of not worrying about saving pitches for later looks.
It worked just as well as his fastball-heavy approach during last year’s inning. He got a groundout from Aaron Nola on a curveball …
… froze Jorge Mateo on a 2-2 fastball …
… and then got Ivan Castillo to fly out to center on the first pitch, which was also Kopech’s last.
The reaction from hitters suggested he was either getting a generous outside corner, showing excellent gloveside command, or some combination thereof. But if Kopech received any help, he also helped himself. When he fell behind 2-0 on Mateo, he responded by pumping one high fastball over Mateo’s swing plane, then throwing a decent slider that Mateo pulled into the ground foul of third base, which leveled the count for the punchout.
We’d already seen Kopech reintroduce himself to standard March competition, so the satisfaction is going to come when Kopech proves able to do it again, and again, and again. The nice thing about the shift to relief work is that he doesn’t have a mountain in front of him. He’ll likely go an inning at a time the rest of the way, maybe two if it’s smooth. He doesn’t have to worry about in-game stamina or command of all his pitches. How he looks in his second game in three days is the bigger task at hand. Hopefully the adjustments that take place away from cameras are going just as well as the changes that we saw on the mound.
(Photo by Quinn Harris/Icon Sportswire)
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March 10, 2021 at 08:34PM
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Another smooth March reintroduction for Michael Kopech - Sox Machine
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