Light 'em up boys, this ball's going 23 over the limit.

Because I love you, my three loyal readers, I turned on the 11:30 showing of the Reds/A’s game on MLB network last night. In addition to hearing the TV guy repeatedly and bizarrely mispronounce ‘Cozart’ and briefly thinking that Manny Ramirez had pigtails, I also logged velocities from all of Cueto’s 51 pitches. Actually, I missed one, so  50 out of 51 pitches. Here’s the chart, it’s a google spreadsheet.

Here’s my notes:

• Cueto did get his fastball up to 93 mph, according to the TV’s gun, but only a couple times. His two-seam fastball average velocity is a little over 93, so at this point in the spring, the velocity looks fine. Other than that, the fastball mostly hung around in the 92 mph range, but was already tailing off a bit towards the end of the game.
• Speaking of which, I thought it was a lot of pitches for early March, but 51 pitches probably is about right. I also noticed that at about 40 pitches, Hanigan came to the mound, then Zavada started warming up, and I think Cueto threw mostly breaking and off-spead pitches after that. I am interested in the spring training schedules of our starting pitchers – but I don’t have a very good frame of reference.
• I didn’t actually try to look at the type of pitch. My terrible, but obviously not so secret, secret is that I am super terrible at pitch recognition. That’s why I reference pitchFx charts about every other post. His fastball did seem to have some good movement. And there were definitely a couple sliders that were nice and slide-y.
• Although it doesn’t matter, I think one of the reasons that Cueto happened to run into trouble yesterday is that the A’s were being pretty sparing with their swings. There were only a couple swings and misses that I remember. The results broke down like this: 11 balls in play, 18 balls, 13 strikes, 8 fouls, and 1 hit by pitch.