Nick Blackburn

While following yet another disappointing showing by Nick Blackburn on GameCast, I decided to spend some of the time investigating the pitch selection of the Twins struggling starter. Here's what I came up with:

Blackburn threw 62 pitches on Saturday.
53 Fastballs (including 3 cutters)
9 Off-speed

That comes out to 86% of all pitches were of the fastball variety.

Of the 6 hits he gave up (2 doubles and 4 homeruns), 5 of the 6 (83%) were put into play by fastballs, which only makes sense since that's what he mainly threw.

Two things are fascinating to me:
1) Four of the Tiger batters saw only fastballs. Three of them (Ordonez, Guillen, and Avila) hit homeruns. The fourth (Santiago) hit a double.

2) In Nick's first start this month (6.1 IP, 9 H, 7 R (4 earned)) against Tampa, he threw...drumroll please...85% fastballs (& cutters). In his stellar month of May, he threw less than 80% fastballs & cutters and over 13% changeups. This month's changeups...less than 5%.

If you look at Nick's Pitch type and value on fangraphs.com, you'll see that his sinker (fastball) is his best pitch by far (1.7w) and that his changeup is his worst (-1.4) for the month of July. However, if you go back to the month of May when he went 5-0 with a 2.65 ERA, you see that his fastball value was 7.1w and his changeup an unspectacular -1.0w.

To conclude: He's throwing less off-speed, which is making his fastball more predictable, and therefore more hittable. I'm not saying that he needs to get batters out using his off-speed, because his career numbers show us that he gets batters out by throwing his fastball. What he needs to do is throw the off-speed more often to keep hitters off balance, otherwise you're punching your ticket to LA to throw in the Home Run Derby.