The rain tonight held off just long enough for me to see Jameson Taillon pitch four full innings, and I left the stadium impressed. He was going up against another 2010 1st round draft pick out of high school, Jesse Biddle, who was going for Lakewood and Taillon clearly outpitched him.
The stats for his start read as follows: 4 innings, one hit, no runs, no walks and three strikeouts, but that obviously doesn’t tell the whole story. He was throwing all fastballs the 1st inning, needing just 9 pitches to get three easy groundouts. He was between 93-95 on every single pitch and six of the nine pitches were for strikes.
In the 2nd inning he threw 11 pitches and allowed his only two baserunners of the day. The first batter flew out to RF on a 95 mph pitch. He went 1-2 on the second batter with 93-94 MPH fastballs before throwing what looked like a change-up at 84 mph, which produced a soft grounder to 1B. With two out he got his first swing and miss of the game on a 94 mph pitch before giving up a broken bat infield single on his last 95 mph pitch of the night. To be honest, the infield single looked like an easy grounder off the bat, but Eric Avila, who has 22 errors already, didn’t get off a quick or strong throw and just missed getting the out. Jameson hit the next batter before getting a first pitch pop-up to 2b to end the inning.
In the 3rd, Taillon had his most work throwing 15 total pitches including a seven pitch AB that resulted in his 2nd strikeout. All three of his strikeouts came courtesy of off-speed pitches for the 3rd strike, two of them swinging and one on a check swing. In between strikeouts in the 3rd inning he got a low liner right to 1b for the 2nd out.
The 4th inning got a little iffy with the weather and Jameson worked quickly getting his 3rd K, followed by the hardest hit ball, which was a line drive right to the right fielder. He got his last out on an easy groundball to shortstop, with nine pitches total in the inning. Shortly there after the rain started hard and the game was called very quickly less than 30 minutes later.
The totals for the game were 44 pitches, 37 of them were fastballs with the following breakdown for speeds:
95 mph: five
94 mph: twelve
93 mph: eleven
92 mph: five
90-91 mph: one each
Two unknown speeds didn’t register, both fastballs to the last batter.
The off-speed pitches were all between 79-84 mph and he throws three (slider, curve, change) so I’m not sure what they were, but only one of them looked like a curveball. As I mentioned above three of the seven off-speed pitches resulted in strikeouts and another resulted in a called strike while 3 were called balls.
He threw 30 of his total pitches for strikes, 14 for balls. He faced 14 batters, 6 groundouts, 3 strikeouts, one line out, two fly outs, the infield hit and HBP. He got three total swing and misses, 6 foul balls.
The game will be completed tomorrow prior to the start of tomorrow’s game which has now become a seven inning game. The score is 3-0 Power in the top of the 5th with two outs and men on first and second. I will recap the batters performance tomorrow combining the two games into one report. One thing of note is that Rogelios Noris left the game in the middle of the 4th after grounding out to 2b. Didn’t see an injury so I’m not sure of the reason.
