Defensive Indifference

Now that I’ve recovered from this morning’s “festivities” (it was a good game, but baseball is meant to be played in the afternoon not over a morning sugar-free Red Bull), I’m ready to react to the action.

My main impression from today’s game is that Daisuke Matsuzaka still has some work to do. Dice-K went five strong, and after a rough start looked like the same tantalizingly dominant pitcher he was last year — impressive in stretches, wildly frustrating at other times. He did admit to being nervous:

“Given the opportunity to start on opening day, I did feel a little nervous and a little excited and that might have shown,” said Matsuzaka, who signed a $52 million, six-year contract with Boston before last season after eight years with the Seibu Lions. “I’d like to apologize to all the fans who turned out and wanted to see me go deep in the game.”

But without being too much of an armchair psychologist, I think there are some confidence issues at play here — not confidence issues in the sense that Matsuzaka has a fragile mindset, just in the sense that it doesn’t seem like he always trusts his stuff. When he was off in the first two innings, he was way off, missing wildly.

He’s capable of missing bats though. He struck out six hitters in five innings and made his opponents swing and miss on 13 of the 51 strikes he threw (I had to hand count because there is no Pitch F/X data for Japan games, but that will be coming later this year). When he found the zone, A’s hitters whiffed more than a quarter of the time.

Matsuzaka’s goal for the remainder of the season should be to nibble less and trust his arsenal even more — he has swing-and-miss stuff and he doesn’t need to locate it perfectly every time to have success.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 25th, 2008 at 7:05 pm and is filed under A's, Red Sox. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.