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OT: The Toronto Blue Jays

Great start when things are bad...lol, he's about to reap a whirlwind.

I expect the Leafs to win tonight, otherwise I'd expect all the Fan talk tomorrow and for a while, to be about Manoah.
 
Arsenal isn't a lock for ace type stuff. gameday says his slider was in the low 80s which is a real slow slider. His changeup was also sitting around 90, which isnt huge separation from his 96 heater.

But his pitches seem to have plenty of movement, and the command looks good too, and there's plenty of velo there.
 
zeke said:
Arsenal isn't a lock for ace type stuff. gameday says his slider was in the low 80s which is a real slow slider. His changeup was also sitting around 90, which isnt huge separation from his 96 heater.

But his pitches seem to have plenty of movement, and the command looks good too, and there's plenty of velo there.
Click to expand...

Low-80s slider when you have a 96 FB hopefully will act almost more like a slow curve than be something people can tee up on. If they're looking for the fastballs or even the fast change, the slider will probably fool them.

That change in the high-80s will be big for getting lefties out. From looking at that video, it's going to be lethal because so many people are going to be eyeing it like a FB over the plate, but then it's going to be outside of the zone and hopefully lead to some weak contact. He was wild on a few throws, but also had lots of nicely placed balls. I'd probably like to see a couple more cases where that FB tails up on batters getting them to swing under it, but he was good at painting the outside of the plate to both sides of batters.
 
I like the lateral movement on his fastball. And his change has a tonne of movement, but is also 90mph. The slider does not look awesome to me, especially at that speed. He threw a bunch of hangers as well, but I think the movement on his other pitchers made it hard to tee up anything. It's an unusual mix, and we'll have to see if he is able to make adjustments after MLB clubs have more data on him. It's possible that he needs to throw his slider harder and slow the change down a bit, but it's also possible that he throws them that way on purpose because nobody can hit him. Check back in a few months.

I don't see an ace necessarily just from that one start, but he has a chance to be very good.
 
Judge was sitting on the slider on 3-2 in his first AB, by the way, which is why he looked like such a fool. He probably thought Manoah wouldn't challenge him with the fastball after that 3-1 swing. Could have been a very different result.
 
Didnt love how often he was in the middle of the plate with his fastball and how bad he was missing when he was trying to paint corners with it. Needs to get that fastball down, because you're not going to generate a lot of swings and misses in MLB with 95-96 over the heart of the plate once hitters have a book on you.

Live arm though, definitely. Theres a pretty high ceiling here, maybe not an ace but fringey #1 type stuff
 
There's a lot to like about having a +2 seam/+4 seam/+change that all look the same out of the hand and just break/move differently half way through their travel. Agreed that he needs to shave 2-3 mph off of that change though and just generally command it all better than what we saw in his debut. Give those 2-3 mph to that slider and even if it's never more than a "show me" slider that he can get over the plate when he needs it, that's a great mix.

I hope his command was opening night jitters though, he benefitted a lot from the Yankees never having seen him before I think.
 
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