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Good morning baseball fans!
Dave Cameron of FanGraphs says there are reasons to worry about Astros starter Dallas Keuchel.
Again, it’s worth emphasizing that we’re talking about two starts. No conclusions should be drawn yet, and it’s entirely possible that Keuchel gets his stuff back and starts getting more calls at the bottom of the zone again. We’re dealing with speculation here, not any kind of certainty, and we don’t have anywhere near enough data to suggest that Keuchel is screwed.
But as a guy who didn’t even break 90 all that often, he’s always going to have a lower margin for error than other pitchers. As Jered Weaver has shown, velocity loss can matter even for guys who don’t rely on hard fastballs, and if Keuchel doesn’t get as many called strikes as he got last year, his problems could compound.
The Astros offense looks potentially quite good, especially if Tyler White can continue to provide an answer at first base and A.J. Reed joins the club at some point this summer. The bullpen should be good once Ken Giles stops giving up home runs. But for the Astros to win the AL West, they’re going to need solid starting pitching, and Keuchel was the guy who allowed the rest of the rotation to just be okay. If he’s not the Dallas Keuchel of 2015, the AL West could end up as a race to 85 wins.
Here is the MLB Week-In-Review.
The video suggests that in a small-sample Kevin Pillar edges Kevin Kiermaier in the Statcast data.
Here is the MLB Blog Review for this week.
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Today in Baseball History: In 1945, one-armed outfielder Pete Gray makes his major league debut for the St. Louis Browns, going 1-for-4 in the 7-1 victory.