JMU or one of the folks who are comfortable using pitch/fx or looking at video - when this game is up on Brooks Baseball or whatever, could you look at Lannan's past few starts and some of the ones before he was sent down and see what sort of changes there have been to delivery, velocity, movement, etc ...? Love to see someone explain the alchemy.
So, this would take me much longer to do a more in-depth look (such as isolating LH vs RH matchups or specific PA where he got beat/was successful), but I saw some obvious things on the pitch F/X data that stood out in terms of Lannan's starts when he was moderately to mostly successful vs the ones where he stunk.
- The key seems to be his curve, something I have alluded to in a few of my posts. In starts where he was successful, his curve ball dropped anywhere from an inch to two inches more. In some bad starts he had good movement on the curve, but the difference was that his strike percentage for those curveballs was hovering around the 40% area when he was not successful, and closer to 60% when he was. Also, in starts where he struggled with the feel or location of his curve, his release point was a few inches higher than when he did not struggle with feel or location with that pitch.
- Differences in his changeup were also noticeable b/w good and bad starts. When he has been on, the changeup was around 83-84 MPH with around 10 inches of horizontal break. When he was off, the change was hovering around 81-82 MPH and had somewhere between 6-8.5 inches of horizontal break.
- His two seamer, which runs away from righties and towards lefties, was breaking further away from righties in his better starts with less vertical movement and vice versa for the worse starts.
- Since being called back up, the slider, change, and two seamer have been put in play at a much lower percentage than they were earlier in the year for Lannan. He has also been getting a ridiculous amount of whiffs from his change since getting called back up.