Pittsburgh — Max Clark and some of the other Detroit Tigers rookies went to dinner in Pittsburgh Sunday night. The topic quickly turned to the one thing they all have in common right now — the vagaries, nuances and challenges of transitioning and adjusting to big-league pitching.
"We were talking about how it's just insane how quickly the league transitions," Clark said. "It's not week by week. It's literally series by series."
It didn't take the league long to see that Clark, when he first came up, was susceptible to high-velocity fastballs and he was seeing a healthy dose of them. Going into Monday, 72.4% of the pitches he'd seen were heaters, four-seamers or sinkers.
He was hitting .227 on the four-seamers and .267 on the sinkers.
So imagine Cleveland right-hander Tanner Bibee's surprise last Tuesday when Clark laced a 93.6 mph heater for a single with an exit velocity of 103.6 mph. Later in the game he smoked another fastball to the track.
#clark #league #week #velocity
"We were talking about how it's just insane how quickly the league transitions," Clark said. "It's not week by week. It's literally series by series."
It didn't take the league long to see that Clark, when he first came up, was susceptible to high-velocity fastballs and he was seeing a healthy dose of them. Going into Monday, 72.4% of the pitches he'd seen were heaters, four-seamers or sinkers.
He was hitting .227 on the four-seamers and .267 on the sinkers.
So imagine Cleveland right-hander Tanner Bibee's surprise last Tuesday when Clark laced a 93.6 mph heater for a single with an exit velocity of 103.6 mph. Later in the game he smoked another fastball to the track.
#clark #league #week #velocity
3 days ago
