Jake

I see we continue the time-honored tradition of trying to find meaning in the mostly meaningless day to day variations in production at the plate

Tanner McDougal gave up some very hard contact to ex-Sox Ryan Noda and Bryan Ramos

Not sure why they only had Sandlin throw 60 pitches today

Sox have to self-scout to figure out why batters know what pitch is coming from Noah. AAA hitters had absolutely no chance against his breaking pitches and it has been very, very different in MLB even though the slider grades out as a plus-plus pitch by movement. And it's such a fastball-heavy approach at this point there's no way they're just guessing right based on pitch sequences. As a side point, I don't know why he's been so reliant on the 4-seamer in the majors when that was never his main fastball in the minors.

I am increasingly convinced that hitters know exactly what pitch is coming from Noah. Hopefully Noah can figure out how to stop that from happening.

Somehow Romo's defense grades out as not too bad. Sox strategy with challenges is basically: make sure you use them and preferably the catchers should be using them. Sox as a team grade out as benefiting from challenges more than average and that's basically due to volume. Individually, the two primary catchers grade badly at challenges because they are so aggressive and miss a lot. But ultimately you get no benefit from keeping your challenges in your pocket. So the Sox are like high-volume chucker in basketball. Low accuracy, but a lot of buckets.

Shane had a very yippy outing his last time out. Not sure what's going on with him

First 3-ball count of the night is kinda crazy

Noah hasn't had all bad luck this year but he's had horrible luck today.

Romo fails to challenge strike 3 ☹️

Interestingly with Noah the stuff models all really like his slider but IMO it's been the pitch giving him the most trouble. My gut feeling is teams have scouted something that makes it easier to pick it up or know it's coming ahead of time. Hopefully whatever it is, it's something Noah can counteract.

To some extent, you're trading off two things — how far sideways you release it vs. how close to home you release it. It's not like an absolute tradeoff where you have to give up one completely to get the other, but the best extension guys are partly accomplishing that by releasing it later in the motion, i.e. straight out in front of you. But you can get some extension purely from the lower half and Noah is clearly not generating a lot from that...you can tell just from eyeballing what his legs do.

Two defensive swings, two hits for Nimmo

Hard to look back at his initial run in AA and find fault with the numbers, but I remember watching and noticing that the strikeouts and whiffs in general were almost always on the offspeed (mostly slider). Seemed like even the fastballs that were well-executed for a whiff would still get fouled off or hit softly. So my take then was that he wouldn't be racking up big whiff numbers if they were merely really good in AA and it wasn't driven by command problems down there. In AAA he showed some ability to get whiffs on the 4-seam but it's more about pitch sequencing when it works...get guys used to the sinker and cutter, then the 4-seam seems to zoom upwards. If the 4-seam is primary it's not going to get missed that often unless something else changes. And for whatever reason he's had terrible command of his sweeper for the most part in MLB and as of late hitters have looked surprisingly ready for it when he does get it in the zone.

When I see Romo swing and then I see where the ball goes, I am constantly surprised by how softly it gets hit. How do you do that? He's somehow not missing the ball entirely that often while also never hitting it square.

Luisangel has been hitting better but I'm telling you he's lost like 7 to 8 hits from having to run from the RH batter's box instead of lefty. And it's pretty easy to hit a bunch of choppers batting off-handed. Maybe Getz wasn't wrong, just early

My outlook on Noah was that if he failed it would be due to giving up hard contact. That's why all the walks and stuff after he was called up was so surprising. Seemed like his risk would be in failing to get enough strikeouts and getting hit around. The optimistic median outcome I felt like was an innings-eater guy, which of course would be great to have. Upside would be about him figuring out how to generate more whiffs of course.

It was 94mph 😭

Time will tell I suppose, but I wonder if Noah's velo is down in an effort to throw more strikes or if his arm/body is breaking down

What are we talking about? Maybe I missed the context. His breaking pitches haven't been put into play yet. Both of the relatively well-hit balls were on 4 seamers

Kumar Rocker is rocking and rolling

Cutter has only been thrown twice today and was fouled off the one time it was swung at

Nimmo's homer was hit on the second slowest swing to produce a homer since they started keeping track lol

As for what we saw from Thorpe's arsenal in MLB, the changeup was basically as advertised. Generated a nearly 40% whiff rate which is fantastic for any pitch, but especially a changeup and especially a changeup being thrown as often as it was. That's basically Devin Williams level of whiff-on-changeup and he was having to face batters multiple times a game. The rest of the mix was pretty suspect with the other offerings generating really, really low whiff rates and getting hit hard too often. Some of that was command and sequencing, some of it was surely inherent to the pitches he was throwing. He had started using his slider more right before the injury and that pitch was looking pretty useful for him. But that would be the big question mark for him — what does he use around the changeup, how much does he use his fastball, whether to use slider/cutter/sweeper as the glove side breaker, etc. Many guys never figure those things out, so it's tough to say whether he will or would have. Not to mention that many guys lose the shape on some of their pitches post-TJS so I'm very curious to get Statcast data on what he's throwing in 2026.

You'll have to ask Drew. His statement at that time indicated that his elbow was very sore after that excellent third-to-last start. Tried pitching through it the next two times through and it didn't work. Then bone spur surgery, then TJS coming back from the bone spur surgery. The bone spur was surely there to some extent before, but I don't know how much he felt it in the time that he was pitching adequately because I can't ask him. I doubt he faked the whole thing just to try to get Soxtalk off his back about two bad starts though.