So there's some concern that Matt Moore was tipping his pitches in his game yesterday against the Red Sox. Check out these quotes:
"We were trying to think of anything that he might be doing to tip his pitches, and we were talking about he might be tapping his glove on his fastball or something like that," [Chris] Gimenez said. "I didn't see that, but Hick did."
After the game, Hickey said their concerns were alleviated because video showed it was more a matter of bad location on Moore's pitches than anything else.
And Moore said he was confident there was no issue with tipping off the hitter -- "I don't think so at all" -- and had not been in the past. "Not that I've been told," he said. "Maybe years ago when I was in rookie ball or something like that. But not as far as I can remember."
I'm at work so I can't go back and watch the video of the game, but this stuff aligns with what I found last year regarding Moore's glove-tapping. The short-story version is that he tended to sort of pump the ball into his glove before throwing a fastball, but his hand remained still on curveballs. Check out the links to last year's stuff to read more (again, I'm at work, so I'm hoping the videos still work).
When I get home, I'll take a look at yesterday's game and see if I notice the same sort of thing happening. Jim Hickey says the tape doesn't show anything, and frankly Moore wasn't locating his fastball anyway, so I wouldn't be surprised if the Sox were just crushing mistakes. But it's still worth checking out.
Even sitting at home and not knowing much about pitching mechanics even I noticed the glove tap on TV going back to the ALDS game.
ReplyDeleteEarly in the boston game he was doing the glove tap but later he stopped doing it.
But yeah, on the fastball he does the tap, and on change and curve he holds still... not EVERY time... but I can't think of him consistently doing the glove tap on any other kind of pitch.
Got a chance to watch the video, he was doing the same thing he had at Durham. Scott from the podcast will have a fanpost on DRB at some point this week with what we found, I'll link to that when it's up.
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