Atlanta Braves fell in Texas doubleheader game 1… but what’s up with Gohara?

The Rangers’ bats looked formidable this week, but how did the 21-year-old rookie look in his major league debut?

If you checked out “Atlanta Braves twitter” after the first game of the Wednesday double-header, Luiz Gohara was ‘squeezed’ by home plate umpire Carlos Torres.  There may have been some of that, but I wish to offer an alternate viewpoint.

Gohara went for a total of 4 innings, giving up six earned runs – the result of 4 hits, 4 walks, and some occasionally sketchy defense.

He threw 83 pitches, 51 of them for strikes.

I’ve been perusing the strikezone maps from the game.  This might be a bit early to do so – brooksbaseball.net has the data up on their site; baseballsavant does not.

But what I see does seem to back up what my eyes told me.

Neither starting pitcher… nor at least one reliever for the Braves, either… was exactly on their game.  Quite a number of pitches were well wide of the strike zone on both sides.

Gohara’s slider seemed to be doing its job:  around 70% of them ended up low in the zone.  Most of these resulted in whiffs.  That bodes well for the future, for the hitters were geared up for the fastball (at nearly 97 mph) and failing to follow the movement of the slower slider (84.5 mph)

But it’s the fastball that gave him fits at times – with nothing to do with umpire calls.

The Timing

I noticed a tendency of Gohara to lose the timing between his body and arm.  On several occasions – and almost exclusively to right-hand hitters – his arm lagged behind his body.  This resulted in pitches well outside and up.

Was this the result of simple nerves?  Entirely possible.  Was he getting squeezed?  There may have been a couple of incidents, but if any pitchers were getting that treatment, it was the Rangers much more than Atlanta…particularly to right-hand batters.

It did appear that he recognized the problem, but unfortunately was over-correcting at times, which led to his arm being too far out in front… for low and inside outcomes.

3 of Gohara’s 4 walks seemed to be the result of these outside pitches – at least that seemed to be the case for those to Mike Napoli (twice).  The other walk was issued to lefty-hitting Joey Gallo.

The Cause?

First off, I don’t believe this is a chronic problem.  It likely was related to ‘first start jitters’ and that seems to have been confirmed in his discussion with the media after the game:

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Gohara – you gotta remember, he’s still just 21 years old – had a similar hiccup when he hit AAA this year.  That was July 28th in Syracuse:  5 runs on 4 hits in 4.2 innings (4 earned) with 5 walks and 5 K… allowing 1 homer.

Those numbers are similar to what he did on Wednesday.

The rest of his starts at Gwinnett went better.  He had one more 5 run game, but walked 1, 3, 2, 2, 1, 2 in those 6 starts in August.  That’s just 11 in 40.2 innings… perfectly acceptable.

If that arm thing is indeed a tendency, then it’s something that should improve over time.

I will say this, though:  for a team (the Mariners) that was concerned about Gohara’s shoulder, he certainly looked strong on Wednesday – 97 mph with control.  This got him to nearly 128 innings for the year.

Next: Showered with Freebies

I guess the Braves medical staff was right.