Dallas Kuechel started his journey to join the Atlanta Braves 25-man roster Monday night with a start at the Braves single-a affiliate, the Rome Braves.
The Atlanta Braves announced the signing of Dallas Kuechel Friday night and he was supposed to make his first Minor League start Saturday night with the Triple-A affiliate Gwinnett Stripers.
However, that game was rained out and his first start came Monday night with the Rome Braves.
Clearly, Kuechel was going against inferior talent against the New York Yankees single-a affiliate, the Charleston RiverDogs, but he did all you could ask of for a former Cy Young winner making his first start of the year.
The lefty posted a line 7 IP, 0 ER, 1 H, 1 BB, 9 K on 77 pitches — 55 of which were strikes. If this were a Major League game he would have continued into the night, but this was more about getting his innings in and getting out of the game feeling good.
The stadium didn’t have a radar gun so I was unable to get exact measurements on velocity, but his game isn’t based on velocity anyway, rather he uses the sinker to get groundouts.
With that said, his velocity passed the eye test and looked around 90 MPH.
Kuechel was truly dominant with 19 out of the 23 batters faced either grounding out or striking out, and only a couple of batters getting good wood on the ball.
He continually got ahead in counts and even on the one walk he was up 0-2 but after two questionable calls by the umpire he ended up walking the batter.
All five of Dallas Kuechel’s pitches looked to be on point. The cutter and sinker created weak contact throughout the night and his slider and change-up were used as out pitches. His fastball looked good staying out of the middle of the zone.
The slider would’ve been the pitch that would have shown the most rust. Typically if a pitcher is rusty a slider will either spin out or just hang resulting in long home runs (see Mike Foltynewicz).
However, his was tight with great breaking action and consistently made the RiverDog’s batters look silly.
The change-up was on point as well and stayed in the lower third of the zone and consistently got swings and misses.
Once it was clear he wasn’t coming out for the eighth inning, Kuechel received a standing ovation from the Braves faithful. Hopefully, this is just the beginning of a great relationship between Kuechel and Atlanta Braves fans.
The Rome Braves went on to win the game 1-0 in the bottom of the 10th.
Kuechel is supposed to make one more Minor League start before being called up to the Atlanta Braves roster. The second start should be with the Gwinnett Stripers, possibly this weekend.