Starter Spotlight: Paint It Blach

6-15-24 – By Michael Castrignano – @412DoublePlay on X

A weird case of having a better ERA at home (3.86) than away (7.50), LHP Ty Blach does exactly two things really well this year: limiting walks and getting hitters to chase outside the zone. Unfortunately for him, everything else he does as is fairly pedestrian or worse.

In 10 games this season (7 starts), Blach has a 4.84 ERA and 1.41 WHIP with 22 Ks and 8 walks in 44.2 innings of work.

The 4.2% walk rate is a career-best rate and far lower than his 7% mark – likely due to the fact that he gets hitters chasing pitches out of the zone at an above average rate. However, those chases have not resulted in many strikeouts as his 11.5% is one of the lowest in baseball. No one has a lower rate with as many batters faced (192) as Blach and only Sixto Sanchez (10.5%) has a worse rate with more than 150 batters faced (162).

His arsenal consists of a high-80s sinker, low-80s changeup, low-80s cutter and high-70s curve. He runs the sinker middle-middle and keeps the changeup low. His cutter and curve also run low but have less consistency on the location. The intent is to create ground-balls but the results don’t quite match up.

He relies mostly on the sinker with the changeup as his main secondary option with both pitches fairing poorly in both surface and underlying metrics.

His sinker has been hit at a .355 clip and slugged at .505 while his changeup has opponents hitting .375 and slugging .500.

The cutter (.275 wOBA) and curve (.095 wOBA) have performed much better for Blach but in smaller sample sizes as his cutter had an oSLG of .652 in 43 batted ball events last season.

With the slow-tossing southpaw on the bump today, Pirates hitters should look to attack early and often.

Blach has a first pitch strike rate of 70.8% and he’s allowed 4 runs in each of his last two games with all of the damage coming in the first 4 innings. The team couldn’t get to Feltner yesterday but has fared well against lefties with a 102 wRC+ thus far this season and a .712 OPS in these situations – compared to .635 when facing RHP.

Take some good swings and attack the meatball sinkers and hanging changeups. This is a team the Pirates should beat and a pitcher they should pummel.

Let’s Go Bucs!