6-16-24 – By Gary Morgan – @garymo2007 on Twitter
It’s a fine line between Phenom and flame out, especially for fans. Personally, I expect to feel just about every range of emotion a fan can have during a rookie season, hell, I expect it for the first 2 or 3 seasons with most guys.
Jared Jones is no different. Well, he’s different, but he’s still subject to all the same things every rookie has to deal with too.
His numbers as a whole still look great on the season, maybe not phenom anymore, but still exciting. His incredible start to the season created expectation, expectation that even the most pragmatic among us struggled to see through to mention the league would adjust and more than that, eventually he’d get tired.
That’s typically where the mind goes.
The league has him figured out you’ll hear. He needs more pitches. What happened to his velocity?
Well, some of the league at least figured out if they’re going to get to him, what they need to look for. He has pitches, he just needs to become a bit more consistent with a couple of them and his velocity comes and goes based on his rest and conditioning. Sometimes he’s still hitting 101, sometimes he sees it drop to 95-96 either as the game rolls on or on short rest, even early on.
14 starts, 79 innings pitched, a 3.76 ERA with a 1.13 WHIP. That’s not bad, in fact, there isn’t a team in baseball that couldn’t find room for him in their rotation.
It’s not like he’s in some freefall.
His last 3 outings, 6 innings against the Dodgers with no earned runs, 5 innings against the Twins with 2 ER and 4.2 against the Rockies surrendering 6 earned. If this had been him all year, you’d probably see people like me telling you to be patient, expressing how young he is and why it’s worth seeing more. You know, like a normal rookie that hadn’t had his name in the thick of the Rookie of the Year conversation.
I’d be a lot more concerned if I were seeing a down trend in velocity that stuck. I’d be more concerned if I saw a pitcher who no longer looked like he could go get the strikeout when he really needed it. I’m not seeing that though, I’m seeing a player who yes, the league has scouted, and yes, needs to adapt and make his own move to push back, but more than anything, I’m seeing a kid who needs to figure out how to command his fastball more than just get away firing it right over the heart and letting the movement do his work.
His stuff moves enough to have that work fairly often, but against some of the teams he’ll face he needs to be able to paint that pitch. There are guys in this league that won’t struggle with velocity and it only takes one pitch not moving enough or worse, moving right into the hitting zone to do damage. Jones advantage is, those types of hitters are few and far between.
The other thing Jones has to adapt is knowing when his fastball does dip, he can’t get away with that middle middle approach the way he can when he’s hitting 100. Unhittable at 100 for 99% of the league, fairly touchable at 96 for 50% of the hitters he’ll face. There are nights when it takes him an inning or two to realize he doesn’t have that velocity and start trying to use his other offerings, and be a little more precise with the heater.
Should you be worried that the Pirates 3 headed monster is actually more like 2? Well, if you wanna be, but I’d rather look at the stuff and the maturity beyond his years. He’s racing through lessons that take most players a season to learn, sometimes a trip back to AAA. Instead, we’ve seen him already adjust and focus primarily on his offspeed stuff from the jump against some lineups. I’ve seen that ability and will take years to develop, if ever.
Even last night against the Rockies, he suffered from trying to adjust. They were seeking his slider and doing a great job of laying off the pitch when it missed the zone. They hunted sliders that finished in the zone, an adjustment they forced him into by being selective.
Grandal and Jones punched back from that by throwing the heater and trying to paint edges with the slider. It led to uncharacteristic walks and ultimately more impactful contact. In the future, you’d like to see him use his changeup or curve to slow down the bats a bit to compensate for the velo being a touch down, but overall, just not his sharpest outing.
Altitude is always a factor in Colorado, but if it weren’t time to take a look at how the league as a whole was starting to push back before Denver, it wouldn’t be now, this has been going on for his past 5 or 6 outings.
I truly believe he’ll find his way and the talent is still elite. Bumps in the road, and non-linear bumps by the way. There will be more elite, there will be more not so elite, he’s a rookie.
Should he be seen in the same light as the comps to his early season numbers? Well, probably not, most of the comps have been doing this for years and that in and of itself is a level of special you can’t see until you’ve seen it. He has those kind of tools, but it’s too early to act like it’s a given.
If healthy, Paul Skenes and Jared Jones probably won’t reach their peak as pitchers until they’ve done it a few years and seen more of what this league does to someone who has largely not been hit in their career.
Jared is fine, he’s just not polished and at some point MLB is always the sandpaper.
Steel City Pirates 