NEWSLETTER
I have no idea if anyone is going to remember this the way I do, but it’s all I can think about after tonight’s start by Hayden Wesneski.
Back in the second-half of the 2015 season, Jake Arrieta was on the heater to end all heaters. It was the stretch that led to his 2015 NL Cy Young award, in case you forgot. And at the end of that stretch, at the beginning of the Cubs playoff run to the NLCS, Arrieta tossed a four-hit shutout against the Pirates in the Wild Card game. By results only, it was another peak-Arrieta performance in a season full of them.
But if you actually remember that game, you’ll recall that he did run into a bit of trouble and wasn’t quite as good as he had been throughout the second-half of the year. But when Sahadev Sharma framed his start (correctly!) that way in the postgame press conference, he got a bit of grief, because, well … it was a four-hit, complete-game shutout in a one-game playoff. It was a funny moment. Sharma was right, but I understand the reaction, too.
Anyway, that reminds me of Hayden Wesneski tonight.
The results were – frankly – outstanding. He threw 7.0 innings of one-run ball, with no walks and SEVEN strikeouts. He netted 11 whiffs and had an excellent 39 CSW%. And at one point, he sat down 15 Athletics batters in a row. And I will stop there for a moment, because that, alone, is impressive — even if it was against one of the worst teams in baseball. Nobody needed a pallet-cleaning, confidence-building performance more than Wesneski and that’s exactly what he delivered.
But if you actually watched the game, you’ll know he wasn’t quite his sharpest.
Wesneski began the game with meatball after meatball after meatball, sometimes getting punished for it, sometimes getting lucky. He didn’t walk any batters, so you can say the control was okay, but the command … oh boy the command was off. In other words, even when he was landing one in there for a strike, he was missing his spots badly. The final line could’ve looked a lot different if things hadn’t gone his way early.
But here’s where we get back into the compliment column: You know what’s GREAT for a young pitcher’s development? Figuring out how to navigate your way through a start when you don’t have your best stuff – be it command, movement, velocity, whatever. And that’s exactly what Wesneski did tonight.
So maybe it wasn’t the sharpest outing. And maybe he’ll need to be a lot better against non-A’s opponents. But for tonight, he was good. Great, even. And it was awesome. I am very excited for him. It’s exactly what he needed. He so clearly builds off his own momentum from inning-to-inning (it’s exactly what I pointed out before his start tonight). And now we hope that momentum carries from game-to-game.
