Bleier, Paisano Video

Friday, May 01, 2009

(3) Comments


(pictured, Richard Bleier)
We should have known this was coming. When you have players by the names "Fry" and "Hamburger", things happen. The Crawdads have started a "Burger and Fries" promotion that rewards the entire crowd with free Pepsi if Eric Fry gets a hit and Mark Hamburger gets a strikeout in the same game.

And on the inaugural night of "Burger and Fries" the crowd was drinking free Pepsi.

Onto the game...

I have seen the last two Richard Bleier starts and my feeling is that the guy is a Kason Gabbard starter kit. Bleier is most productive when mixing his three pitches equally (sinker, hard slider, curve). In his previous start, Richard was deadly accurate with his offspeed pitches and had a lot more snap on his curve than he did last night. Again, Richard topped out at 87 mph on his 2-seam fastball and he didn't touch that often.

In the first inning Bleier attacked with fastball after fastball, pounding hitters inside. The Lakewood hitters timed Bleier's fastball quickly, hitting 3 singles and another laser directly at a waiting outfielder. I contest that Bleier doesn't have the kind of fastball that can be thrown 15 straight times with success. He gets in trouble quickly when he doesn't vary his arsenal.

After the first Bleier went away from the fastball throwing slider after slider. Bleier throws a hard, 80-84mph slider and used it similarly to his fastball, attacking right handed batters inside and producing groundballs. Bleier's curve did not have much snap and didn't produce swinging strikes like it did last week.

The Crawdads' starting pitcher was only charged with 2 of the 5 runs scored. I feel this was one of those outings where the scorekeeper made the SP's line look better than it was. For example, in the top of the fourth, Bleier gives up a leadoff double and a single, but because of a sloppy relay throw from Eric Fry a runner scores. I don't think Bleier is as good as his early season line looks and I certainly think Bleier carries partial responsibility for the three unearned runs on this night.

It's a small sample size and I am allowing myself the opportunity to change my mind, but at this point I see Bleier as a soft-tossing lefty that has to have all three pitches working and mixed well to succeed.

Here's a video of that sloppy 4th inning. The last out isn't on the video...catcher Doug Hogan threw out a man stealing second to end the inning.




I got quite a bit of video from this game. I will put out some more stuff, including some Mark Hamburger video (who touched 93mph), over the weekend.

Here's David Paisano's 5 at-bats from the game. It was an unlucky night for David. Some line drive outs and a beautiful bunt that just died in front of the plate.




Check out Mark's observations in the post below. Good stuff.

3 Responses to "Bleier, Paisano Video"

Mark Parker said :
May 1, 2009 at 11:39 AM
I made a change on my blog concerning the single, error 7 play in the 4th after seeing the video. My recollection wasn't as good as I thought after seeing the video... noticed that the effort by catcher and pitcher backing up probably wasn't what it needed to be.
XXZ said :
May 2, 2009 at 2:01 AM
Hey man, have you had a chance to check out the back end of the Shellfish bullpen? What do you think of Nevarez, Hamburger and Nam?
Mark Parker said :
May 2, 2009 at 1:06 PM
Nevarez:
After a shaky start to the season, he has looked pretty well. Struck out the side on Friday night, allowing only a blooper to center.

Hamburger the same sort of start.

Nam, I really like. From what I can tell, he seems to have good life on the fastball and mixes speeds well.

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