Game 86: Yankees (Taillon) at Red Sox (Pivetta)

Scouting report on Pivetta from Reddit:

Tonight the yanks close out the series vs. the red sox when they face righty Nick Pivetta. He owns a 3.68 ERA and is the only Starter from the original Red Sox Rotation that is not currently on the injured List.

so lets see some nuggets about the guy:

Pivetta throws a 4sm Fastball about 50 % of the time against righties and lefties. Against lefties he will throw a Knuckle Curve (30%) and a slider. On top of that, he will sprinkle in some Changeups against the lefties, but very rarely. Against righties he wont throw changeups and throw more of the slider and about the same amount of the Knuckle Curve.

His 4sm Fastball ranks as the 8th (!) best pitch in the majors this year. So its safe to say that the Fastball is his bread and butter pitch. When he gets behind (which he rarely does) he will use it a lot more. His Knuckle-Curveball, while moving a lot (i would like to say it falls out of the sky), is ranked as one of the bottom 10% pitches. He makes up for that one with his slider though, that one is ranked in the top 10% of pitches in the mlb. So his stuff is pretty wild.

While he is considered the Ace of the Staff right now, looking at the baseball savant page you wouldnt make that guess. A lot of white and blue on the metrics. His expected ERA is higher than his actual ERA as well. He is about league average in both Walks and Strikes. Overall looking at the Spray chart of his allowed Hits and Homers i would like to argue that he got bailed out by the monster in left at least 3 or 4 times on line drives that should have been homers.

Pivetta has had a bad April (which probably is the reason for his "mid" baseball Savant Page) followed by a great May and June. He started his July with allowing 7 ER against Tampa in his last outing. But i tell you one thing: If you cant get to Pivetta he will go very deep into the game and even has the potential to go 9 IP, as he has done earlier this year. On the other hand he did have a couple of "miss" games during his very good stretch as well. I wouldnt call him a hit or miss type of pitcher though, he just has had too many good games to call him that.

Pivetta did pitch against the yanks earlier this year. He allowed 4 hits. 2 of which where Homers, by the hands of Stanton and Rizzo. The other two where line drives by Donaldson and Gallo (who got thrown out on his attempt to get to second). So maybe the yanks got something on the man.

Lets hope the yanks make the start to his July very bad. And they really wanna do that because if they dont, next week is gonna be bad news again, as he is likely to pitch against the yanks next week as well.