{"id":6400,"date":"2013-04-06T11:56:36","date_gmt":"2013-04-06T15:56:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/?p=6400"},"modified":"2013-04-06T11:57:01","modified_gmt":"2013-04-06T15:57:01","slug":"this-is-why-they-play-162","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/?p=6400","title":{"rendered":"This is why they play 162…"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Haren's first Nats outing wasn't much better than his spotty Spring Training. Photo nats official via espn.com<\/p><\/div>\n

Dan Haren<\/strong>‘s debut with the Nats couldn’t have gone much worse, as he gave up 6 runs in 4 innings to help contribute to an ugly score line as the Nats lost 15-0 friday night<\/a> in Cincinnati.<\/p>\n

Haren’s troubles were simple; he did not hit his spots and left balls out over the plate.\u00a0 Each of the four homers he gave up were center cut 90mph meat-balls that missed the outside corner he was aiming for (and that Kurt Suzuki<\/strong> was asking for) by 6-8 inches.\u00a0 Professional hitters are going to punish these mistakes, and when you play in a bandbox as Cincinnati does, line drives to left field turn into homers instead of doubles off the wall.<\/p>\n

I turned the game off when Zach Duke<\/strong> let in the 7th run; he proceeded to show why he was available on a minor league deal last off-season.\u00a0 Hopefully subsequent appearances will continue to be of the mop-up variety where we don’t really care what the score line looks like, because that’s about what I’d expect of Duke after seeing last night’s performance.<\/p>\n

Haren’s pitch f\/x data isn’t encouraging<\/a>; max of 90.7mph on his fastball, but he only broached 90 a handful of times, losing his max velocity as the night went on and barely hitting 88 by the time he was done.\u00a0 Was he going to different pitches (cutters?)\u00a0 I liked his split-fingered fastball on the night but he threw mostly fastballs and cutters (according to pitch f\/x analysis anyway; i’m not sure how they tell the difference).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dan Haren‘s debut with the Nats couldn’t have gone much worse, as he gave up 6 runs in 4 innings to help contribute to an ugly score line as the Nats lost 15-0 friday night in Cincinnati. Haren’s troubles were simple; he did not hit his spots and left balls out over the plate.\u00a0 Each […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[983,906],"class_list":["post-6400","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mlbpitching","tag-dan-haren","tag-zach-duke"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6400","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6400"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6400\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6407,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6400\/revisions\/6407"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6400"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6400"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6400"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}