Bad launch unmasked

In baseball, there are pitches that batters sometimes fail to hit. There are elite pitches, good pitches, and of course mediocre pitches. We see it all the time, hitters and pitchers making mistakes that usually result from an “unmasked bad pitch.”

How could it be? That was one of my questions after Twins starter, right-hander Bailey Ober, attempted a risky magic act. At a 1-0 count, he threw his changeup all over the center of the strike zone against Yordan Álvarez. Even if you weren't watching Game 1 of the ALDS between the Twins and Astros this Saturday night at Minute Maid Park, you can probably imagine the result: a two-run bomb that was launched at an exit velocity of 99.8 mph. The ball landed 379 feet in right field.

Astros 3, Twins 0.

“I watched a couple of videos there before I faced him for the first time,” Yordan said in a postgame press conference about how he prepared after his first matchup against Ober. “And watching the videos is not the same as seeing it in person. He's a really big guy, he has really good extension. So, I was a little surprised the first time. But the second time I came up to bat I already had a pretty clear idea.”

Yordan Álvarez's two-run homer increased the lead for the Astros*, while veteran right-hander Justin Verlander ate up two-thirds of the game without allowing a run.

*Just look at this graph to deduce where it says danger:

Home runs by Yordan Álvarez against changeups

Still, the Twins did not give up, although coming back from a five-run deficit seemed like an impossible mission against the Astros bullpen.

Going back to Yordan's home run, I don't think Ober's big sin was taking it in the first playoff start of his career. Yordan has enough potential and talent to crush any elite pitch in MLB today. He has also shown that he can do it under the pressure of the playoffs.

That history precisely made me reflect on the pitching of Ober, who had struck out Yordan on a 0-2 count with a high fastball (outside the strike zone) during the first inning.

So, the strategy of rescanning with the changeup made some sense, but Ober couldn't control the launch command. While Yordan swung his bat gently, catcher Ryan Jeffers checked to see if the fearsome Cuban slugger remained in the same position in the batter's box. Jeffers framed where he wanted the pitch, in the far corner over low, but Ober made a slight slip.

The 84.5 mph changeup remained, as hitters often say, “floating” in the center of the strike zone. Of course, any batter or even Yordan himself could have hit a fieldable ball. Baseball is unpredictable. That was one of many possibilities since the pitcher threws a pitch toward the plate. But then the probabilities of a localization error being fatal become intertwined.

For that unavoidable reason, against elite hitters with the ability to make adjustments from one pitch to the next, the slightest deficiency could be costly.

In short, the three runs that Ober allowed in the same number of innings were produced by home runs: José Altuve's spectacular homer on the first pitch of the game and, two innings later, Yordan Álvarez's timely hit.

After Verlander celebrated his quality outing of six scoreless innings, the Twins reacted with back-to-back by Jorge Polanco and Royce Lewis off reliever Héctor Neris, a pair of home runs that reduced the deficit, to 5-4. At that moment, the two home runs that Ober allowed would have put a notable advantage in the hands of the bullpen, but then Yordan Álvarez crushed a sweeper from Caleb Thielbar and sentenced Minnesota with a solo home run in the bottom of the seventh inning.

Once again, Yordan Álvarez once again made the difference in favor of the Astros: he drove in half of the runs in the 6-4 victory. That last line surely won't be forgotten by Ober and Thielbar, who threw a couple of bad pitches that were “unmasked” by one of the most efficient hitters in the game.