In his start on Sunday, Michael Lorenzen unveiled his new curveball against the Jacksonville Suns. He has only been working on the pitch for about a week.
“I just started working on [the curveball] like a week ago,” Lorenzen said with a laugh. “I was watching [Cardinals starter Adam] Wainwright throw and [Dodgers starter Clayton] Kershaw throw, and they have these big, loopy curveballs. I was interested in throwing one, I really wanted to throw one.
“I watched some videos on Wainwright, how he gripped it, how he threw it. I got some input from a couple guys on the team, what they do when they throw it. I just started working on it last series, the day before I pitched. I threw it in the bullpen for the first time just three days ago and it was really good, so I threw it today and got a strikeout with it.”
Lorenzen of course is still very new to pitching, in his only season of his life solely as a pitcher, he has had plenty of success with Double-A Pensacola. The right hander has a 2.26 ERA in nine starts spanning 51.2 innings with just 40 hits allowed, two home runs, 18 walks and 37 strikeouts. He has been a groundball machine as well with a 60.3% groundball rate in the Southern League, where the league average is 45%, making his rate 33% higher than average.
He had been a fastball, slider and change up pitcher coming into the game. This was the first time all season that he would be facing a line up for the second time, having somehow faced nearly every team in the league without matching up against someone twice.
So, what did the new pitch look like? Well, at times it looked like a brand new pitch. It was a bit slurvy at times, flattening out some. But he also threw several good curveballs in the game, which is kind of amazing since he has thrown it for all of a week and he could locate the pitch and threw several good ones. Lorenzen already has some of the best stuff in the system. He just added another pitch. If he can find any sort of consistency with the curveball he could really become difficult to hit.