The Cincinnati Reds game ended in a tie after 10 innings on Monday night and just about everyone hates ties, but it provided a good opportunity to get an extra pitcher into the game. For the Reds that turned out to be right hander Ben Klimesh.
Klimesh is coming off of a season where he had 77 strikeouts and 21 walks in 61.2 innings. Those are strong numbers, but his ERA between Bakersfield and Pensacola was 4.82, a number that wasn’t so good. The right hander will turn 25 in May and will likely be back in Pensacola’s bullpen, but he had a chance to pitch for the Reds in spring training and he flashed some big stuff.
He three a perfect inning and struck out a batter. It was his only appearance in big league camp this year, but fortunately it also happened in a stadium that had the Pitch F/X cameras running. That means we get to see just how hard he was throwing the movement on the pitches.
The right hander has always had good top velocity, known to hit 96 MPH at times. What was impressive was in this outing he averaged 96 MPH, granted he only threw five fastballs. The top velocity was 97.2 MPH and all five were at least 95.1 MPH.
He only three eight pitches total and five of them were fastballs. He threw one change up and two sliders. The sliders were both 87 MPH and are more in line with a pure slider rather than the cutter type of slider that borders between the two pitches.
The most interesting pitch of the outing though was his change up. It’s not a pitch that he goes to as often as the other pitches, but it jumps off of the page when looking at the raw data when it comes to the movement.
It must be noted that it is just one pitch, so we don’t really have a baseline for this being an outlier of some kind of one that he can repeat, but the pitch came in at 90 MPH, six MPH slower than his fastball, had 2.5 inches more running action on it and this is what stands out, 7.5 inches more sinking action to it than the fastball. A change up with that much movement coupled with a mid 90’s fastball and a good slider is a real weapon. Don’t be surprised if he’s one of the guys that has a breakout type of year this season.