So I guess the biggest news of the day would be Aroldis Chapman struggled in yesterdays game and left with back spasms. The good news is that his first inning was dominant. He thew less than 10 pitches in the inning while striking out a batter. The bad news is that his second inning was pretty bad. Chapman shook off the catcher at least 10 times in the inning to get to a breaking ball, which we found out afterward was because it was easier to throw than the fastball.
I put Chapman’s first inning on my computer and broke down the footage. My main concern was that he has been noted to slow down his arm action on the change up, and since his first inning was the one that he was not dealing with the back issue so much its the only one I looked at. Chapman only busted out one change up, a few sliders and the rest fastballs. The pitches all had the same arm speed, measured from when he pulled the ball from his glove. Unfortunately we only had one change up to work with.
Redleg Nation’s spotlight player Matt Klinker took some pictures of the Reds complex. Go check them out over at Redleg Nation.
C Trent looks at how the fifth starter spot is still up for grabs between nearly everyone in camp. Dusty had this in the article though, and it really sums up how tight the race actually is:
“Everyone wants some answers, we don’t have any,” Baker said. “I’m telling you the straight facts. We don’t know.”
The Reds made some cuts as they optioned Chris Heisey to AAA and sent Frazier and Cozart to AAA. Speaking of Heisey, Jamie Ramsey has up a pretty good article on him over at Reds.com. Go read it now, its a very good article.
FSN Ohio is getting some cool stuff added this year for the Reds games. They announced they will be getting “foxtrax” which is essentially Pitch F/X for the games, which will be cool to see.