On Tuesday night in Los Angeles the Cincinnati Reds sent right handed pitcher Daniel Wright to the mound to start against the Dodgers. Wright was making his Major League debut with just two starts in Triple-A under his belt, but the righty more than held his own.
Daniel Wright tossed 5.1 innings against Los Angeles, allowing three earned runs on seven hits and a walk while striking out four batters. He threw just 87 pitches, and 54 of those were strikes (62%). The lack of walks in the game was a refreshing sign from a Reds pitching staff that has an incredibly high walk rate.
After a 26-pitch first inning, Wright only needed more than 13 pitches to get through the next four innings once, tossing 19 in the 4th. He only recorded one out in the 6th inning and he needed 10 total pitches For the most part, he was very pitch efficient in the game.
In the start, the former Arkansas State pitcher averaged 89.4 MPH on his fastball, mixing in both a 4-seamer with a bit of cutting action on it and a 2-seamer with more sink and running action to it. He also threw an equal number of change ups (83 MPH) and curveballs (75 MPH), while mixing in a few sliders (83 MPH) as well. Let’s take a closer look at how things broke down by pitch.
He mixed things up fairly well, showing off multiple offerings and not being overly reliant on any given pitch. Let’s take a quick look at how his velocity on each pitch was.
He topped out at 92 MPH on both the 4-seamer and the 2-seamer, which is about in line with what he’s usually at. Every so often he will touch a tad higher than that. Much like I wrote in my column at Redleg Nation this week on Wright, he’s not going to blow you away with his stuff, but he’s got enough solid pitches that if he can locate them, he’s going to be a solid pitcher. Ultimately I think he winds up in the bullpen simply because of the number of options that the Reds will have at their disposal in the next year, but his control will play well there and his velocity may take a step forward in shorter appearances.