“I really thought that his pitch, in moving over, was the perfect pitch. It worked for guys similar to him, like Glavine.”BOBBY VALENTINE After Masato Yoshii made his third straight ineffective start and heard the wrath of the Shea Stadium crowd on Tuesday night, Bobby Valentine was afraid his struggling fifth starter would think he let his manager down. In reality, it was the other way around.
Valentine said the Yoshii’s recent wildness and inability to find the plate’s aren’t the problem, but just the symptom of the problem. And Valentine admitted before last night’s game with San Diego that the cause is a slight adjustment that he asked the pitcher to make in spring training.
The adjustment has caused wildness, which in turn has Yoshii pitching from behind and getting smacked around by opposing hitters. In short, Valentine messed Yoshii up.
“Ummm, yeah. That’s what I would say,” Valentine admitted sheepishly yesterday.
Valentine came to this realization after watching film after film of Yoshii’s last loss, the Mets’ 6-2 beating at the hands of San Diego on Tuesday night. Yoshii surrendered six hits and four runs in 42/3 innings. He fell to 1-3 with his third straight poor start, and saw his ERA balloon to 7.52. And the loss typified his recent control problems, with five walks.
But after watching film of Yoshii this year compared with his pitching form of last season, when he had a solid 3.93 ERA – 3.27 at home – Valentine thinks he’s found the solution to Yoshii’s struggles. Moreover, Valentine even took the heat and admitted that they’re struggles that he may have caused.
After acquiring veteran starter Orel Hershiser, Valentine and pitching coach Bob Apodaca told Yoshii to move from the third base side of the pitching rubber to the first base side. Hershiser had similar pitches to Yoshii, and Hershiser had had success with the move, as had Atlanta’s Tom Glavine.
The move was designed to give Yoshii’s best pitch a more pronounced break. Yoshii’s out pitch is called a ‘shuto’ in Japanese, something akin to a reverse slider. Atlanta’s Greg Maddux also throws the pitch, and when thrown properly it breaks in on righties and away from lefties. But with the recent adjustments, Yoshii’s has been breaking entirely too much.
‘I thought it would give it more of an angle,” Valentine said. “Well, it does. It goes totally out of the zone.”
Valentine pulled out tape of Yoshii’s last outing, and showed the ball breaking away from left-handed hitters. And of course Yoshii got ahead of the right-handed Jim Leyritz before hitting him with a shuto to lead off the second inning. He went on to walk five batters and fall behind nearly every hitter he faced.
“It wasn’t just dart-throwing, pulling something out of the sky with him. I really thought that his pitch, in moving over, was the perfect pitch. It worked for guys similar to him, like Glavine,” Valentine said.
“He needed another pitch. I thought if he had a little different look, it’d give him some more confidence.
“How’d that work?” Valentine asked rhetorically. “It’s so blatantly, consistently … lousy. But it’s the same spot. It’s just one pitch, over and over again, outside, outside.”
Valentine said he’ll have Yoshii move back to pitching from the third base side of the rubber. He hadn’t had a chance to talk to his struggling starter about his and Apodaca’s theory, but said he worried that Yoshii who is always quick to accept blame, even when not warranted might become upset.
‘I hate to say this, but what I probably know in the cultural thing of it, he’ll think that he didn’t do what he was told,” Valentine said. “He’ll think that he failed when [he didn’t].”
