On Doug Fister Tonight

As I attempt to improve my pitcher evaluation skills, I’m probably going to keep writing these whenever I get the chance. A young kid with a last name like Fister making his starter debut seemed like a nice opportunity. So Fister’s line looked real nice, aside from the walks. 6 inning pitched, 1 infield hit, 0 runs,  4 walks, 4 strike outs. Now his K:BB in Tacoma was fantastic, so I have to figure that the 4 walks were a fluke, and partly due to both jitters, and being squeezed by yet another terrible home plate umpire.

He missed some bats, 7 on the night – which is more than I would have expected from a guy like him, and he located his off-speed stuff real nicely. Unfortunately he couldn’t locate his fastball. He only through 49% of his fastballs for strikes – even factoring in the squeezing, that’s still going to have to improve. One thing I didn’t know about Fister, is that he has a pretty good looping curve ball. He doesn’t use it often – he only threw 5 of them on the night, but 4 of them were strikes, and it froze a couple of hitters for strike three – similar to the way RRS uses his.

It’d be silly to expect his results to be consistently this good, but he isn’t a bad pitcher and should do alright with this defense behind him, if he can cut down on the walks. It’s a shame that Aardsma chose tonight to blow just his 3rd save of the year, as I’m sure it would have been big for Doug to get that first major league win.

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