Archive for the “Jason Motte” Category

I wrote about Jason Motte at VEB on Sunday. I knew that there’s a history of me scouting him and watching him so I spent some time digging up old posts about Jason Motte when he was still in the minors. I wrote a lot about him in 2008 and it turns out, some things never change.

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Jason Motte has been a hot topic of discussion amongst Cardinals fans lately and with good reason, as he used a sensational spring training performance to beat out Chris Perez for the team’s role of closer. Opinions are fairly a split on Motte and I’m sure his four-run blown save in his first appearance as the team’s closer has intensified things a bit.

Mostly a one-pitch pitcher, there are some that feel Motte won’t be able to translate his minor league success to the major league level because you need more than one pitch to succeed in the majors, no matter how good that pitch is — and that pitch is really good: an upper 90′s fastball that explodes out of his hand. It’s straight as an arrow, but it’s sneaky and gets on hitters quick because he short-arms the ball, which dates back to his days as a catcher. When he’s able to command the pitch, it’s virtually unhittable.

Motte’s No. 2 pitch is a fringy slider that he’s able to use when hitters start cheating on his fastball or when he wants to throw off a hitter’s balance at the plate. By the way, I know there are some that suggested he develop a splitter partly because it would be easier for him to maintain a more consistent arm slot and I agree with that completely.

Now, I’m not here to give a traditional scouting report on Motte. That’s been done before by Azruavatar and you can read both of those excellent reports by clicking here and clicking here. You can also read Erik’s rundown of Motte’s pitch f/x data by clicking here.

I’m going to actually take a deeper look at Motte’s mechanics — how he generates his velocity and what changes he’s made between this year and last that I think has helped improve his overall command. My hope is that everybody will take away some knowledge about the velocity generating process and some of the more subtle changes a pitcher can make to improve themselves.

The big change Motte made this season was that he simplified his wind-up by lowering his hands and centering everything closer to his core. The 2008 version is on the top and the 2009 Motte is on the bottom:

This year, Motte is in a more athletic, more compact position. Instead of bringing his hands up by his head, he brings them closer to his upper chest area. This change took place partly because of the timing difference between Motte’s high leg kick from 2008 and his smaller leg kick in 2009.

Motte pauses once his knee reaches the pinnacle of its lift before punching the glove, which acts as his timing mechanics to unleash all hell. The difference between the two versions is that the 2008 version pauses for a longer period of time, while the 2009 version gets going much more quickly. This results in a wind-up with better flow — much smoother than before and without any pauses that have the potential to throw off his timing.

Now let’s talk velocity…Motte is obviously blessed with tremendous arm speed and the genetics to throw hard. But he’s also extremely efficient from a velocity standpoint and his arm action is excellent. He lets the elbow pick up the ball, meaning no hook in the wrist, like you see with Rich Harden. He also efficiently loads the scapula, which I’ll try to explain below:

The loading of the scapula is the pinching of the shoulder blades together. The arm is loaded horizontally rather than straight back toward second base. Might it put more stress on the shoulder? Perhaps…but it’s an essential component of velocity.

Watch how Motte’s chest sorta puffs out in the clips above…this is a symptom of the shoulder blades pinching together. Also take note of Motte’s hip/torso separation. I pause the graphic at the key frame. The belt buckle is pointed toward home plate, while the torso is facing the third base direction. Just before his front foot lands, the hips start to rotate and the torso is subsequently unloaded, bringing the arm with it.

The arm’s power is generated from the torso unloading. There is a kinetic chain of events and to generate the kind of velocity Motte does, you have to have a precisely efficient kinetic chain. It’s also important to throw with intent, which Motte certainly does.

One thing I quibble with are Motte’s front side mechanics. The glove generally should be kept firm out in front of the chest. While Motte does firm up to keep his front shoulder from flying open, he leaves the glove down by his side when it ideally should be left out in front of the chest. There are numerous reasons for why it should be kept firm out in front of the chest — lower injury risk, better control, more consistent release point, and better command of one’s breaking pitches to name a few.

Final Thoughts

Nobody should overreact to Motte’s Monday debacle. One game doesn’t make a player. Consider how dominant he was last season at the MLB level even though his dominance occurred in a limited amount of innings.

The jury’s still out on whether he’s a closer-level reliever. That’s probably a best case outcome unless he can develop a consistent secondary pitch that he can go to when the command of his fastball deserts him. Can he make it happen? Only time will tell.

This article is apart of Baseball-Intellect’s Cardinals top prospect list, which you can read below:

Prospects 1 – 5
Prospects 6 – 15

Alex breaks down major and minor league players by using sabermetric and video analysis at the website Baseball Intellect. He’s also done regular work for the Hardball Times and Baseball Digest Daily. You can contact him at baseballintellect@gmail.com

One of the things that I enjoy the most about writing here is that I’ve got a record that I can be held to.  It’s really easy to log on to the internet and start dropping bombs on players.  What’s difficult is establishing a conclusion and staying consistent with it.  Keeping that in mind, I searched the archives to come up with my notes on one Jason Motte.

The conversion began in 2006 but Motte burst onto the scene in 2007 in Springfield.  I made a point of watching an excessive amount of video on Motte. Read the rest of this entry »

From Josh Kalk’s Pitch F/X cards.

Kalk also runs similarity scores on his site for each pitcher and interestingly enough, Motte’s most comparable pitcher from 2008 was Grant Balfour. Balfour happened to lead the majors in K/9 with 12.65. Jason Motte led all of the minors in K/9 with 14.85. Both throw fastballs 90% of the time. So you tell me – can he get by with one pitch?

Cardinal70 recently asked me to participate in the latest “United Cardinal Blogger” collaboration, a project that I could not say no to. The project: Name your Top 7 Prospects, as inspired by our esteemed beat writer Mr. Derrick Goold. The regular minor league season just finished and it seems like it wasn’t long ago we were talking draft, and here we are already ranking players. Time flies.

NOTE: This is NOT our official list that we will be rolling out later. This is more or less my off the cuff rankings as things stand at the moment, and it’s still pretty fluid right now.

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There was some dispute as to who was the player of the month. Both Wallace, David Freese, Josh Phelps and Daryl Jones all had outstanding months. In the end, I think we all were happy to see Daryl take home the “Futchee” for the last month of the minor league season.

Jones hit .319/.441/.549 in 91 at-bats in August. He hit five home runs and stole five bases in six chances. He struck out 23 times but walked 19 times, showing some excellent plate discipline. For his all around efforts this season Jones will get plenty of Top 100 consideration, a vast improvement from going getting cut from the Cardinals Top 30 in Baseball America’s last Handbook. Jones is no longer tantalizing us with his tools, he’s flashing them on the ball diamond.

2. Brett Wallace – I personally voted Wally for the top spot, but he did have somewhat of an uneven month. Through 71 plate appearances for the Quad Cities Wallace had a power outage, hitting .306/.394/.387. But once promoted to Springfield, he went on an absolute tear, hitting .400/.471/.711. He did hit the ball on the ground a lot – 69%, but when he did hit the ball in the air, it usually went a long way. 27.3% of the balls he hit in the air cleared the fence.

3. David Freese – After a hot July, Freese showed no signs of slowing, hitting .349/.410/.632 for the month of August with seven homers.

As with the hitters, neither of us could decide who was in the top spot for the pitcher of the month. According to our system, Nick Additon is our pitcher of the month. Additon had a 3.21 ERA in 14 innings for QC with 24.1% K/PA rate and a 5.2% BB/PA rate. He had a 0.50 ERA with a 13/5 K/BB ratio over 18 innings and held batters to a .167 average.

2. T- Jason Motte and Richard Castillo – Motte held PCL hitters to a .163 average and struck out 22 of the 47 batters he faced, just showing utter dominance. Seeing him pitch yesterday all I have to say is wow…beware the goatee. Castillo posted a 1.99 ERA with a 23.2% K/PA ratio and a 4.5 K/BB rate. Pretty nice to see a converted catcher and an 18 year old pitcher both have terrific months.

The pitching was more impressive than the hitting in Memphis. I got a chance to watch several relievers (Motte, Scherer, Worrell) as well as a couple starters (Walters, Boggs) that could play roles in the future for the big league club. I also saw my two nemeses far too often.

It’s boring out here.

They don’t blow enough games in late innings at Memphis.

They’re still learning to be major leaguers. We’ve got it down already.

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Once again, you’ve probably all heard by now, but I will post the link to Team USA’s 7-0 victory over Netherlands. They play Cuba tonight.

Derrick Goold has some notes about Colby Rasmus‘ rehab and Josh Kinney‘s intention to return to the team this season. Goold also posted this article about Rasmus and a whole lot of other minor league related notes.

Kevin Goldstein answered three Cardinals questions in his chat the other day. Since it isn’t a subscription piece, I don’t feel bad giving them to you here in their entirety (although you really should subscribe to BP and visit every day):

KCardinal (KC): With Daryl Jones turning his tools into performance this year, will he make your top 100?

Kevin Goldstein: I’m a big Daryl Jones supporter and he’s got a lot of tools, but Top 100 is pushing it.

MikeJordan23 (Brooklyn): I’ll keep asking until you answer: With Brett Wallace hitting abilities but lack of position should the Cardinals trade him to the AL when he’s eligible or find him a new position? And thoughts on Niko Vasquez?

Kevin Goldstein: Stop asking! You don’t really worry about any sort of logjam until you are forced to. The Cardinals right now have a valuable commodity in their minor league system, but there is no reason to start making any decisions on it. Thoughts on Vasquez? I’m a big, big fan.

Jason Motte (Memphis): Would my one-pitch repetoire hold up in the Majors right now?

Kevin Goldstein: Seriously, what’s up with all the Jason Motte questions? Is there a fan club or something? I love the guy, gotta give it up for any converted catcher who has 97 whiffs in 58.2 innings at Triple-A. That said, I think he’d get righties out right now, but his arm angle and lack of secondary stuff would give him trouble against lefties.

Action all over the system (and the globe) – all the details are after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

John Wasdin had a no-no through 7 before Jason Motte came in to strike out 5 batters over the 8th and 9th inning. I took a look at the video to see what Motte was up to with his pitches.

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I thought it would be interesting to take a look at the prospects currently in the Cardinals system and that the Cardinals have developed (or failed to develop) over the past five years or so on a position-by-position basis to take a closer look at the strengths and weaknesses of the system. The first position we’ll look at is catcher, which has become a strength in the last few years after producing a starter at the major league level and a top prospect that is getting close to the big leagues. The full breakdown of the position is after the jump.

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