Wow, nice start from Buchholz tonight! I just watched the highlights on mlb.com and he had some nasty stuff, good slider, wicked curve and saw his fastball hit 97mph on at least one pitch. Clay now has a 2.70 ERA and 18 K's, good for top 20 in the AL pitching.
This kind of loss doesn't bother me nearly as much since it's "to form" with what the moves were in the offseason. They got great pitching tonight but for whatever reason (didn't see enough clips of Wilson to see if it was a case of good pitching or poor hitting), they didn't do much offensively. And when you consider Ellsbury and Cameron are out, this isn't so bad IMO.
Back to Buchholz. I've heard a common complaint is that he doesn't trust his stuff enough, not enough strikes. So I'll start keeping an eye on his 'strike percentage' per start (# of strikes/# of pitches), which for tonight is 0.67. To put the number into some context, that's his top ratio of his three starts this year and his ratio for all of 2009 was 0.615384615, with the following per-start breakdown:
Ratio (Strikes/Pitches) ERA
----------------------------
0.708860759 3.74
0.663043478 5.02
0.641509434 3.92
0.640776699 1.59
0.633027523 3.21
0.626168224 3.52
0.626168224 4.38
0.622222222 3.72
0.615384615 4.4
0.600000000 4.45
0.592105263 6.05
0.587628866 3.66
0.585714286 4.21
0.574468085 3.99
0.568421053 3.49
0.561904762 5.33
While there isn't a strong correlation between good strike/pitches ratios to good ERA's there is at least an indication that it's something worth keeping an eye on, given the relatively small sample size so far. I'll also try and get similar data at some point to see how much of a correlation there is with other pitchers too.
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