{"id":20721,"date":"2018-03-29T12:12:55","date_gmt":"2018-03-29T11:12:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/?p=20721"},"modified":"2018-03-29T12:12:55","modified_gmt":"2018-03-29T11:12:55","slug":"oakland-as-season-opener-2105-on-thursday","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/?p=20721","title":{"rendered":"Oakland A&#8217;s Season Opener: 21:05 on Thursday"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/wp-content\/Graveman.jpg\"><img fetchpriority=\"high\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-full wp-image-20724\" src=\"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/wp-content\/Graveman.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"228\" \/><\/a>As I&#8217;ve got the day off work and can&#8217;t think of anything but baseball, I thought I&#8217;d do something vaguely useful with my time and look ahead to the A&#8217;s opener tonight at 21:05 BST.<\/p>\n<p>After inheriting the Opening Day assignment in 2017 due to Sonny Gray being ill, Graveman will take the mound this time as the A&#8217;s nominal ace.<\/p>\n<p>I say nominal ace as even the most optimistic A&#8217;s fan wouldn&#8217;t really put him in the ace bracket, but he&#8217;s the leading starting pitcher among our current crop alongside Friday&#8217;s starter Sean Manaea.<\/p>\n<p>Looking back at his Opening Day start a year ago, Graveman did a decent job in limiting the Angels to 2 runs over 6 innings.\u00c2\u00a0 He did that throwing his sinker almost exclusively. There were a few cut fastballs thrown in here and there, yet otherwise it was sinker, sinker, sinker.<\/p>\n<p>Athough he does throw his sinker a lot, that was a bit extreme, perhaps with him not quite having a feel for his change and curve in his first start, and more generally over the 2017 season this was his pitch breakdown according to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.brooksbaseball.net\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Brooks Baseball<\/a>:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Sinker: 65% of the time (approx 94 MPH)<\/li>\n<li>Cutter: 15% (91)<\/li>\n<li>Change: 10% (86)<\/li>\n<li>Curve: 6% (80)<\/li>\n<li>Other 4%: varations of a fastball.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>As with most pitchers, the overall numbers obscure the different approaches taken against right or left-handed hitters.\u00c2\u00a0 Against righties he went to the sinker almost 80% of the time, then 10% cutter, 10% curve (very occasionally chucking a change into the mix). Against lefties, he significantly increased his cutter (23%) and change-up (22%) usage, bringing his sinker use down to approximately 50% and then throwing a few curves in here and there.<\/p>\n<p>For those new to baseball, that&#8217;s quite typical among pitchers. A right-handed pitcher will tend to use a curve against a right-handed hitter and a change-up against lefties, and vice versa for a left-handed pitcher.<\/p>\n<p>The Baseball Savant website does a great job of visualising how a pitcher has approached different hitters and the outcomes of that.\u00c2\u00a0 Here&#8217;s <a href=\"https:\/\/baseballsavant.mlb.com\/player_matchup?type=batter&amp;teamPitching=oak&amp;teamBatting=ana&amp;player_id=608665\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">a link to the page<\/a> for Graveman&#8217;s work against the Angels.<\/p>\n<h2>Line-up<\/h2>\n<p>The starting line-up hasn&#8217;t been announced at time of writing. The A&#8217;s are facing right-hander Garrett Richards and faced a righty (Chris Stratton) in their final exhibition game on Tuesday, so if we use that as a guide then it would be:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>Joyce (LF)<\/li>\n<li>Semien (SS)<\/li>\n<li>Lowrie (2B)<\/li>\n<li>Davis (DH)<\/li>\n<li>Olson (1B)<\/li>\n<li>Piscotty (RF)<\/li>\n<li>Chapman (3B)<\/li>\n<li>Maxwell (C)<\/li>\n<li>Powell (CF)<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>I suspect Jonathon Lucroy will be in the line-up instead of Maxwell, but we&#8217;ll find out soon enough.<\/p>\n<h2>21:05 BST<\/h2>\n<p>The game is scheduled to begin at 21:05 BST and is available to watch online for MLB.TV subscribers. Join myself and the rest of the OaklandAUK fanbase on Twitter tonight.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The game is scheduled to begin at 21:05 BST and is available to watch online for MLB.TV subscribers<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[566],"tags":[125,553,128],"class_list":["post-20721","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-oakland","tag-los-angeles-angels","tag-mlb-2","tag-oakland-as"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20721","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20721"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20721\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20725,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20721\/revisions\/20725"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20721"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20721"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20721"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}