What is happening. Welcome to the Plus pitch podcast.

You're more than Pitching Podcasts from Pitcherlist.com.

My name is Nick Pollock.

Today is June 4th.

And yes, we're going to talk about baseball.

Kevin Gossman, my gosh, 6.1 innings of 6-turned run, 6-its, 1-walk, and 3 strikeouts.

He had 16 hard hit balls.

What is going on with Kevin Gosman? To be clear, it's his four-seamer

getting crushed. It's always been crushed a ton. It's more so, I think, this year. And it's not just

a fastball that is just bad. It's more that the splitter isn't nullifying enough. The whole thing

about Kevin Gosman over the years is that he throws a lot of four-seamer strikes. Tone in the zone. He's essentially 99th

percentile in both strike rate and zone rate with his four-seamer, but he's been able to get away

with it a ton because he would have a splitter that has about a 22 to 25 percent swing strike

rate. So essentially he nullifies it where if you're going to sell

out for that fastball, then you're just going to over swing on the splitter and you're going

to get strikeouts. You're going to get, you're going to get whiffs. You're going to get deeper

to count and so on and so forth. So here's the thing. Kevin Gosman this year, yeah, he's not getting the same swing strike on a splitter. It's two out of 23 whiffs in this one against the Orioles.

And it for the season is about 15, 16 percent as opposed to the 22, 25 percent.

And because of that, it means you get more at bats with balls and play on the splitter

that doesn't end in a strikeout, which means you get more hits essentially allowed.

And also, it means that the four seamer isn't as, well, the splitter isn't as scary.

So you can sell up more for the fastball and the splitter's a little more hitable.

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