Spring Training is a time for experimentation, most notably for pitchers. Mike Mussina is pitching inside, Chien-Ming Wang is dusting off his secondary pitches, etc. They’re also shaking the dust off their arms. What this means is that you can’t expect them to look super amazing. That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t worry if someone is awful and be excited if someone looks good, but be careful with your enthusiasm.
The way I approach Spring Training is to look for certain things with specific players. Some examples of what I’m looking for this year are:
- How does Phil Hughes’ changeup look?
- Is Chien-Ming Wang mixing in and improving his secondary pitches?
- Is Edwar Ramirez having success spotting his fastball?
This approach gives me something to look at beyond just a box score and raw numbers without context like “Earned Runs” which are mostly useless in Spring Training.
So when the Daily News says that Wang had a dismal outing because he gave up 4 runs in 4.1 innings in a Spring Training start they’re not being fully honest. What I took away from Wang’s pitching is that he is working very hard on his slider and change and that he is starting to have some success with them. He was able to get outs with both, which leads me to think he might be able to break out of the sinker-sinker-sinker formula this year. And that would be great.
Spring Training stats are pretty meaningless (Baseball Prospectus recently published an article about this), so don’t get caught up in them. This time of year it’s best to take a scout’s eye view.
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