Chien-Ming Wang takes the mound in a few hours for his third start of the season. In case you can’t recall, his first two have been simply atrocious and it seems something is mechanically wrong with him. You can tell just from his release points something funky is going on when he’s delivering the ball.
4/1/08 versus Toronto
4/13/09 versus Tampa
(Thanks go to Brooks Baseball for the fancy graphs)
This is the kind of thing that, normally, you would look to resolve in rehab starts in the Minor Leagues and at the team complex in Tampa. I know he didn’t look good in Spring Training either but the focus is different there from when you’re on an actual rehab trip. So with that out there I think that, if Wang does not improve a bit during this outing he’ll magically come down with some kind of minor injury that requires a trip to the DL. It would be really tough on both him and the team to try and work out these issues while he’s on the Major League roster.
Do I think he’s gone all Dontrelle Willis on us? No, because unlike Willis, Wang never depended on a funky delivery to get balls by batters and he’s not experiencing the extreme lack of command Willis did. Yeah he’s having problems hitting his spots and getting his pitches exactly where they should go, but Willis was pretty close to an Ankiel-style meltdown.
And let’s not forget that there are a lot of guys out there having a rough start, it’s just easy to focus on Wang’s because he’s close to home and it honestly has been worse than the other victims.
Yeah, but at least he hasn’t gone and started looking like this yet: http://tr.im/j8jR
Anyone want to take three guesses as to who that is?