The best offense in the Majors is in a little rut now. The Rays have scored only one run in their past two games and haven’t scored more than five runs since last Friday. Opposing teams are now trying to avoid giving the Rays many fastballs and have really started to throw some off speed pitches much more frequently. I am not sure how long till the pitch type numbers at Fan Graphs are updated, but in the past 7 days the Rays have seen a lowly 53.2% fastballs, which is as low as 59.7% if you add the cutters into it. The past 14 days hasn’t been so kind with 55.3% fastballs seen and 57% in the month of June.
Tonight’s starter for the Texas Rangers could provide some relief or more headaches depending on what he does. The young lefty Derek Holland features a 93 mph average fastball reaching 95+, a hard slider similar to Kazmir’s, a curveball, and a changeup. The interesting thing is that Holland uses his velocity on the fastball as a weapon throwing it 75% of the time this season. He has been putting that fastball in the strike zone often in his 49.1 innings with a lower K rate than he has had in the minors. His batting average against is a high .312 and a low BB/9 of 2.92, so it is likely that he pounds the fastball over the plate. A groundball pitcher this season, a 1.64 HR/9 should be taken advantage of by the Rays hitters in the Rangers homer happy ballpark.
The pitching matchup looks good with Holland facing another hard throwing lefty in David Price.
