That didn't go well. After teasing us with a good performance, Oliver Perez kicked off the ground, sending us back to the bottom on the never ending see-saw. What went wrong? Throwing only half his pitches for strikes is the short answer, but Oliver's survived such control issues before. Let's start with the not-so-bad:
Perez threw with a pretty consistent release point all night. He's notorious for falling one way or the other when out of whack, so on one hand, it's encouraging. On the other hand, we can't just blame bad mechanics.
Whereas he used to keep a solid 10 mph between his fastball and changeup, so far Oliver's reduced velocity has made them hard to distinguish. When you're throwing fastball at 88 and a changeup at 84, you're really throwing a crappy fastball and a Barry Zito.
His slider looks awful, all over the place. The only consistent movement he got was sort of flat, barely breaking toward righties. And those two on the right...ugh...
Geez.