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Adam Ottavino looks shaky, then unhittable in first outing of 2017

April 4, 2017

In the eighth inning of Monday’s Colorado Rockies 7-5 win over the Milwaukee Brewers, righty reliever Adam Ottavino got himself into, and spectacularly out of, trouble.

The very first pitch he threw was a slider that fooled everyone, dropping into the high part of the strike zone but being ruled ball one. After that, Ottavino struggled to find anything in the vicinity of the zone and his release point was all over the place:

That’s some pretty extreme variation, especially when you compare it to two of the pitchers who came before Otto in the game, Jon Gray and Scott Oberg:

Now, Ottavino is known for sometimes rearranging where he stands on the mound, which means even a consistent delivery would result in different release points. But as you can see from looking at the first chart, he has two distinct clusters, but even those have more variation than the release points of Gray or Oberg. We didn’t include the charts, but Mike Dunn and Greg Holland both exhibited the same consistency as the latter while Carlos Estevez was pretty concentrated but with one release way off from the others.

Ottavino’s funky delivery and ridiculous stuff have always been a weapon he’s been able to harness. At least, that has been true while he’s been in a Colorado uniform. But for a moment, his inconsistency (maybe due to rust?) looked like it might doom the Rockies first game of the year and give fans immediate horror flashbacks to 2016.

It didn’t work out that way, though. Ottavino discovered a rhythm, found enough of the zone with his fastball, and backed it up with a slider the Brewers simply couldn’t touch. After working into a second-and-third-nobody-out jam, Ottavino struck out the side in dominant fashion and displayed a rare bit of emotion for a guy who is known to be cool, calm, and collected.