R.A. Dickey knuckling down on strikes
IN THE ZONE: Jays’ ace adjusting his speed, workload as he focuses on avoiding sluggish starts in April
NEW YORK — Sport has spawned a glut of unreliable aphorisms, perhaps none more flawed than this: It’s not how you start, it’s how you finish that counts.
Which ignores the fact that if you start a season poorly, you may not win the race, no matter how well you finish. And that reality weighed heavily on R.A. Dickey during the off-season.
As the knuckleballer reviewed his first two seasons as a Blue Jay, two related factors nagged at him. His Aprils were sluggish. And he walked too many batters, especially early in the season.
So he came to spring training determined to tame both demons. He is pleased with his progress so far. The true test will begin in Yankee Stadium on Wednesday night, when he will make his first start of the season (weather permitting).
Even during his best years with the Mets, April was typically a challenging month for Dickey. According to Fangraphs.com and BaseballReference.com, his walk rate tends to drop after the first month of the season. So does his ERA and opponents’ OPS.
With the Jays, Dickey’s walk rate in April has been 11.5 per cent, compared to 7.9 per cent over his three previous Aprils with the Mets.
This spring he eased his workload to stay fresh and made a conscious decision to swap higher velocity for more strikes.
His plan worked. He walked one batter in 12 innings in exhibition games. The previous spring: 10 walks in 14 innings.
“I am confident,” he said. “That’s something that I’ve really tried to do this spring: how can I consistently throw strikes like I did from 2010 to 2012? That’s one of the things that really helped me (then), was keeping my walks down.”
So how does a knuckleball pitcher suddenly implement a plan to throw more strikes? For Dickey, it was about staying in a comfort zone with his velocity. Last year, he often viewed an 80-mile-an-hour knuckleball as an accomplishment. But in retrospect, he concluded that less might accomplish more.
“For me, it means that speed isn’t necessarily as important as being able to throw it in the strike zone,” he said. “A lot of times the last couple years I would get in trouble by trying to make a knuckleball go 78 or 80 miles an hour when a 75-mile-an-hour knuckleball is just fine and it’s in the strike zone a much longer amount of time. So being comfortable with that, being comfortable with throwing knuckleballs at lower velocities and keeping them in the strike zone a little bit longer is one of the things I can intentionally do to throw strikes with it.”
Dickey turned 40 in October. Many a good knuckleballer has pitched well into his 40s, but as Dickey thought about his past two seasons, he decided to make concessions. He would ease up on his spring workload and throw fewer pitches between starts. Most pitchers throw on flat ground daily; Dickey took the occasional day off. It was about feeling both fit and fresh to start the season.
Dickey also faces another adjustment. After working with catcher Josh Thole for nearly all his starts over five seasons, he will start 2015 with Russell Martin behind the plate. As pitcher and catcher, Dickey and Thole could finish each other’s sentences, and Thole is as good as they come at charting the unpredictable flight of a knuckleball.
But Martin, one of the game’s best receivers, made significant strides with Dickey in spring training.
There remains what Dickey calls “that X-factor” — the difference between Martin catching him in a spring game for four or five innings in the Florida sunshine and trying to go deep into a game in Yankee Stadium on a chilly April night.
“But he’s a pro,” Dickey said. “I think he’s going to be really, really good back there.”
Martin has been really good back there for a lot of years, but he has never caught an accomplished knuckleball pitcher. Now he and Dickey face a two-pronged challenge: developing a deeper comfort level with each other while each doing his own thing to keep that peculiar pitch in the strike zone — and in the process, helping Dickey and the Jays get off to a much-needed good start.