Taillon solid in 2nd outing
not something I’m striving to go out and outperform other guys in spring training to get,” he said.
Taillon said he will keep his focus and goals internal. The 26-year-old righthander knows what it takes to pitch effectively in the majors, having done it for parts of two seasons.
“I can sit here and tell you 200 innings and 200 strikeouts and 20 wins and stay healthy and all that, but sometimes things get thrown at you,” he said. “I had a bunch of goals last year and I was acted upon by something else that didn’t let me get there. I’m just going to focus on kind of doing me.”
Last year should have been Taillon’s first full season in Pittsburgh. A testicular cancer diagnosis and the treatment that followed stole five weeks from him. He had a 2.08 ERA in April, but in 19 starts after coming back, that number increased to 4.85.
“I was excited about it last year, too,” he said of a full season. “I didn’t quite get there.”
Baseball guarantees nothing; regarding pitchers’ health, even less. Like all pitchers, Taillon takes preventative measures. He has trained for three offseason at Fairchild Sports Performance in Houston, focusing on posture, quality of movement and preparing for a season’s worth of starts.
That work continues this spring, with one inning added per outing, but Taillon did not complete his third inning Sunday. Brian Dozier got him twice, on a first-inning double that ricocheted off a diving Colin Moran’s glove in the first and a double to the wall in the third.
“The first AB he took me kind of deep [in the count] and then the second AB we went the opposite route,” Taillon said. “He just swung early and I left a fastball over the middle. I thought I was filling it up pretty good with strikes but I thought I was a little wild in the zone with fastballs. The other pitches felt good.”
Taillon threw a firstpitch curveball for a called strike to Byron Buxton and threw the curve to righthanders and left-handers.
“The lineup was legit,” manager Clint Hurdle said. “He went out there with a plan, he used his twoseamer, his four-seamer, he added his changeup to it. He added and subtracted velocity and he stayed aggressive throughout. I thought it was another solid outing for him.”