Little means a lot
Oklahoma baseball coach Skip Johnson offered a little advice to pitcher Devon Perez, and it’s paid off for the senior right-hander.
NORMAN — Devon Perez had a bit of a rough go of it during his second start of the baseball season Feb. 25 against Holy Cross.
A little bit after that start, the Oklahoma senior right-handed pitcher was in the bullpen at L. Dale Mitchell Park working with head coach Skip Johnson —who served as the Sooners’ pitching coach a year ago.
“Try striding out longer each and every time,” Johnson told Perez.
The change was almost instantaneous.
“Once I started doing that, I felt back to my normal self again,” Perez said. “I guess when I started throwing my changeup this past year, I was shortening my arm up and I ended up shortening my legs as well because most of the time they work together. So really just getting back to that stride helped a lot of things fall back in place.”
The results have been immediate, too.
In Perez’s last three starts, he’s allowed just one earned run in 16⅓ innings, dropping his ERA to 2.22.
Perez, who is Oklahoma’s Saturday starter, has teamed with junior Jake Irvin to give the Sooners one of the most formidable one-two punches among starting pitchers in the Big 12.
Going into this weekend’s Big 12-opening series against West Virginia at home, Irving and Perez have combined for a 2.55 ERA.
“This team’s mentality is definitely good knowing that any team we play, we can get the first two wins and there’s a series victory already,” Perez said.
In addition to the change in strides, Johnson has also preached to Perez —and all his pitchers — about striving to execute the plan of attack instead of dwelling strictly on the outcome.
“It’s hard for an amateur to think like that,” Johnson said. “They want to attack. ‘Oh, I’m gonna see if I can throw it harder. See if I can make this curveball nastier.’ It’s not like that. If I get two strikes, I want to put the ball in a better location vs. making it harder or making it break more. You’ll see it. It’ll take guys out of rhythm,”
Like many pitchers, it took Perez a bit to grasp the approach when he arrived from Iowa Western before last season.
“You can’t control whether the batter swings. You can’t control whether the umpire calls it a strike,” Perez said. “If you focus on hitting your target every single pitch then most likely the results are going to go in your favor. If I do my job then everything else will most likely fall into place.”
His last appearance might’ve been the best of his career, striking out seven in seven quick innings, allowing just one unearned run with two hits in a win over Kennesaw State. Perez needed just 80 pitches to get through that outing.
“If you make a bad pitch, flush it and then focus on the next pitch,” Perez said. “If you keep doing that throughout the game, through 60 or 80 pitches, most likely you’re going to be successful if you can get 75 percent or more of those pitches where you want them to be.”