The Baltimore Sun has a fine column with quotes from Corey on his new team. Perhaps most interesting is this: Patterson said he's not particularly planning to lay off more pitches: "You just have to trust yourself, trust your vision and when you get the pitch in your zone, you take advantage of it. But any hitter will tell you that."
The problem is the "pitch in your zone". I've long argued that Patterson thinks he is above the methods used by good hitters spanning the years. He just refuses to believe there are pitches he can't hit. I wonder if that will be different now.
The other thing is this:
He hadn't really dominated in the high minors, and in retrospect, some say, the Cubs may have pushed him too quickly.
"It's kind of like if I tell my kids to clean their rooms or they can't go out, and then a few minutes later, I say, 'Let's go to the movies,'" said Jim Callis of Baseball America, one of the prospect trackers who ranked Patterson so highly. "Eventually they're going to say, 'I don't have to work on anything, because I'm moving up anyway.'"
Corey had over 1300 ABs before his first MLB game. Forcing a hitter to take walks is like forcing a pitcher to throw more strikes. Sounds easy enough but how often has that happened? The Cubs can hardly be blamed for this. His failure to adapt his methods is what did him in. You can receive all the tutelage in the world but if you do not implement the suggestions you will get stuck with the same results.
He's still only 26. Dusty Baker says: "Fresh start. New town. New league. That's going to be good for him." Agreed. But will he give his plate approach a new look?
3 comments:
As a former youth baseball coach, the HARDEST thing I taught was the fact that just because a pitch is a strike doesn't mean you have to swing at it. Patterson seems similar in this respect. If there are less than two strikes, you don't have to swing at pitches JUST BECAUSE they're strikes. Curves...pitches up in the zone, etc. They're still meant to get you out, but the kids I worked with always thought they had to swing away at the first thing they saw in the zone. They didn't realize that the more pitches they saw, the more likely to see a "mistake" or something even BETTER to hit. It's sometimes a tough concept to understand, but hopefully Corey figures it out!
The trouble with Patterson is that he doesn't swing at just strikes. He swings as pretty much everything. Pitchers realized they could get him out by not throwing him anything good.
I agree with those who wish Corey well. I picked him high in the second set of picks for my AL fantasy team.
He has some good tools and maybe ....maybe Baltimore will do it for him.
I hope so.
Earl in Alaska
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