Storey told us that Meyers is on a cute, disciplined hurling regime that has been followed scrupulously, followed conscientiously faithfully, and has yielded fruitful results.
His power and arm strength disappeared. He was swinging at terrible pitches resulting in very high strikeouts. He had only 1 HR in 149 PA and it was nearly 2 months prior to finally being sent to AAA. Baserunners were taking extra bases at will due to weak and inaccurate throws. All this lead to speculation that his shoulder simply has not fully recovered from injury/surgery. The team has said from the beginning that it is a mental issue, not physical and Jake needs to " let go" to get over the mental trauma and fear of reinjury. However since being sent back to AAA he has been raking. More walks than strikeouts and 10 extra base hits ( including 4 HR) in 83AB at Sugar Land. The team also says he has been on a disciplined throwing program that has helped as well. All this has caused us fans to speculate he may be put on the playoff roster. ( well that and how awful Dubon is in CF)
To kind of feed into the team's stance on things, when he rejoined the team he came out of the gate hot (at least from a hitting standpoint). Not much power but he was playing well to start and then sort of fell off a cliff. It was really weird the way it all went down.
I remember a particular play in the OF where he landed on his shoulder and came up slowly and looked hurt. That's when it all changed. Either he reinjured it or it scared him into " playing careful"
Mental is part of fully recovering. I don't see a hard line between the mental and physical part of recovery as they are connected. There is a big difference between being healthy and a fully recovered productive MLB player. I don't think he ever reached the productivity he had prior to being hurt, and did get worse while he was in the majors. I don't care how someone wants to classify Meyers abilities as being impacted as mental or physical, all I can see are the physical actions were not where they were last season. I've seen way too many players reinjure themselves to believe teams (or even players) when they say they are fully recovered, but don't look like it.
July 17 was when that happened. His OPS at that time was .646. A week earlier it was .801, so he was already in a slump when it happened. His OPS in the 80 or so plate appearances after that was .466.
Thanks for this. I was just trusting my memory and my eyes. I vividly remember that play and his reaction to it though. Maybe he was hurt or thought he was hurt before but he sure acted hurt then. The bottom line is that 2022 Jake has not been the same player 2021 Jake was. Hopefully he returns to that form. The 2022 playoffs would be great But having that player on the team in 2023 would sure close up a current hole.
Feels like if he's really improving, he definitely should be on the playoff roster over Dubon, but it seems silly not to bring him up now in that scenario and start him for the next week. He doesn't need go straight from hitting minor league pitching to playoff pressure.
Need to teach him to throw right handed. After all, DD can do it with a softball, shouldn't be that difficult
…No, the credit for that may start with Luhnow, but it trickles down from there, particularly to one scouting director, Oz Ocampo, and his staff, who signed the four Latin American starters who are the backbone of this rotation now and likely for many years to come. And they did it by worrying less about prospect age and velocity, and focusing on other factors that are so important in developing young arms who can actually pitch, not just light up radar guns. Look at this season’s rotation of Verlander, Framber Valdez, Cristian Javier, Luis Garcia and Jose Urquidy, with the seven McCullers starts thrown in. Through the Sept. 25 weekend, they led major-league rotations in innings, quality starts, average game score, innings and pitches per start as well as pitching WAR. They were second behind the Dodgers in wins and ERA. They are the only team with four starters with 140 innings; they have five. Javier’s strikeouts per nine innings is bettered only by Shohei Ohtani and Carlos Rodón. Oh yes, and no one in that foursome, all between 25 and 28 years old, is yet arbitration eligible. “I don’t think there’s ever been anything like what they’ve done so quickly,” says Strom. Valdez and Javier were born in the Dominican Republic, three years and four months apart, Urquidy was born in Mexico, Garcia in Venezuela. Valdez, Javier and Urquidy were signed to professional contracts in a 16-day period in March 2015, while Garcia was signed two years later, all by scouting director Ocampo. All four made their major-league debuts between August 2018 and September 2020. Look out to the bullpen any night and add on 26-year-old Albert Abreu, with a 97.5 mph fastball, a slider that holds right-handed batters to a .134 batting average and a 34.5 percent strikeout rate. That makes for four pitchers between 25 and 28, all pre-arbs, all originally signed for less than the Astros gave 2022 seventh-round draft choice A.J. Blubaugh out of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Luhnow is gone now, working in soccer in Mexico. Strom left the Astros after last season, moving on to the Arizona Diamondbacks after a flirtation with retirement. Which brings us to Ocampo, who is back with the Astros in 2022 after a few years away, resuming a relationship with the organization that began a decade earlier. Back then, in 2012, he came to the Astros with a Georgetown degree in political economy and an MBA in value investing and management from Columbia University. He is the son of Filipino immigrants whose father owned a delicatessen in Bergenfield, New Jersey. Yes, as a teenager he sold a lot of lottery tickets and newspapers, which he devoured because of the passion he developed for baseball. Ocampo had an internship with MLB in 2004, and then was hired by Luhnow and the Cardinals to oversee their startup Dominican Baseball Academy at only 21 years old. After spending two years with MLB in international baseball operations, he joined the Astros after Luhnow’s ascendance to general manager before the 2012 season. Luhnow was schooled in the importance of the four-seam fastball by Strom when they worked together in St. Louis, and brought him to Houston, where he was a prominent figure in the Astros’ first five postseason runs. Luhnow’s public legacy may always be first as general manager of the 2017 Trash Can Astros, but all four of these Latin American pitchers were signed by Ocampo before Charlie Morton got Corey Seager to ground out to Jose Altuve for the final out of the 2017 season. Ocampo chose his graduate school curriculum because he wanted to study investment business, and perhaps have a hand in creating Moneyball part 2. He became the Astros’ international scouting director at the starting line of Luhnow’s long-term plan. “The Latin American scouting was important to Jeff because he had lived in Mexico,” says Strom. Owner Jim Crane wanted to be invested in that international market, and Ocampo had a significant role. It was at the insistence of Ocampo and scout Chuck Gonzalez that the club pursued its interest in Yordan Alvarez. Gonzalez tried to sign Alvarez when he defected from Cuba in 2016, then only a few months later joined with Ocampo to push for the trade that sent Josh Fields to the Dodgers and brought Alvarez to Houston. Given Ocampo’s Ivy League work in value investing — a study field that has been a career builder for Red Sox owner John Henry and Oakland executive Billy Beane — it is interesting that he was able to sign Valdez and Javier for $10,000 apiece, Garcia for $20,000 and the foursome for $140,000. That may have been a matter of finding value in “older” players: Valdez was 21 when he signed, Javier signed a week before his 18th birthday, Garcia joined at 20. When the annual international signing lists are announced, the vast majority of signees are 16. “There is risk in signing kids at 16 after they have spent two or three years trying to build up velocity,” says Ocampo. “We were trying to build a vast program. We were able to give young players a couple of years to grow and develop physically. They were often left feeling slighted because they felt they were bypassed. Many were actually still high school age in the U.S. We scouted them very hard.” Strom, who has a residence in Mexico and is bilingual, went to the Dominican twice with Ocampo, working alongside scouts from that country. “We were looking for the basics — delivery, athleticism, physicality, love of the game, willingness to listen to and try suggestions, and spin on the breaking balls.” They were not ruled by radar guns, and didn’t care so much about prospect ages. They were looking for pitchers. “We were looking for clean deliveries and a feel that they could develop velocity,” says Strom. Astros scouts Román Ocumarez and Leocadio Guevara strongly suggested Javier. Strom and Ocampo liked him. He threw 84-88 mph with a good delivery and curveball. “His fastball was very tough to pick up,” says Ocampo. Javier now throws 94-96. His ERA was 2.77 heading into the last week of September; the average against his slider was .137, the whiff rate 40.3 percent, and he was fourth in the majors in highest strikeout-per-nine-inning rate. …
