His slider, fastball and changeup tunnel more which give batters less time to make a decision. Even though the curveball was good, you could see it coming a mile away and didn't setup his other pitches. As Spaghetti says, in the majors, it's less about shape and more about tunneling.
It would be hard to be upset if Kukuchi continues to pitch like he has to start off his Astros career. Because Kukuchi has pitched like a bonafide # 1 or 2 pitcher. If the Astros can resign him, it will bode well for the overall outlook of the trade, but you can’t break the bank for him. But it’s very feasible to think he’s going to get a contact offers in The 20-25 million range for 3-4 years.
The Astros are run prudently like a business. They only resign him if it make economic sense for them.
It’s really wild how universal from our fans to all the media this trade was either framed as desperation or completely reviled. Even two weeks ago I was arguing with someone that still said this was an overpay. It’s now in the conversation for best pitching deadline add in baseball history. His stuff is dynamite. It’s hard to believe he had such middling results. Our pitching braintrust is unfair.
Best way to do it. Nobody can hate on this organization. The only bad move they made was probably the one forced upon them. Firing Lunhow. Other then that, its been ran pretty well excluding the Abreu situation.
And even firing Luhnow (a move I’m still bitter over), could be seen as a necessary internal politics, to appease the baseball commissioner; hence leave the 2017 title without an asterisk or stripped (which other fan bases and GM’s wanted to do.) Luhnow was hired by Crane to build him a proprietary way to analyze baseball talent using data. Analytics was not on Drayton McClains priorities, hence the Astros were well behind the 8 ball. So Luhnow build a system, and Every bit of knowledge (new and old) from the scouts, the coaches, the numbers, the minors, etc goes into the algorithm, and it generates valuable resource that is obviously superior to what other teams are using. Crane had vision, and he hired an ambitious elite cyber genius that loved baseball but wasn’t moving up fast enough in the Cardinals organization. So when Luhnow was fired, his brain child was property of the Astros. And the Astros continue to make solid to elite moves! Moving on from Korey Lee whom I was really high on, and putting all their eggs on the Yainer Diaz basket was a baller move. Korey Lee will be a good to average catcher, Yainer Diaz may be the AL all-star catcher for the next 10 years.
