“It’s too bad they don’t put a stat on the board for first pitch strikes,” my friend Andy said to me somewhere around the fifth inning of Saturday night’s Louisville Bats game. “If they did, I feel like it’d be close to zero.”
Of all the things I could say to sum up my first experience watching Keyvius Sampson pitch, that probably sums it up best. Sampson, whom the Reds claimed off waivers in January after the San Diego Padres released him, made his Louisville debut Saturday after ripping through AA ball with an impressive 1.85 ERA (though, in doing so, he did post a slightly less impressive 3.