They say major league hitters can time a bullet; show them a 100-mph fastball three times in a row and they’ll hit the third one a mile. They don’t swing harder or faster — at least the smart hitters don’t — they just start their swings earlier. So how does a pitcher prevent that?
He throws his secondary pitches.
Saturday night Yordano Ventura pitched against the Boston Red Sox and was throwing his secondary pitches — cutter, curve and changeup — right away. In the first inning he threw two cutters, two curves and two changeups. Yordano only threw two of them for strikes, but it let Red Sox hitters know Ventura was not going to feed them a steady diet of fastballs; a tactic that’ has put him in trouble in the past.