Matt Moore and his devastating changeup
In all likelihood, lefty Matt Moore will break camp with the Rays as a member of one of baseball's top rotations and as a vital part of their playoff hopes. Moore is one of the most gifted arms around, and unsurprisingly he tops a number of prospects lists, even in a year in which the more ballyhooed Bryce Harper and Mike Trout are among his competitors. The Rays of course know much about finding and cultivating young pitchers, and in Moore they have someone truly special, even by their own lofty standards. In part, it's his precocious mastery of the changeup, a pitch that so often befuddles and eludes a young hurler.
As Roger Mooney of the Tampa Tribune reports, Moore's change checked in at 88 miles per hour in his spring debut on Tuesday (three strikeouts in 1.2 innings of scoreless relief). That's faster than a number of major-league fastballs, you'll note. Of course, when your heater regularly registers in the high 90s, an 88-mph changeup qualifies as, well, a change. There's more to it than that, though. While Moore worked just 9.1 regular-season innings For Tampa Bay in 2011, we can still draw some conclusions about the measurable quality of his stuff.
Had Moore worked a qualifying number of innings, then the horizontal movement on his changeup -- 10.3 inches of arm-side run -- would have ranked fourth in all of baseball (two spots behind teammate
The Rays have previously indicated that Moore won't be on any arbitrary innings limit this in 2012. In other words, he's the right pitcher in the right organization to craft a very special rookie campaign. Moore's devastating change has much to do with those hopes.
