Game 10 - Guardians Versus George Kirby - 4/9/2023
Young Mariners righty on the bump in the series finale.
Sunday’s attempt at avoiding the sweep will be no small task for the Guardians. They will see George Kirby on the mound. In 2022, the highly regarded Mariners prospect burst out in a big way with 130 innings of 3.39 earned run average ball and peripheral metrics to support.
Repertoire
Look out for that 95 mile per hour fastball that will touch a couple ticks higher a few times per game. Kirby’s extension also adds nearly a full mile per hour on a perceived basis. He will also dig deep into his bag of tricks for different pitches, throwing all six of them at least eight percent of the time.
Matchup Grades
The grades tallied a lot more positive than could be reasonably expected given the fastball velocity. It turns out that Guardians hitters not named Mike Zunino have been very capable against righty fastballs with similar spin and velocity over the last few years.
Jose Ramirez registers his first strong matchup grade of the year. This grade comes from a propensity for success against the fastball, sinker, and curve; those three pitches exceed 70 percent of Kirby’s pitches against righties. Kirby seems like the perfect mix to hope for Jose Ramirez’s initial homer of the 2023 campaign.
Josh Bell is another strong matchup point despite his lackluster start to 2023. This is data based on all 2021 to 2023 plate appearances and not overreactive to how disjointed his swing has seemed out of the gate. No matter how bleak things seem in the moment, Josh Bell is a competent big league hitter and this author would rather push chips on years of supporting data rather than gut feeling and visuals based on one week.
A focal point of these matchup grades is the overwhelming quantity of neutral to slightly positive grades. Amed Rosario and Josh Naylor narrowly factor positively, while Kirby’s pitch types and mix see standard output opportunities for Steven Kwan, Andres Gimenez, Myles Straw, and Oscar Gonzalez.
Luckily, Mike Zunino will be resting for this afternoon’s tilt because George Kirby would be the result if you created a pitch mix solely designed to get Zunino out.