Baseball-Intellect: A Second Look at Francisco Liriano

After a surge of Francisco Liriano articles in response to the pitcher’s recent demotion, Baseball-Intellect takes a second look at Francisco Liriano, a pitcher’s hand break, and pitching mechanics in general as a follow up to the article the site published a day after Liriano’s first start and in response to a couple of the various articles that came out this past week…

There is no one magic mechanical attribute that all of a sudden increases velocity.  Pitching mechanics are a sequence of individual actions and when these individual actions are put together with precise efficiency, a pitcher can generate velocity in any number of ways. This is not to mention factors that we honestly have no clue of knowing about; for instance, how strong exactly are those ligaments, tendons, muscles, etc in the pitcher’s arm/shoulder?

My feeling is if it is clear Liriano cannot speed up his tempo or break his hands later because he cannot coordinate all the moving parts, then an earlier hand break would be fine to deploy.  However, if he can coordinate and time correctly a later hand break or a faster tempo, then there is no reason to continue to do things that, in my opinion, hurt the quality of his stuff.