Analysis of Chuck James

This post is in response to many of the criticisms I hear about left handed pitcher Chuck James of the Atlanta Braves.

Chuck James has worked pretty hard on other pitches in the past and has even tried to incorporate them into games early last season. I think he scrapped them because they just didn’t work effectively enough.

Chuck has very flawed mechanics. The only pitch I can really see him effectively developing with his mechanics is a cutter. Any breaking pitch he develops would likely just hang in perpetuity because he doesn’t follow through enough.

It could be argued that he should change his mechanics. His current mechanics leave him too limited in stuff he can develop and incorporate. They also render him a blown out shoulder or elbow waiting to happen.

Changing mechanics however runs the risk of changing the the quality of the two pitches he does have. His flawed mechanics make that fastball and changeup seem alot more special than they are because of the movement on the pitches caused by the flaws and because hitters are not used to eyeballing such flawed mechanics and can have a harder time reading what is being tossed out of those flawed mechanics.

If he abandons his current mechanics, he might end up losing what he does have for the sake of gaining an extra pitch or two that are not special enough to overcome the loss of the 2 bread and butter pitches that made him a big leaguer (and a pretty decent major league pitcher at that).

Chuck is very young and inexperienced as well. People take him to task for not knowing when he is injured as opposed to being just hurt. He’s never been injured before due to throwing, so how the hell would he know how serious his injuries are? He sees Hudson and Smoltz battling through pain and wants to be like them. So he tried last year to imitate them and be tough because his team needed him to make no excuses if he wasn’t injured. Unfortunately, he was too young and inexperienced to understand he was dealing with an injury and not just pain he had to fight through like the tough hombres called Hudson and Smoltz.

Because Smoltz has been through every conceivable injury and pain known, Smoltz is someone who is better able to diagnose what is going on with his arm than the doctors themselves are. Chuck however does not have that experience. It’s really no different than young NASCAR drivers who often drive their crew chiefs crazy because their inexperience doesn’t allow them to understand what is going wrong with the car as they drive in circles for 500 miles. While the crew chief is begging the driver to feed him information so he can fix the problem during the next pit stop, all he gets is a stupid young driver who doesn’t understand how to diagnose or communicate what is going wrong with the engine, tires and whatever. Older John Smoltz drivers like a Mark Martin, however, are able to diagnose it and communicate to the crew chief what needs to be changed so that the next few pit stops can be ultra effective.

Chuck’s inexperience also explains why he has not developed other pitches, worked harder to understand hitters or to fix his mechanics. He’s never really faced adversity as a pitcher. He dominated on the amateur level and in the minors. He has even done pretty darn well in the majors. That kind of success makes young pitchers very reluctant to change what they do. It’s kinda the logic of dancing and going home with the girl you brought to the dance instead of dumping her to try and pick up a new girl and risk ending up with no girls to lay down in bed with that night.

Chuck did face some real adversity last year for the first time in his life as a baseball player. He had injuries and also shaky performance. To his credit, he seems to have been humbled by it and has been honest about how he failed to meet expectations. From his quotes, he really seems to want to figure it out. Due to inexperience and not being the brightest dude and his flawed mechanics, he might never be able to completely figure it out in time before his shoulder eventually falls apart due to his flawed mechanics.

But I think people just need to enjoy Chuck while they can and appreciate that Chuck is a pretty darn good major league pitcher despite his flaws.