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Pirates reliever Felipe Rivero learned to throw his wicked slider while with the Washington Nationals.
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Pitches old and new contribute to Felipe Rivero's dominance

Mitchell Leff / Getty Images

Pitches old and new contribute to Felipe Rivero's dominance

PHILADELPHIA — Felipe Rivero’s 26th birthday on Wednesday fell near the end of an exceptional first half. Thirty-five batters had reached base against him in 45 innings; nine of them scored. No qualified reliever in baseball had an ERA lower than his 0.80 mark.

“I don’t really think about it,” Rivero said. “I’m just trying to help the guys to win games.”

It’s hard for the actual execution of his pitches to look more impressive than his stat line, but it does. He retires batters with a fastball that can touch 101 mph, a changeup 13 mph slower and a wide-breaking slider. It’s also hard to believe the slider didn’t exist until last season, when Washington Nationals starter Gio Gonzalez showed Rivero his two-seam curveball grip.

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“I threw a couple times and it wasn’t doing the curveball thing, but it was [moving] like the slider,” Rivero said.

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Gonzalez is part of the reason former Nationals pitching coach Steve McCatty moved Rivero to the bullpen. Rivero started from 2010, his second year with the Tampa Bay Rays’ Venezuelan Summer League affiliate, until 2014.

“I was not going to make it with [Stephen] Strasburg there, [Max] Scherzer, Gio, and all those guys,” Rivero said. “I was not going to be part of the rotation. Since I was going good they put me in the bullpen just to try to help the team out of the bullpen.”

The bullpen agreed with him. In 49 games in 2015 he had a 2.79 ERA and 0.95 WHIP. His 4.53 ERA at the time the Nationals sent him to the Pirates for Mark Melancon belied his potential, and armed with a new slider he struck out 12.8 batters per nine innings in the final two months of 2016.

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“We’ve seen him the year before when he was with Washington,” pitching coach Ray Searage said. “We’re just like going, holy [expletive], this guy just gets zoned in. Good lord. He was filthy.”

While Rivero has had the changeup since that 2010 campaign in the Venezuelan Summer League, it became more effective when he learned to command it. Maturity helped. He spent more time working on it and learned to throw it in any count.

“They don’t know what to expect from me now,” Rivero said. 

Meadows back in Bradenton

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Outfielder Austin Meadows, who went on the minor league disabled list June 22 because of a strained right hamstring, transitioned his rehab to Bradenton after receiving a platelet-rich plasma injection last week, head athletic trainer Todd Tomczyk said. The Pirates expect him to miss up to four weeks.

Meadows has had hamstring injuries before, including one that cost him half the 2014 season.

“Concern, sure, that he got injured again,” Tomczyk said. “He’s probably the most frustrated in this whole process. Austin’s a competitor. He smells the big leagues, he wants to be up here. We’re taking a different approach from the minor league perspective performance team, looking into different ways to train, looking into different ways to prevent this from happening in the near and distant future.”

Infielder Gift Ngoepe, on the minor league DL because of a strained left hamstring, began his rehab assignment with short-season West Virginia Tuesday.

Rest stop

Adam Frazier got the day off Wednesday. John Jaso started in left field and hit second. Frazier hit .311/.388/.437 through the end of May but has hit .219/.297/.295 since.

“He is getting attacked differently and that’s all part of the process up here,” manager Clint Hurdle said.

Bill Brink: bbrink@post-gazette.com and Twitter @BrinkPG.

First Published: July 6, 2017, 4:00 a.m.

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