INDIANAPOLIS — In eight pitches Wednesday night, Mitch Keller looked as dominant as he has in a while.
Sure, it was in relief with Class AAA Indianapolis, and yes, there is more work needed before anyone is ready to deem the 25-year-old ready to return to the Pirates, but it was about as good as he could have pitched in his first appearance since being optioned to the minors last week.
It came in the seventh inning of Indianapolis’ game against the Memphis Redbirds. Keller came in for what he says is his first ever relief appearance and mostly pumped his fastballs into the strike zone and past opposing hitters.
Against the first batter he faced, Keller opened it up with a 95 mph four-seamer down the middle for a strike. He then went up to 96 on the outside corner for another, cranked it up to 98 for a foul ball, then broke off a slider in the dirt for a swinging strikeout.
He hit 98 again, forcing a groundout on the first pitch to the second batter. For the record, Keller has averaged 94.4 mph with his fastball this season. 98 is fast for him, even if he’s done it before here and there.
To wrap up against his final batter, he threw a 96 mph fastball for a called strike, bent a curveball perfectly into the zone for strike two, then dusted his opponent away with a fastball at 98 up and out of the zone, getting another swinging strikeout. That was it for night one of Keller’s quasi-revenge tour in Indianapolis. Eight pitches, seven strikes, six fastballs, two strikeouts and a 1-2-3 inning.
“Coming in for one inning is definitely different than trying to throw five or six or whatever it was,” Keller told the Post-Gazette after Wednesday’s game. “So yeah, that was just kind of the mentality, just one inning, don’t worry about a couple innings, just go out there and attack, that’s what my mentality was, and felt really good to do that.”
For those who might roll their eyes that Keller is dominating minor leaguers when he was supposed to be a potential ace on the Pirates this season, that is the point. Things have obviously not gone well for Keller this season, as he is through 12 starts and 47 1/3 innings and toting a 7.04 ERA , a 1.796 WHIP and allowing double-digit hits and more than five walks per nine innings.
The main, identifiable cause for Keller’s struggles, he and others have said, is fastball command. It is his best pitch, or at least the one he throws more than 57% of the time, and it’s been spotty. He hasn’t found the strike zone with it as frequently as necessary. About 43% of his fastballs have been out of the strike zone. Opponents have swung at 240 of the 530 fastballs he has thrown and swung and missed at just 47 of them, or 19.6% of them, which is the fifth-worst whiff rate against fastballs of the 15 qualified Pirates pitchers this season. Fifty percent of the balls in play against his fastball can be qualified as hard hit, which is the second-highest mark among qualified Pirates.
Basically, he isn’t blowing the fastball past hitters, and he isn’t spotting it well enough to get weak contact.
That is an issue, but Keller has said all season that he hasn’t found any sort of mechanical reason for the variability in his fastball control. It has not been for lack of trying. The fact that he hasn’t found a mechanical fix, then, leads Keller to believe that it’s a mental thing. When things are going well for him and he knows his stuff will be there, he’s good. When runners get on base and doubt creeps in, his control starts to falter and he spirals a bit.
That’s why he is in Indianapolis, in his mind: to dominate hitters and convince himself that he is who he’s supposed to be again, even when everything doesn’t go perfectly in an outing.
“I have all the confidence in the world in myself. It’s just how do you bring it every single day when stuff’s not going exactly the way you want to?” Keller said. “That’s just something I’ve got to learn and get past and just go out there and attack like I did tonight.”
Of course, it’s a lot easier said than done to maintain confidence on the big stage. Wednesday was the first step, but it was also stress-free. He came out of the bullpen as a tactic to help him think less about the situation. Worry about warming up, come in, put up or shut up. He put up.
Keller said he thinks he’ll get one more relief appearance before starting again, but he isn’t completely sure about that. He’ll do whatever, though, and the Pirates will wait for him to get right again, as neither party is about to give up on the young pitcher.
“No one ever wants to be optioned, but I understand it. I wasn’t doing my job,” Keller said. “[The Pirates] told me that they just wanted to let me know that they have all the faith in the world in me and they want to do anything they can to help me out and get me back. It’s just refreshing to hear them say that when they think of the Pirates being good, they think of me being up there, like a good piece of starting pitching for them. So just overall it was, ‘Go out there and do your thing,’ and just really frame everything and just go attack the hitters.”
There are a bunch of caveats here. Keller threw a 1-2-3 inning of relief against the 7-8-9 hitters in the Memphis Redbirds’ lineup. He is not a new man, ready to dominate the majors now.
But it’s certainly better than allowing hits or walking the 7-8-9 hitters in the Memphis Redbirds’ lineup. For now, that’s a good start, as Keller sets his focus on rediscovering himself.
Mike Persak: mpersak@post-gazette.com and Twitter @MikeDPersak
First Published: June 17, 2021, 1:35 p.m.
