Arcia and adjustments

[Parker Hageman]

At the Star Tribune, La Velle Neal has a great write-up on yesterday’s win and profiled the significance of rookie Oswaldo Arcia’s seventh home run of the year – one that proved to be the difference in Sunday’s affair.

 

What made this noteworthy was Arcia’s adjustment he made to the opposition. Here’s Arcia via translator Chris Colabello:

 

“The whole game he was throwing me away, away, away. In that last at-bat, I tried to learn from his first two and sneak up on him a little bit and got something out over the plate.”

 

Twins hitting coach Tom Brunansky had some great things to say about his performance:

 

“Those are the things I get excited about because you start to see the hitters see things and take it and apply it. It’s nice that they get results because it makes it easier to teach.

 

“The home run was a product of him making an adjustment in a situation. We get one in the left-hand column [the win column] out of it, but it’s nice too because we can talk about other issues now that he will take and apply it.”

 

This is a good development, if he can continue with this approach. Being pitched away has been Arcia’s weak spot, inciting the most swing-and-misses as he has often tried to do too much in his first year with the Twins.

 

As Mike Radcliff told me last month, Triple-A offers plenty of opportunity for hitters to learn to adapt to pitchers who know how to exploit a hitter’s weakness and this may have been critical to Arcia’s offensive development.

 

“In Triple-A,” said Radcliff, “there’s a lot of guys who know how to pitch. They might only throw 86 [mph], but they’ve got different kinds of pitches and they’ve been to the big leagues and they know how to care up a hitter and they see a hole and they can attack it. So you can make a case that Triple-A provides even another talent level of sorts for any hitter going up.”

 

Arcia has now had three stints in Rochester and has proven that he can handle that level of hitting. Yesterday demonstrated that he may be adjusting. This morning, Nick Nelson wrote that Arcia has given Twins fans a reason to follow the team through the remainder of the season. One thing to watch while watching is how Arcia handles that pitch on the outer-half of the strike zone.

[old nurse]

It is called learning. If he doesn't learn, he will be gone when the next wave comes. Just keep giving him at bats the rest of the season.