Matt Moore and his recent struggles

David E. Klutho/SI

One of my favorite parts of baseball is following young prospects. I wrote about Dylan Bundy in an earlier post, I am an avid MLB draft follower and one of my favorite parts about covering Mizzou's baseball team for the student newspaper (shameless plug) is watching young talent and trying to project where they'll land professionally. This is because baseball is monotonous, slow and frankly boring sometimes, and injections of youth, potential and possibility can seem exciting. Which brings me to Matt Moore. Seeing the Rays' young lefty dominate the Yankees last year in the playoffs last year was pretty incredible. 15 strikeouts in 9.1 innings against a lineup like the one he faced was certainly reason for enthusiasm.

The Rays shared my excitement, obviously. Moore has had a spot in Tampa Bay's rotation this year, but the results haven't been what I expected nor what his pedigree would suggest. A 1-3 record and 5.31 ERA only scratches the surface. A 5.08 BB/9 rate indicates control problems. A .279 BAA and .325 opponent BABIP says he's getting hit hard. Another troubling development is Moore's transformation into a fly ball pitcher. 49.2% of batted balls against him have been flies and 17.8% have been liners. A 33.1% ground ball rate isn't going to get anyone far in the AL East, a division filled with murderers' row lineups and bandbox ballparks. Moore's problems have been basically everywhere, and they seem to be spanning his arsenal of pitches, too. His only one with a positive PITCHf/x pitch type linear weight/100 pitches has been his changeup, which is at 2.17 while his four-seamer is -1.43, two-seamer is -0.55 and his slider is -1.79. Oddly enough, the movement on Moore's pitches isn't radically worse anywhere, and the small differences can be attributed to the difference in effort between starting and coming out of the bullpen.

Other than simply not throwing enough strikes, I can't find any blatantly obvious reasons for Moore's struggles, but I think pitch location is a significant factor. The pages on texasleaguers.com and the full-size pics can be found here and here.

 In 2011, Moore was able to distribute his pitches all over the plate, keeping batters off-balance and preventing them from cheating. There is an especially good balance of outside and inside fastballs and his changeup lived low and on both sides of the strike zone.

This season, though, Moore seems to be leaving his pitches up an inordinate amount, which has almost certainly been a large factor for his ballooning fly ball rate. He has gravitated to the inside part of the plate for right-handed hitters, too. That might be an advisable strategy if Moore threw in the upper-90s, or even consistently sat in the mid-90s, but his average four-seamer this season has been about 94. And again, this is the AL East, the division with the MLB lead in offense per capita. Moore needs to keep the ball down more, that's for sure. He's been locating his changeup very well, though, and following that example for the rest of his pitches would be very beneficial.

The Rays have a multitude of reasons to maintain optimism about Moore. He's still young, has a great pitching coach in Jim Hickey and his struggles are mainly based on control, meaning his stuff is still there. Moore is still one of the top young prospects in baseball, another reason for Rays fans to feel excited about this young season.