Rockies Mailbag: Why is Jake McGee succeeding with the Dodgers when he couldn’t with Rox?

Den­ver Post sports writer Patrick Saun­ders with the lat­est install­ment of his Rock­ies Mailbag.

Pose a Rock­ies — or MLB — relat­ed ques­tion for the Rock­ies Mailbag.

A recent sto­ry from anoth­er media out­let not­ed Jake McGee’s much-improved per­for­mance this year with the Dodgers and his increased fast­ball usage. Is that a reflec­tion of the Coors Field effect on pitch­ers? Or is it a reflec­tion on the Rox orga­ni­za­tion that such a seem­ing­ly sim­ple tweak escaped notice for his four years in Denver?
— Dave G., Fort Collins

Dave, the arti­cle you are refer­ring to was writ­ten in The Ath­let­ic by Nick Groke, my for­mer col­league at The Den­ver Post.

It was a very inter­est­ing piece, not­ing that McGee’s fast­ball usage is up this year, but also explain­ing that his fast­ball veloc­i­ty has increased. Accord­ing to Fan­Graphs, McGee’s fast­ball this sea­son is aver­ag­ing 95.1 mph as opposed to 93.4 mph with Col­orado last sea­son. He’s still not throw­ing as hard as he did in 2014 with Tam­pa Bay when he was almost exclu­sive­ly a fast­ball pitch­er, thanks to a heater that aver­aged 97.5 mph.

The Rock­ies orig­i­nal­ly signed McGee pri­mar­i­ly because they thought his fast­ball would play at alti­tude. Some­times it did, some­times it didn’t. Last sea­son, he allowed 17 of 26 inher­it­ed run­ners to score (65.4%), which was the high­est per­cent­age in the majors (min­i­mum 25 inher­it­ed run­ners). That is one of the big rea­sons why the club released McGee.

But back to your basic ques­tion. The Dodgers just might have dis­cov­ered a tweak to McGee’s mechan­ics that enabled him to “redis­cov­er” the mag­ic of his fastball.

“It was kind of cool to have that feel­ing again, to be on the mound and be my old self again,” McGee told The Ath­let­ic. “When I get feed­back like that, swings and miss­es, it’s hard for me to go to some­thing else, even though they know I’m throw­ing a fast­ball 98 per­cent of the time right now.”

At sea lev­el in Los Ange­les, McGee’s fast­ball does appear to have more life and move­ment, mak­ing it more of a swing-and-miss pitch. But I don’t think the Rock­ies “mis­di­ag­nosed” McGee. I think part of the prob­lem was a painful and trou­ble­some left knee that at times plagued McGee last season.

For the record, as I write this, McGee is 2–1 with a 3.86 ERA for the Dodgers, strik­ing out 17 and walk­ing only three over 11 2/3 innings. His WHIP is an impres­sive 0.943.

How­ev­er, his last out­ing was not good. He took a loss against Texas last Fri­day, allow­ing four runs on four hits and notch­ing one strike­out in just one-third of an inning.

We’ll see how this plays out.

Para­phras­ing Clint Hur­dle, “This is not the try-hard league; it’s a do-good league.” I get the sense these fel­lows have got them­selves all tensed and tan­gled up try­ing too hard. They’ve got to be a bet­ter team than they’re show­ing us late­ly. It can’t be Buddy’s fault; he’s pret­ty easy going. Right? Also, do you guys in the media get to be in the press box or in the stands for home games? Can you share some of how the job works day today in the 2020 COVID season?
— John, Denver

John, I agree with you that the Rock­ies are too tight. Part of that is a byprod­uct of los­ing, so it then becomes a vicious cycle. But the vet­er­an lead­ers on the team — Nolan Are­na­do, Trevor Sto­ry and Char­lie Black­mon — are all grinders. They lead by exam­ple and by their work eth­ic, but I get the sense that they are kind of islands unto them­selves. Of course, I don’t get to see the team in the food room, weight room, team plane, etc., so I can’t accu­rate­ly gauge the inter­nal mood of the team.

I do won­der if it would do the Rock­ies some good to get real­ly ticked off, and that includes Black, who tends to be very even-tempered.

That said, I found it inter­est­ing that gen­er­al man­ag­er Jeff Bridich talked quite a bit about the per­son­al­i­ty and spark he believes new out­field­er Kevin Pil­lar will bring to the team.

As for the sec­ond part of your ques­tion, I find it inter­est­ing that you’re inter­est­ed in “ink-strained wretch­es” such as myself. But thanks for the question!

Things have changed a lot this sea­son. I am not trav­el­ing to the Rock­ies when they play on the road. I road games on TV from my home office, keep­ing score as I always do, while tweet­ing and fol­low­ing the game on MLB.com’s Game Day. The Rock­ies media rela­tions folks set us up with sev­er­al pregame Zoom ses­sions before each game and then a few after the game. I want to say — once again — that the Rock­ies media rela­tions crew has been amaz­ing get­ting the play­ers to talk to us.

When the Rock­ies are at home, I cov­er the game from the press box at Coors Field. There were quite a few peo­ple there for the home open­er but now there are usu­al­ly only sev­en or eight writ­ers in the press box. I much pre­fer cov­er­ing games in per­son. I get a much bet­ter feel for the game and you can see things that aren’t cap­tured by TV cam­eras. Of course, hav­ing access to TV replays is essen­tial, too, so there is a TV in the press­box close at hand.

What I miss the most dur­ing this weird sea­son is the per­son­al inter­ac­tion with the play­ers in the club­house. I can gath­er news on my own and I don’t have to rely on Zooms and share every­thing with the rest of the media. It’s more dif­fi­cult to be a reporter this sea­son and get a true sense of what’s going on with the team.

Do the Rock­ies seri­ous­ly think (and do you as well) that Wade Davis has some­thing left and can be a clos­er again?
— Gary J Gaudin, Thornton

Gary, Davis is still on the injured list and the Rock­ies aren’t telling us much about his sore shoul­der. For him to be out this long sug­gests that it’s a pret­ty big deal. The Rock­ies’ acqui­si­tion of right-han­der Mychal Givens at the trade dead­line is anoth­er indi­ca­tion that Davis prob­a­bly won’t be count­ed on this sea­son. He might pitch, but I can’t see him as a clos­er. Frankly, I was sur­prised that Davis was essen­tial­ly giv­en the clos­er role dur­ing the abbre­vi­at­ed spring train­ing. I thought Scott Oberg had earned the role and was a much bet­ter choice, but now he’s been lost for the sea­son with reoc­cur­ring blood clots in his right arm.

Gar­rett Hamp­son has been very suc­cess­ful bunting in inop­por­tune sit­u­a­tions. Why don’t oth­er play­ers bunt more fre­quent­ly, espe­cial­ly when the shift is on?
— Judy Frie­man, Denver

Judy, that’s a great ques­tion. The sim­ple answer is that most play­ers are ter­ri­ble bun­ters and they don’t do it very often. They prac­tice it as an after­thought at the begin­ning of bat­ting prac­tice. Hamp­son learned to bunt in high school and at Long Beach State, where all play­ers were required to be decent bun­ters. I wish Raimel Tapia was a bet­ter bunter, and Sam Hilliard, too. But it’s just not part of con­tem­po­rary play­ers’ skill set.

The cur­rent thought is that by bunting, you are essen­tial­ly giv­ing away an out. With the empha­sis on home runs, that’s a no-no.

If you want to read more, take a peek at this sto­ry in Sports Illus­trat­ed enti­tled “Bunting for Dummies.”

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