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Zach Britton’s Shaky Early Outings No Cause for Concern

Zach Britton looks into home plate.
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The other day, I wrote a post titled “Let’s Draw a Bunch of Conclusions from One Game.” It was fun, but it was also, of course, a bit tongue-in-cheek.

Certainly, we can’t draw any meaningful conclusions from one baseball game, whether it’s the first game of the year or the 101st. Still, we baseball-starved fans needed something to talk about, and I was far from the only blogger to publish a post on what the Birds showed us on Monday. Full disclosure: I stole the idea from a San Francisco Giants writer, Grant Brisbee, (whom you should be reading).

One of my “conclusions” was that Zach Britton is Zach Britton. He allowed a couple hits Monday, sure, but they were on ground balls, and he still got the outs that he needed to.

However, Britton’s second outing of the year made Birdland even more uneasy. He again allowed two base hits, and as Mark Viviano pointed out on Twitter, at no point in all of 2016 did he give up multiple hits in consecutive outings.

He again got the ground ball he needed at the exact moment he desperately needed it, when Toronto had loaded the bases with just one out. But twice in a row, he played with fire. That’s not something we saw very often from Great Britton last season.

Zach has allowed seven baserunners – on five hits and two walks – in three innings pitched.

Queasy yet?

Fortunately, you shouldn’t be. Britton warned us about this before the season started, after he was only able to rack up five innings of work down in Sarasota, about half as many as he’d like to feel comfortable. Now he’s at eight innings of work this spring, so he should be getting more into the rhythm of things.

He was mostly missing below the zone, and one of the hits off him came on a pitch at the bottom corner of the rectangle, as we can see thanks to BrooksBaseball.net:

Zach Britton's strike zone plot vs. the Jays from game 2 of 2017.

He left a couple pitches up though, but thankfully his stuff is so good that the Jays weren’t able to do anything with them.

Just like you can’t draw *real* conclusions from one game, you can’t draw them from two. At this point, it’s just a little blip on the radar that we’re likely to not even remember in a week’s time.

Britton still owns baseball’s nastiest pitch. We aren’t likely to see many more bases-loaded or multiple-hit outings from him going forward.

Still, we’ll all be just a bit more nervous the next time AC/DC cranks up. Here’s to Zach quickly assuaging our fears.

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