Carlos Rodon is like the fine wine of MLB pitchers — he gets better with "age," though age is metaphorical for pitches thrown and innings eaten over the course of a game. And that's a scary prospect for a starting pitcher, seeing as the typical starter will wear down by the later frames of an outing. For Rodon, he's usually just as good, and in cases like Tuesday night, he was throwing harder than ever.
Rodon struck out the side in the sixth, his final inning of work, and recorded those three Ks with impressive heaters measuring at 99.2, 100.1 and 100.4 miles per hour, in that order.
According to MLB.com researcher and writer Andrew Simon, Yankees fireballer Gerrit Cole is the only other pitcher in the tracking era (post-2008) to have notched three 99-plus-mph strikeouts in the sixth inning or later. In another neat statistic, you'll see that those two 100-mph heaters were the two hardest thrown pitches of the night, and that 100.4-mph cheese was pitch No. 104 for Rodon. And in yet another cool tidbit, this one shared by Sox Machine writer Jim Margalus, you can see how Rodon's late-game performance looks statistically throughout this season. Here's a chart showing batters' numbers against him based on the number of times they've faced him in a game.
Here's a similar chart, this time showing how opponents fare against Rodon based on the number of pitches he's thrown. It looks like there's a brief lull in the middle — if you consider a .228 BAA a "lull" — before he buckles back down to his dominant stuff.
There's a reason the 28-year-old is finally an All-Star, and White Sox fans should be more than excited that the left-hander has figured out how to succeed at the Major League level in a year with World Series aspirations.
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