(AUDACY) White Sox left-hander Carlos Rodon is like the fine wine of MLB pitchers — he gets better with "age," though age in this case is metaphorical for pitches thrown and innings eaten over the course of a game.
That's often a scary prospect for a starting pitcher, seeing as the typical starter will wear down in the later frames of an outing. But in Rodon's case, he's usually just as good and he also has a knack for throwing as hard as ever as he works late into games.
In the White Sox's 4-1 win against the Twins on Tuesday ,Rodon struck out the side in the sixth inning, his final inning of work. He recorded those three strikeouts with impressive heaters measuring at 99.2, 100.1 and 100.4 miles per hour, in that order.
Yankees ace 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, according to MLB.com researcher and writer Andrew Simon. In another neat statistic, you'll see that those two 100-mph fastballs from Rodon were his two hardest thrown pitches of the night, and that 100.4-mph cheese was pitch No. 104 for Rodon.
And 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 has thrown. It looks like there's a brief lull in the middle — if you consider a .228 batting average against a "lull" — before he buckles back down to his dominant stuff.
That's a big part of the reason the 28-year-old Rodon has earned his first All-Star honor, and White Sox fans should be excited that he has figured out how to succeed at the big league level in a year in which his team carries World Series aspirations.
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