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Zito's start last night...

Not as bad as it looked.

7 ER in 3.2 innings for a wonderful ERA of 17.18. That looks pretty bad. However, watching the game last night I thought he was generally pitching pretty well - so I decided to look a little deeper.

3 K's, 0 BB, and 2 HR's. FIP of 8.65. Still really bad, but not nearly as bad. Factor in the .770 BABIP and frankly, Zito kinda got screwed. On a night where ATT park turned into pre-humidor Coors field, Zito gave up a pair of gopherballs and got both completely screwed by BABIP as well as sequence of events. After he gave up that last HR, he also looked PISSED... yelling on the mound - etc. I've never seen mr calm and cool like that before.

He didn't walk anyone and he was striking guys out. He was really not noticeably worse in this start than he was on the 24th against Seattle or the 19th against Washington. In fact, Matt Cain had almost as poor of a start on the 9th at Arizona and an even WORSE start on May 2nd at Colorado (10.70 FIP).

So what's my point? Don't flip out. Zito had 6 starts last year that were in the same catagory of suck as this last one, so it's hardly a surprise.

Zito got shelled last night - baseball is a funny sport and these things happen. Johan got shelled the other day, too. I still think Zito is doing pretty well this year.

It would be great if someone can look at pitch F/X and see if there was anything out of whack with his movement/location/velocity, or if he truly just got unlucky.

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