CINCINNATI – Below .500 for the first time in more than a month, and losers of 10 of their last 12, you could forgive the Twins if they were in no mood for a moral victory. But it’s hard not to be encouraged by what they saw from Bailey Ober on Wednesday night, especially over his last three innings.
Yes, Ober took the loss in a 4-2 defeat to the Reds that deepened Minnesota’s recent slump. And yes, Ober was hit for four runs in the first three innings.
But over the final 2 2/3 innings, before rain forced a premature end to the game in the sixth, Ober looked like the pitcher they have come to rely on over the past few years. He mixed his assortment and lived on the edges of the strike zone, inducing consistently weak contact in a ballpark where it can be very tough to pitch.
After three straight outings where Ober was searching for his form, he seemed to find it on Wednesday.
“Both his command and his stuff were clearly better,” said manager Rocco Baldelli. “They were improved from his last outing, and even his last couple of outings. This is the best he’s thrown the ball in a while.”
His last time out, Ober walked six and allowed four homers in one of the worst outings of his career. Six days before that he was charged with five runs over seven innings, and in the previous start, he allowed only two runs but needed 97 pitches to get 12 outs.
The first encouraging sign from Ober came right out of the gate. His velocity, down in recent starts, ticked back up a bit. He hit 92.2 miles per hour and consistently sat around 91, a step up from recent starts. It averaged 90.4 over the outing, his highest since May 25. Eventually, the results followed as well.
He acknowledged that he had been trying to get his mechanics back in place, which can be challenging for a pitcher listed at 6-foot-9. On Wednesday, he felt he was closer than he’d been in some time.
“Movement-wise, everything [was] just flowing in the right direction,” he said. “I was just talking to myself, ‘Man, I just need a 1-2-3 inning, and then I’ll get going.’ Because I felt really good. And it just didn’t happen until the fifth inning. … I felt good. Hopefully it carries into the next outing.”
From Ober’s perspective, even those first three innings were better than they looked. While a simple chart suggests that some of the balls that were hit caught too much of the zone, he said that even early, he was locating most of his pitches where he wanted them.
“The fastballs that were hit were in good spots where the guys usually don’t hit those if you look at their heat maps,” he said.
“I had a lot of those today. So that's why I’m not super beat up about it. I threw to good spots where they’re not supposed to hit and they just put the ball in play and hit it right where we weren’t. So just one of those days.”