Basis on Balls

There's plenty to say about Edinson Volquez's calamitous outing tonight which ruined my afternoon and cost me a DirecTV controller (I can neither confirm nor deny the rumor that it was thrown across my living room with tremendous force)...

But of all the things that bothered me about his performance -- and they were numerous -- there's one thing that truly irked more than the others:

Didn't it feel like he was shaking off Ramon Hernandez multiple times on seemingly every single pitch?

This, after the following anecdote was relayed to Hall of Fame beat writer Hal McCoy by Reds pitching coach Dick Pole on the heels of Johnny Cueto's superb outing versus the Cubs on Wednesday:

“He’s learning,” Pole said about Cueto. “He’s a young man. But the big thing I noticed was that he is trusting his catcher (Ramon Hernandez). He wasn’t shaking him off as much as he had been doing.”

Wow, what a novel concept. Trust your catcher. Trust your stuff. Try not to strike everyone out. Follow those rules and maybe you can avoid pitching lines like this one:

5 IP, H, 7 BB, 7 K, 3 ER, 97 pitches

If Volquez doesn't become more pitch efficient -- and doesn't begin to embrace the notion of pitching to contact -- he's gonna be in for quite a lengthy season. And so are the Reds.