John Holdzkom started 2014 in independent ball and at one point in the season got cut by his indy league team. He has pitched for New Zealand’s World Baseball Classic team. One time he called in to Chelsea Peretti’s podcast, lamenting his blown baseball opportunity. The Pirates signed him out of the blue last summer, fixed his control issues, snuck him onto the 40-man roster before the deadline for the post-season, and on October 1st he pitched in a playoff game. He can throw his fastball 100 mph and is pretty much the only big leaguer to throw a palm ball. I don’t even know what to say: the whole thing is wonderful.
Holdzkom threw a grand total of ten innings for the Pirates last year, and so I don’t want to make any broad, sweeping conclusions about anything that happened. For his first eight appearances, he was unhittable. In his last two, he was not. My main suspicion is this: he’s going to need to develop a pitch to play off that fastball. We know he has the palm ball, but according to FanGraphs, almost 94% of his pitches last year were fastballs. It’s obviously a good fastball and he’s a reliever so he doesn’t need a massive arsenal, but if he wants to be more than a ROOGY, he’s going to need another pitch.
Anyway, I don’t mean that as a criticism, really, just as a sort of guess of where Holdzkom’s headed and what I think probably needs to happen for him to sustain that magical run from the end of last season. As it stands, that fastball looks like a pretty great pitch. In his nine regular season innings, Holdzkom faced 32 hitters and struck out 14 of them. On top of that, he got groundballs at a nice clip. I think he’ll need the second pitch (most likely the palm ball) for when hitters adjust to him, but if he can throw it reliably, it seems clear that the components are there for him to make a really solid relief pitcher.
<500 is an ongoing series previewing 2015 for each key Pirate in fewer than 500 words.
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