The nearly immaculate Dylan Coleman
One pitch from perfection, Dylan’s a guy to keep your eyes on.
He was gone from the Tri-Cities before we could even truly appreciate him.
Dylan Coleman was coming up on my list of first impressions posts, but he managed to be the first of the 2018 draft class to be promoted this season—and for very good reason.
Dylan is a 98mph strike-throwing machine with some wicked stuff. With his combination of velocity and control, he certainly seems like the type who could beat a quick path to the majors. After showing some nerves in his first professional appearance, he’s done nothing but shut down opponents since then.
Last week, while listening to Chris King’s play-by-play during the Dust Devils game against Vancouver and following along in FirstPitch, I saw something that made my jaw drop.
Dylan was one pitch short of an immaculate inning.
An immaculate inning is one in which a pitcher strikes out all three batters faced on just three pitches, using just 9 pitches for the full inning.
Immaculate innings are less rare than a perfect game — 85 pitchers with immaculate innings all-time in the MLB compared to 23 perfect games. But they’re far rarer than no hitters, with 299 in MLB history.
Achieving an immaculate inning is an extremely hard thing to do, for starters, because it’s hard to throw 9 pitches in a row that accurately. Further, it’s even harder to pitch that accurately in general. It’s even harder yet to pitch so accurately without a batter putting the ball in play or at least fouling off a pitch or two. The entire notion of the strike zone is that a pitcher is putting pitches where hitters are going to have an easy time making contact.
But now we’re talking about getting three strikeouts, not just strictly outs. It would be easier and far more common to have a three pitch inning — say, a pop-up, a ground-out, and a fly ball, each on the first pitch of each at bat.
So much of a pitcher’s ability to strike batters out relies on getting them to chase pitches that are hard to hit — and many times those pitches are going to be out of the strike zone. When ahead in the count with two strikes and no balls, a strikeout pitcher is more likely to throw a ball in order to get a batter to chase a bad pitch or put a ball in play weakly.
Only a pitcher with superior stuff is likely to be able to challenge hitters so directly and come out with this kind of outing.
To provide some more context, Max Scherzer was the last MLB pitcher to achieve this feat, which says something, given that Scherzer is unquestionably one of the most dominant pitchers of our era.
So back to Dylan.
Dylan’s nearly immaculate inning wasn’t a cheapie. He didn’t have batters swinging at pitches that weren’t strikes, and none of his pitches were balls. In his 10 pitches, he served up six swinging strikes, a called strike, and a foul. All six of the 10 swinging strikes would have been called strikes.
Let’s look at the pitch order and locations through the full inning and see what we can learn.
Nick Podkul is one of the top hitters in the Northwest League. Here he is going down in three quick pitches.
The pitch sequence is interesting and allows us to speculate a little bit about the thinking behind the pitch selection throughout the inning.
Pitching to Podkul, it appears he tested him on the first pitch down the middle. After Podkul fouled it off, we saw Dylan mix up locations. Podkul took the second for a called strike and swung and missed at the third
After striking out Podkul, Dylan faced Christopher Bec. It looked like Dylan was feeling confident in his fastball after testing him with the first pitch and followed the same strategy, challenging him the second time and again the third.
We can see here the significant advantage that hard throwers particularly have in the lower levels of the minors. Where most major league level hitters will have a good chance of hitting a hard fastball thrown down the middle, the greener the player, the less likely they’ve gotten their sea legs in facing dominating fastballs.
So it’s pretty gutsy to throw three straight down the middle, but it’s also a smart strategy when you can see that they can’t catch up.
So after the swing-and-miss on the first pitch, Dylan throws Bec another fastball down the middle. Then a third.
We see him change it up again on the fourth pitch. When Bec fouled off the third pitch, I’d guess batterymate Blake Hunt called for a change in location, and they got him swinging again. Down goes Bec on four.
I’d guess that if he’d not thrown three consecutive pitches down the middle — allowing Bec the chance to catch up in timing enough to make contact on the third pitch — he’d have been able to net the immaculate inning.
Then take a look at Dylan’s total dominance in the final at bat facing Jesus Severino:
Good morning, good afternoon, good night.
Last week, Dylan Coleman did something pretty special. He’s going to be fun to watch.
