Performance Review: Niese's one bad pitch, and his execution

In last night's 4-1 loss to the Reds, Jon Niese allowed four runs in seven innings, three of which came on a three-run home run hit by Jay Bruce in the first inning.

It was the first home run Niese has allowed to a left-handed hitter all season.

'I don't regret throwing the pitch,' Niese said after the game. 'I regret hanging it on the inside part of the plate. Hindsight is 20-20. I probably should have thrown a fastball up and in and been done with it. Maybe he would have swung through it. Maybe not. That's baseball. It's one pitch. One mistake can cost you the game. And it did.'

Niese fell to 4-3 with a 3.82 ERA in 13 starts this season.

Here is a map showing Niese's release point on all of his pitches, courtesy of BrooksBaseball.net:

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Michael Baron: I agree with Niese. It wasn't necessarily the pitch selection to Bruce which hurt him ' it was the execution, and how he chose to execute that pitch. I said yesterday Niese shouldn't be afraid to use that curveball against left-handed hitters so to offset his cutter and fastball and change their eye level at the plate. He used a sidearm delivery on the pitch and, because of the lower arm angle, the pitch has tendency to come in softer and flatter across the strike zone rather than going down through the strike zone. As it is depicted in the map above, the pitch he threw to Votto was the lowest release point of any of his pitches, and he almost threw that curve with an uphill trajectory ' it basically floated right down the middle and Votto crushed it. What's worse is that it came with two outs and two strikes and Bruce was feeding right into Niese's strengths earlier in that sequence.

Niese wasn't terrible after the first inning and he gave the Mets plenty of chances to get back into the game. Still, a better decision on how he executes that curveball might have given this game a better look, feel and energy for the Mets. This is part of the maturation Niese needs to get through in order to take that next step in his career. He has shown time and time again he has the talent and the stuff to be a top-of-the-rotation starter ' it's a matter of taking experiences like this, growing from them, and becoming more consistent with his approach from pitch-to-pitch and start-to-start.