BOSTON — Jorge Alcala‘s ERA has improved by more than two runs since the Red Sox acquired him in a trade with the Twins on June 11.
“I think I just lost a little bit of confidence before,” Alcala said through translator Daveson Perez. “Now my confidence is definitely higher than it was working with the pitching coaches here. And their philosophy of attacking the strike zone has helped me a lot, too.”
Alcala has allowed just one earned run in 10 ⅓ innings (0.87 ERA) in 11 outings for Boston. That’s vast improvement from the 24 earned runs in 24 ⅓ innings (8.88 ERA) he gave up in 22 outings with Minnesota to begin the season.
The Red Sox saw his potential, evidenced by his 3.24 ERA in 58 ⅓ innings last year.
The 29-year-old righty’s success starts with velocity.
Alcala has reached 100.3 mph with his fastball as a member of the Red Sox. The Dominican Republic native hit triple-digits for the first time during his age 19-20 season in 2015. He then was pitching for the Dominican Summer League and hit 102 mph, he said.
“I didn’t notice at the time when I did it,” he said. “But they told me after and even the newspapers in the Dominican wrote about it. I was like, ‘Oh, wow.’”
However, it’s not the elite velocity that has led to his turnaround with Boston. It’s his breaking ball, which manager Alex Cora keeps mentioning.
“Good fastball. The breaking ball is real,” Cora said after Alcala’s first outing June 17 in Seattle.
“Obviously the velocity catches your attention but the breaking ball is good,” Cora said after one of Alcala’s most recent outings. “It’s really good.”
But which breaking ball is Cora talking about? Alcala throws both a slider and curveball.
“I think the curveball right now is the best one for me,” Alcala said. “Just continuing to work on it. Obviously I have the fastball there. But you have to mix it up sometimes.”
It’s clear the Red Sox really liked Alcala’s curveball when they traded for him and knew he would have success if he threw it more often.
His slider was his second most used pitch behind his four-seam fastball with Minnesota but it got hit hard. Opponents batted .389 against it. His curveball was his third-most used pitch and hitters were batting just .143 against it.
The Red Sox have dramatically shifted his pitch selection, reducing slider usage from 21.8% to 8.2% while more than doubling his curveball usage from 15.1% to 32.7%."
Control was also an issue. His 6.8% walk percentage with Boston is down from 13.2% with Minnesota.
“I heard Bails (pitching coach Andrew Bailey) and Tek (game-planning and run prevention coach Jason Varitek) the other day talking about catcher’s setups with him,” Cora said. “Kind of start right in the middle and then go to the edges. That probably is helping him right now. I’m not 100% sure what they were doing in Minnesota. Obviously they have a great pitching program over there and they’re really good at what they do. But that’s something from the get-go we told our catchers - do this and hopefully we can get ahead and then we go to the edges.”
Cora said he wants to put Alcala in more higher-leverage situations.
“That makes me really happy that they have that trust,” Alcala said. “Just waiting for my moment to go out there and pitch and do what I can for this team.”
