Arden Zwelling

And when he leaves it in bad areas of the plate, Ozzie Albies does really rude things to it.

And there was another big hit off of it last night than a blanket on as well.

So that's really been like the problem for him is when teams can kind of keyhole him

into the fastball and the cutter and sit on those pitches.

If he misses his location by just enough, they're going to barrel those pitches.

Yeah, you're right to identify that some of this is just that he was available.

And the Blue Jays have two openings in their rotation.

So that's probably the biggest driver here.

But they've done some research and some homework on him.

And they know him a bit as well just from his time in the organization.

And they do have some ideas for different things he could do with his arsenal.

I would imagine that that starts with decreasing the splitter usage just because that pitch has been getting better.

hammered this year particularly by righties and something that was Richardson developed late last year and kind of fell in love with it because it was effective at first when he first introduced it but it's clearly just not the same pitch this year when you look at it metrically or you look at where he's putting it in the zone so I would imagine just shelving that or at least decreasing its usage a bit for the time being and also when you just look at the way he's lost a tick off of his fastball this year and he's lost a

bite off of his slider and I mentioned the splitter just has been modeling very differently this year there's got to be something going on mechanically something with his just his technique I suppose on the mound could be postural could be release could be his finish could be arm angle like there's a million things that play into that and so that's going to be up to Sam Green and Luke Hoey and the Blue Jays pitching guys who work

on that stuff to sort of assess where the areas of opportunity are there for him because you're right like the peripherals everything has gone in the wrong direction this year strikeout rate down walk rate up home run rate up but

for two years prior when he had better stuff and better ability to locate uh simeon woods richardson was not dissimilar in results to a guy like chris bassett or even a jose perillos so if the blue jays can get him back there he's a back-end starter who can five a dive for you but what we've seen so far this season has been a long way off of what we saw the two years prior

I think there's a very high likelihood that Chad Dallas is the bulk guy today.

They need somebody who can throw 70, 80 pitches.

And he's really the only guy in the area code who can do that for them.

Josh Fleming pitched yesterday.