photo by wollstonecraft [flickr]

An interesting thing happened yesterday after Felix Hernandez dominated the A’s for 8 innings allowing only 2 hits: he gave credit to the Internet [times]. Dave Cameron, of USS Mariner, wrote an open letter to M’s pitching coach Rafael Chavez pleading with him to ask Hernandez to mix up his pitches in the early innings. It didn’t go unnoticed by Dave (nor Jeff Sullivan of Lookout Landing) that Felix’s struggles were occurring primarily early in the ballgame and primarily because he was throwing too many fastballs. Felix read the report, relented, and gave up his usual “establish the fastball early” routine. As Dave rightly points out in his follow-up post, correlation doesn’t automatically mean causation, but the fact that information posted on a baseball fan blog, even a wildly popular one like USS Mariner, made it all the way to the mound in a big league baseball game is pretty cool. The Internet may not be the savior of our democracy that everybody expects it to be but it might yet save the greatest pitching talent our local pro baseball team has ever produced.

Baby steps, I guess.