Breakdown of Teheran & Banuelos in Friday's game

Teheran and Banuelos each threw multiple innings in today's ATL-NYY game that was televised on MLBN. You can imagine my excitement when I found out the first TV broadcast of a Braves ST game this season was going to feature Teheran as the SP. Catching 2 IP from Banuelos was just a lucky byproduct of DVRing the game. I'm going to go through batter by batter for each guy later today when I get a chance, but for now I'll just have my initial impressions of each guy

Teheran: Fastball was 95-97 per the broadcast gun the first two innings, before falling off a tick or two in the third. Was mostly hitting his spots, but of the ~5 noticeable misses, all but one ended up in the middle of the zone. Where he was missing was a much larger concern than how often he was missing.

Curve was actually consistent for the most part. He appeared to be focusing on it early as he threw 3 or 4 before he threw a single change despite the fact he was facing lefty hitters. It looked to be slightly harder and tighter than it was last year (78-79 on the gun but it could have been a bit hot). Based on what I saw, it would grade average to solid-average based on this start. Threw 1 that mostly spun and hung a bit up in the zone, but the other 6 or so were all good. Should be more than adequate as a third pitch if its generally this consistent.

The change looked very impressive, but Teheran struggled to command it well. His misses tended to be up and away which could be a function of slightly slowing his arm on those pitches (which was a problem at times earlier last year). Still, the velocity differential (pitch was 82-84) between the fastball and change was good, and the horizontal movement was excellent. Showed one that started at a LHH hip then moved back over the inside corner, leading to a slight flinch from the batter, which was real impressive.

Banuelos: Regular fastball was 94-96 both innings. Didn't do a great job of hitting his spots, but was more likely to miss off the plate than over it. Showed a pretty impressive sinker (91-93) that kept the Braves hitters off balance. I wouldn't mind seeing him replace some of the 4 seam FBs with sinkers in his starts.

Regular curve (78-79) was consistent, but not particularly impressive. Did a good job keeping it down in the zone or out of the zone, so hitters couldn't have done much with it, but for the most part they seemed to have little trouble laying off. Showed one slower curve with 2 strikes that came in at 74 that just looked nasty. Not sure if it was an accident or if he just took something off the regular curve, but if it's the latter I think he should use it more.

Change was solid, but unspectacular. Did a good job keeping it low and away to RHH, but they didn't seem fooled by it really. I'll take a closer look at later.