Great news!
Great article on Kris Johnson on ProJo this morning. It's honestly a really great read. I mean, at one point, Kris was here: “It got to the point where I was almost accepting failure every time out. It came to the point where I was expecting to lose.”
Poor Kris had a stint of over 300 days between victories in a start before he finally turned himself around.
Johnson blames his own arrogance for his troubles. He kicked off 2009 with a pair of good starts, and his head began to swell. He started to dream of a major-league callup.
“I started putting too much pressure on myself,” Johnson said. “I started saying, O.K., you can hopefully get called up, so you’ve got to start being even more perfect than you have been. And then everything snowballed. My very next start I got tattooed for like 8 runs.”
Despite the awful record, Red Sox brass believed in the 25-year-old, and Johnson was invited back to major-league spring training again this year. It was there that his transformation began. Johnson sat down with Red Sox pitching coach John Farrell, who told him to get back to the pitcher he was in 2008, when he put up a 3.63 ERA in Double-A Portland.
That was only the beginning. He still had to learn to trust himself. For that, he credits pitching coach Rich Sauveur. Johnson was forced to work out of the bullpen to start the year, and he wasn’t attacking hitters aggressively enough. The coach saw that Johnson was still tentative, afraid to throw balls over the middle of the plate.
“No pitcher wants to get hit. So last year, when I was really getting hit - and I got hit hard a lot -- it was like ‘Throw it and hope they don’t hit it,” Johnson said.
Sauveur told Johnson he needed to start taking chances, and quit trying to be perfect. Stop trying to be so fine. Just throw strikes.
It clicked. As he entered the starting rotation, Johnson began working off the fastball, starting hitters with strikes rather than falling behind in the count. Now, he can use his strong secondary pitches -- his changeup, his curve, his cutter -- to maximum effect.
Success came almost immediately, and Sauveur could see the confidence start to well up inside the young lefty.
“It’s not so much a fake confidence that he showed last year, because he would walk around and look O.K. - but now he’s walking around and it’s coming out of him,” Sauveur said.
This is just so, so rewarding. See, hard work really can do things for you. So happy for you, Kris!
Poor Kris had a stint of over 300 days between victories in a start before he finally turned himself around.
Johnson blames his own arrogance for his troubles. He kicked off 2009 with a pair of good starts, and his head began to swell. He started to dream of a major-league callup.
“I started putting too much pressure on myself,” Johnson said. “I started saying, O.K., you can hopefully get called up, so you’ve got to start being even more perfect than you have been. And then everything snowballed. My very next start I got tattooed for like 8 runs.”
Despite the awful record, Red Sox brass believed in the 25-year-old, and Johnson was invited back to major-league spring training again this year. It was there that his transformation began. Johnson sat down with Red Sox pitching coach John Farrell, who told him to get back to the pitcher he was in 2008, when he put up a 3.63 ERA in Double-A Portland.
That was only the beginning. He still had to learn to trust himself. For that, he credits pitching coach Rich Sauveur. Johnson was forced to work out of the bullpen to start the year, and he wasn’t attacking hitters aggressively enough. The coach saw that Johnson was still tentative, afraid to throw balls over the middle of the plate.
“No pitcher wants to get hit. So last year, when I was really getting hit - and I got hit hard a lot -- it was like ‘Throw it and hope they don’t hit it,” Johnson said.
Sauveur told Johnson he needed to start taking chances, and quit trying to be perfect. Stop trying to be so fine. Just throw strikes.
It clicked. As he entered the starting rotation, Johnson began working off the fastball, starting hitters with strikes rather than falling behind in the count. Now, he can use his strong secondary pitches -- his changeup, his curve, his cutter -- to maximum effect.
Success came almost immediately, and Sauveur could see the confidence start to well up inside the young lefty.
“It’s not so much a fake confidence that he showed last year, because he would walk around and look O.K. - but now he’s walking around and it’s coming out of him,” Sauveur said.
This is just so, so rewarding. See, hard work really can do things for you. So happy for you, Kris!