–The following is from Bradford Bruns, who is a special contributor to St. Louis Baseball Weekly and can be heard regularly on weekday evenings from 6-8pm on “The Brian Stull Show” on CBS Sports 920am.
For a pitcher so accustomed to disorienting opposing hitters, Steve Cishek stressed simple objectives in his first public comments since joining the Cardinals.
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“I just want to do anything to help the team win,” said the sidearm reliever, acquired Friday from the Miami Marlins, after batting practice this afternoon. “That’s all I’m concerned about. I’m not concerned about personal stats. You guys know my stats – I couldn’t tell you. I won’t ever look at it.”
Cishek’s recent numbers, though, reflect an undeniable uptick in performance. The 29-year-old right-hander permitted only one earned run over his last 13 appearances with the Marlins.
Such results didn’t come nearly as often through the season’s first two months, prompting Miami to briefly option its former closer to Double-A Jacksonville on June 1. Yet Cishek used the demotion as a means to self-diagnose some problems with his patented delivery.
“When you’re not feeling right mechanically … you’re not getting the results, it can mess you up mentally a little bit,” Cishek said. “I was kind of going through that early on in the year. I was just throwing a little bit lower than I typically do.
“I was just getting underneath my pitches. That took away some velocity, and my sinker flattened out. Especially to lefties, I had a really hard time locating a down-and-away strike; it would just take off. All they would do was sit on my slider, and they were just knocking it around.”
Having seemingly rediscovered the form that helped him net 39 saves in 2014, however, Cishek expressed excitement about giving St. Louis’ already strong relief corps – and squad as a whole – yet another formidable presence.
“We have a great bullpen here, and I’m just here to do whatever,” Cishek said. “I’m a relatively quiet guy. I like to just follow along with whatever the skipper says. If he wants me to pitch the sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, 10th, play right field if we run out of position players, I’ll do it.”
photo credit: Robert Mayer-USA TODAY Sports
