SI

A's Pitcher Made Jose Altuve Look Absolutely Lost on Nasty Four-Pitch Sequence

Mason Miller has great stuff.

Josh Wilson

Mason Miller gets Jose Altuve to bite on a slider away.
Mason Miller gets Jose Altuve to bite on a slider away. /
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Against the hefty expectations against them, the Oakland Athletics are actually making a run of things in what will be their final season playing at the Oakland Coliseum. At 19-25, they sit third in the American League West, just 3.0 games behind the defending World Series Champion Texas Rangers and 4.5 games behind the division-leading Seattle Mariners.

A big reason for that success? Mason Miller. His elite stuff was put on full display in an incredible four-pitch at-bat with Jose Altuve at the plate in the eighth inning on Tuesday night.

It started with a called strike slider at 86.3 miles per hour in the top of the zone. Then, Miller put an 87.7-MPH slider way out of the zone that Altuve bit on and whiffed badly at. Miller went back to that same pitch, same location, but Altuve wasn't fooled twice. To close it out on the fourth pitch, Miller rushed a 101.6-MPH fastball by him low in the zone that was called for a strike.

Before he had a chance to think about it, the call was made. Strike three.

Altuve, an elite hitter, looked completely bewildered at what he just saw walking away from the plate. Here's a PitchingNinja compilation of the three strikes:

Miller throws two pitches, the fastball and slider, and both are quality, earning a 3 and 4 run value per Statcast. He boasts a 155 Stuff+ rating per FanGraphs, the best among qualified relievers in MLB.

Miller kept runs off the board on Tuesday, logging five strikeouts and no hits in his two innings pitched. The game went extras, and the Astros would win with a walk-off single in the bottom of the 10th.

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Josh Wilson
JOSH WILSON

Josh Wilson is the news director of the Breaking and Trending News team at Sports Illustrated. Before joining SI in 2024, he worked for FanSided in a variety of roles, most recently as senior managing editor of the brand’s flagship site. He has also served as a general manager of Sportscasting, the sports arm of a start-up sports media company, where he oversaw the site’s editorial and business strategy. Wilson has a bachelor’s degree in mass communications from SUNY Cortland and a master’s in accountancy from the Gies College of Business at the University of Illinois. He loves a good nonfiction book and enjoys learning and practicing Polish. Wilson lives in Chicago but was raised in upstate New York. He spent most of his life in the Northeast and briefly lived in Poland, where he ate an unhealthy amount of pastries for six months.

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