Bad night for Rich Harden against the Mets. How bad? Just about as wild as he can get. Using a two-foot wide zone, Harden had the poorest control of his career. Your typical box score will treat the swings at pitches out of the zone as strikes, so these numbers will look lower than what you may have seen already. The most recent outing is the last point in these graphs.That's 40.8% on August 31. The other low points in 2009 were 40.6% on June 24 and 41.3% on April 15. OK, you get it, Harden was as wild as can be. He made up for it by getting hit hard. Slugging on contact was ugly high last time out. SLGCON will vary wildly by game, but a bad game is a bad game.Unusually wild, unusually hittable. Well, almost. His whiff rate was fine. Swings and misses were plentiful, as usual for Harden.At least he had that going for him.
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