ANAHEIM, Calif. _ Seeking to recapture his old form earlier this month, Alex Meyer resorted to the earliest captures he could find on the internet: YouTube.
"Yeah, I literally just hopped on YouTube," he said. "I was talking to one of the trainers and they wanted to see some old footage, so I thought, 'Let's see what we can find on there.' "
There, the 26-year-old found his highlights from his junior season at the University of Kentucky, in 2011. He grew an inch every year of college and worked specifically on staying tall while on the mound, to keep his arm slot high. On the video, the Los Angeles Angels' 6-foot-9 right-hander looked different. He knows now that his arm slot dropped as he returned from two months on the disabled list because of shoulder discomfort in 2013. So he went to work reverting to his style.
"You can see my arm slot was a little bit higher, my mechanics were a little bit different, my stride wasn't quite as long," he said. "It's going to be hard to get muscle memory without doing it for so long, but it's just an adjustment that needs to be made and hopefully build consistency and, in the long run, hopefully keep me healthy and try to not get so sore."
Early results are positive. Meyer made his final start of the season Wednesday night in the Angels' 8-6 victory over Oakland and yielded two runs on two doubles and a single in the first inning. He then threw three more scoreless innings, and might have started the fifth inning if not for the Angels' efforts in the bottom of the fourth, when they sent 14 batters to the plate and scored eight runs. There were four doubles, three singles, two walks, and one Kole Calhoun home run.
Meyer logged a 4.57 earned-run average in 21 2/3 innings in five abbreviated starts since his Aug. 1 acquisition. He struck out 24 and walked 13, for him an encouraging beginning.
"It's just a matter of consistency," he said. "With that, I literally try to watch it before I go to bed at night, to have that in my mind and try to feel that a little bit. ... It's just going to take time. I know it's not going to happen overnight."
