Pirates' Mitch Keller feels 'fine' after taking comebacker to thigh

BRADENTON, Fla. — A day after being hit in the left thigh by a comebacker in his first spring training start, Mitch Keller was walking around the Pittsburgh Pirates clubhouse without any worries that it would disrupt his daily routine.

“No, I don’t think so,” Keller said Sunday morning at LECOM Park. “I’ve been walking around on it fine. I’m good there. I’ll go as tolerated. I’m going to go out there and play catch today, see how it feels. I personally don’t think any setbacks will happen.”

Keller took a Daz Cameron liner off his inner left leg in the second inning of a 6-3 win over the Detroit Tigers on Saturday. The Pirates right-hander blamed it on leaving a slider-curve he started throwing less than a month ago too high in the strike zone.

“Obviously that last pitch I don’t want to hang it up the middle,” Keller said. “It’s a new pitch I’m working on, so I was trying to get some work with it. Try to execute it a little better. We know now to execute a little bit better, and it’s something to work on.”

Keller said he started toying with the “slurve” three-plus weeks ago after throwing a bullpen session during his visit to Tread Athletics in Charlotte, the pitching development center he worked with in the offseason to increase his fastball velocity back to the upper 90s.

“We saw some numbers from it, so it was just something we explored,” Keller said. “Saw some really good numbers and was like, ‘OK, this might be something we might want to explore because it’s a pretty good pitch so see if we can’t get a little more consistent with it and have that as a good weapon for me.”

The idea came during a conversation about sliders, which prompted Keller to give the new pitch a try. After one session, he realized that it “might actually work.”

“We put it on some numbers on Trackman and it was actually really good,” Keller said. “It just worked by happenchance, I guess.”

Keller is tinkering with the slurve in hopes of finding consistency and adding the new pitch to his repertoire, which includes the four-seamer, a slider, curveball and a changeup that remains a work in progress.

“Who knows what it will be down the road, but just something that I was messing around with this offseason and I kind of liked it,” Keller said, “so we’ll see how it works out against hitters.”