Rick Porcello Demoted to Toledo

I'm with you Chris and I initially thought about that in regards to Porcello and his curveball. When I went and looked at how little he actually used it, especially down the stretch, I dismissed it as even a "show me" pitch. To me, he never threw it with enough regularity for a hitter to waste his time worrying about it.

I've read (don't recall where) that the Tigers told him to stop throwing it. This seems like a bad decision to me.

I'm not ready to buy into the lack of a curve being the problem. Porcello hardly used it the last two months of last season, he threw a total of ten the last five games he started. His best game this year came against the Yankees in which he didn't throw a single curveball. PitchFX suggests batters are feasting on four-seamers over the plate and a slider that lacks movement. Release point looks consistent, perhaps he has some grip issues to work out.

Zac- So what you're saying is that hitters are hammering a fastball that sits in the middle of the zone, and a slider that's also on the same plane, since it isn't breaking? Why not then use a curve that would at the very least offer a different plane that the batter would have to adjust to? Basically, he's be trying to rely on the speed differential between the fastball and slider instead of the speed and break patterns being different. Curveball will hang more than sliders, but at least it is on a different plane.

You're right about the plane, but I don't think that means it necessarily a pitch selection problem. Rick's location charts show that he is all over the place, too much plate in the hitters happy zone. By comparison, Jeremy Bonderman is doing a better job of keeping his location down in the zone and away from left handed hitters.

In fact, the biggest difference in terms of pitch selection between this year and last year is that he has flip-flopped the percentage of 2-seamers and 4-seamers (I think Matt pointed that out in his previous post). He was almsot always at least 40% four seamers last year but this year he hasn't thrown it more than 30% of the time in any start and has generally been at or below 20%.

The data says he threw an occasional cutter last year. This start may be a growing pain of a 21 year old pitcher trying to figure out what kind of a pitcher he will be.

Zac, you mean batters are feasting on two-seamers over the plate, right? It looks like he's yeilded 17 hits off of his two-seamer in his last three starts and only one off of his four-seamer.

Matt, yes, two-seamers. Blue dot.

I know there are inherent deficiencies trying to come up with an explanation based on one game's data but I think this should get my point across:

Rick Porcello's pitch chart (bottom of page: http://web.minorleaguebaseball.com/index.jsp?sid=t456) indicates to me that there he isn't executing any sort of plan with regularity.

Compare that to Jeremy Bonderman's latest start (bottom of page: http://www.fangraphs.com/pitchfxg.aspx?playerid=1667&position=P&season=2010&date=2010-06-17&dh=0) where it is pretty obvious Bondo is working the bottom half against righties and a line from down-and-in to up-and-away against righties.

sorry, should be a line from down-and-in to up-and-away against lefties.