When have we seen enough?
How many times can a pitcher utterly fail? How many times will a team run a guy out and
leave your team with little chance of winning?
I guess if you run a small market baseball team and drafted a guy first
overall, the answer is indefinitely.
Luke Hochevar has over 600 career innings and over 100
career starts. Not counting 4
appearances in 2007, Hochevar is in his fifth full season. His lowest ERA is 4.68 and only once has his
WHIP been below 1.427. Because of a nice
second half last season, he had a career low WHIP of 1.283. It turned out to be fool’s gold.
He looked to have finally turned a corner last season. In the second half, he turned in a
respectable 3.52 ERA, 1.134 WHIP, and 7.7 K/9ip. Expectations were high in 2012 for the former
number one overall draft pick. Fantasy
experts were listing him as a big sleeper and the Royals were looking for him
to prove that their infinite patience in him was justified. Many, including myself, really thought maybe
the light bulb had finally clicked on. Unfortunately,
it had not.
In six starts, Hochevar has only thrown 28 innings and is
supporting a downright ugly 9.00 ERA. In
the past, he has shown a penchant for looking brilliant for 3, 4 , sometimes 5
innings then he just loses it completely, allowing fists full of runs. This year, those innings have been early in
the game, crippling the bullpen. He hasn’t
been walking an inordinate number of batters but has been getting
hammered. He has allowed 39 hits in 28
innings. He is pounding the middle of
the strike zone, never an ideal place to be against major league batters. Check out this graph of his pitch location from texasleaguers.com.
Note the cluster of strikes in what is the general wheelhouse
of most big leagues. Throwing strikes is
great but you can’t just throw it down the middle. If a guy hasn’t learned this little tidbit
after 600 innings, I doubt he will ever will.
So, what should the Royals do with this albatross? Kansas City
suffers from a horrible lack of even mediocre depth in their rotation. Now, with Jonathan Sanchez (another apparent
mistake and another article all together) on the DL, it appears the Royals won’t
be able to do anything with Hochevar until Sanchez returns, and even then it is
doubtful KC can come up with another starter.
Fourteen months ago, the Royals had 5 top pitching prospects but only
Danny Duffy has really started to pitch to his potential. There is no immediate help in the
minors. I would suggest that as soon as
Sanchez comes back, they should send Aaron Crow to AAA and begin to stretch him
out a bit. Let him rejoin the club when
he as built up some stamina and push Hochevar to the pen. Hochevar has shown superlative stuff in the
past, albeit in small doses. He wouldn’t
be the first pitcher ever to go to the bullpen and discover how to pitch. Maybe he can learn to at least be a decent
contributor to the team.
Who knows if the Royals will do anything in the near
future. Maybe Hochevar can turn it
around in his next few starts. Again,
anyone, including Dayton Moore, who believes that will happen, is just fooling himself. I don’t think I would ever trust him to be a
reliable cog for my team again.
Considering the Royals ran Kyle Davies out to the mound for several
years doesn’t lead me to believe they will do anything with Hochevar
either. If nothing else, the Royals have
proved to be slow learners themselves.
My thanks to baseball-reference.com and texasleaguers.com
for their stats and pitch data.
No comments:
Post a Comment