Peabody: Life, Friends Baseball

In the past three or four days there have been some discussion in the blogosphere and tweets that the Mariners are possibly going to trade for Rick Porcello. He is a 24 year old right handed pitcher that already has four years in the major leagues with Detroit. Each successive year as measured by OPS Against, his results have declined. He is tall at 6’5 and lean at 200 pounds.

The trade is him for some un-named prospects.

Last year his monthly splits on OPS Against were mostly ghastly. Ghastly is from an old English word, ghaesten, which meant to torment and frighten and then the spelling with the “h” comes from somebody confusing it with ghost. Now it means just shockingly bad. The numbers: April .863, May .824, June .729 this was the best, July .773, August .827 and saving the worst for last .876. Overall .808.

There are some words out there that his fastball velocity returned last year from a decline into the 80s. Four of the six months last season he was hit like he was a batting practice pitcher. People went up there and annhilated him. Fifty three doubles, two triples and sixteen homers is ugly. His BABIP (batting average on balls in play) against has got worse each year: 2009 .279, 2010 .308, 2011 .318, 2012 .345. When you went to see him pitch last year the sound was like a driving range full of pro golfers, balls were barrelled up constantly. In four years not one complete game, last year he averaged just under six innings per start. The jump in the BABIP Against makes me slightly skeptical about the velocity data.

Whenever I draft this stuff,now I immediately look to see if the Mariners have made the deal before I publish it. No trade yet.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 15th, 2013 at 12:52 pm by terrybenish and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.