Ubaldo Jimenez: Underrated Superstar or Just an Average Joe?

That's another thing that should be looked at: velocity and pitch selection. Jimenez has a total of four pitches; a fastball, changeup, slider, and curve. The average speed of his fastball is a blazing 94.6 mph, which ranks him third in baseball. Jimenez throws his fastball 71 percent of the time. Opponents are hitting that pitch the best out of all four, at .276. They are hitting his curve .132, his slider .161, and his changeup .213. All-in-all, opposing batters are hitting .238 against Jimenez.

Jimenez allows opposing batters to hit line drives only 16.3 percent of the time, eighth in major league baseball. He's also allowed only eight home runs so far this year, putting his HR/9 seventh in baseball at 0.56.

Home runs allowed shouldn't be a tell-tale sign of a good pitcher, though. In 2007, Johan Santana was very susceptible to the long ball, giving up a total of 33 home runs, making his HR/9 a very high 1.36.

As the Baseball Analysts also note, Jimenez has gotten progressively better in every metric stat this year. Here are his splits for 2008, courtesy the BA:

        ERA    AVG   OBP   SLG   OPS
April   5.90  .291  .411  .393  .805  
May     4.85  .282  .341  .376  .717
June    3.60  .237  .327  .351  .678  
July    2.04  .198  .297  .306  .603

At age 24, they say he might simply be learning on the job. His last horrible outing was back in late May, so they may be on to something.

As a whole, Jimenez is a great pitcher stuck on a not-so-great team. He is soaring under the radar this year because of his poor overall metric stats, but he really is a great pitcher.

The best sign of whether a pitcher is great or poor, though, is simply time. Only time will tell if Jimenez is really a superstar waiting to bloom, or the next Mark Prior.

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