On Rick Porcello and Strikeouts

Now that the Tigers’ 20-year-old rookie Rick Porcello is doing some things baseball hasn’t seen for a long time from a player so young—at least in the wins and runs columns of the ledger—there comes the question of trying to categorize him.

You’ve got to find the proper slot for him, you know, so you can make the declaration: “Rick Porcello is the next ____.” So the two themes often brought up when discussing Porcello—and I was guilty of this myself before I actually saw him pitch—are that, when you look at the stats, you don’t see a lot of strikeouts, but you do see a lot of groundballs.

So what is Porcello? The next Brandon Webb? Roy Halladay? Josh Beckett? All good company to keep, right?

ESPN.com’s Rob Neyer takes that question on, responding to a post at John Q Public:

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"The Beckett comparison is tenuous, as they’re different sorts of pitchers; Porcello’s been described as the best high-school pitcher since Beckett, but that’s about as far as that goes. [Dwight] Gooden ... well, Gooden was in a different universe than anyone else, at 19 and 20. Halladay? Well, OK. They’re both tall and throw hard sinkers.

"I think John Sickels is closer to the mark, though. His take on Porcello before the season: 'He’s an elite prospect, but he seems more like a Brandon Webb- or Carlos Zambrano-style pitcher to me, not a Josh Beckett.'"

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And let me quote this, before we get too far, which Neyer writes and I agree with:

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"Porcello at 20 is an effective major league starter. That’s plenty impressive enough. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves."

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Here’s the thing. Everyone has a view on Porcello. Some want to build him up to being a future Hall of Famer. Some want to knock him down because they’re sick of the hype. Porcello seems to want to just blend in with his teammates and avoid the limelight. And, fortunately, his team wants to protect him. It’s way too early to figure this kid out. Let's not try. Let's let him develop a bit.

But I submit to the amateur and professional prognosticators alike out there who simply must make a comparison that there’s a bit more to Porcello than you’re seeing in the box score, so you should really watch him with your own eyes and keep some of these other stats in mind:

Porcello can be a strikeout pitcher, but he is still just a 20-year-old developing his pitches, learning on the fly and seeing what works. When he drops his curve ball on an unsuspecting batter—which he goes to about 16 percent of the time and has only started deploying a bit more often in his past five starts—he can get swings and misses all day.

And that’s not even his best pitch. When he needs a strikeout, he can get a strikeout. He got four strikeouts in the first two innings of his most recent start, all swings and misses.

So why is his strikeout-per-nine rate a low 5.57? Because he does what all sorts of pitching coaches and managers want you to do: works quickly. How many strikeouts is he supposed to get throwing 3.67 pitches per plate appearance? How many do you expect when he cruises through innings in an average of less than 15 pitches?

Both figures put him among the top 10 regular starters in the AL. His teammate, Justin Verlander, may rack up the K’s, but he’s got the 120-130 pitch count to go with it. Porcello doesn’t have the luxury of knowing he can pitch deep into a game.

You look at yesterday. After a 26-pitch first inning, putting Porcello in jeopardy of not making it through five innings before he hit his pitch count, he settled in at just above 10 pitches per inning for the next five.

On a tight leash, he was able to give his team six innings without once making his manager worry about pitch counts. You can never say, “He’d have struck out 10,” or something. But watching those first two innings, I think you could say if he wanted to add a few more K’s to his ledger, he could have.

You can’t dispute, he’s more of a finesse pitcher (fast ball averages 91.3, tops out about 95 per Gameday data) than a power pitcher like Justin Verlander (95.3 is his average fast ball), obviously. But don’t write Porcello off as a guy who can’t get strikeouts.

Right now, he’s a kid on a short leash who found to get through six innings, he just doesn’t have to. Last year in the minors, he was described by Baseball Prospectus as toying with opposing batters, rather than striking them out. This year, he may not be teasing major leaguers, but he’s sure getting them out.

And like everyone at age 20, he’s got a lot of growing up to do left. Let’s give him another season or two before we figure out what he might become.

Who knows, maybe someday, we’ll be saying about some young kid, “He just might be the next Rick Porcello!”

(Data from Fangraphs.com, BrooksBaseball.net, ESPN.com)