CHICAGO – Last season, it became pretty common knowledge that Francisco Liriano didn’t need to throw his sliders for strikes in order to get strikes. He relied on the pitch heavily, throwing it out of the zone 63% of the time, and getting 40.8% swings and 40.9% contact on the pitch outside of the zone.
This year, Liriano isn’t seeing the same success. He’s throwing the pitch out of the zone 65.5% of the time, but is getting 36.9% swings and 40.2% contact. I don’t think it needs to be explained why throwing a higher percentage of pitches out of the zone, getting fewer swings, and the same rate of contact is a recipe for disaster.
Liriano’s slider is still good, but not nearly as good as it was in the past. He has a .249 wOBA and a 65 wRC+. Last year that was .178 and 19. How can we put that in perspective? The .249/65 number is what you’d expect from someone like Chris Stewart, or another bench player who isn’t putting up offense numbers like David Freese or Matt Joyce. The .178/19 number from last year is what you’d expect from a pitcher, and not a good hitting one. Opposing hitters were performing like pitchers against Liriano’s slider last year, and now they’ve upgraded to bench players.
“I think it can be the fact that the league has tried to find a different way to answer,” Clint Hurdle said of the difference. “It looks, at least to my eye, that at times guys are just going up, taking pitches. Looking for a fastball, and if they don’t get it, they’re taking. Then the challenge becomes trying to throw it for a strike, getting underneath counts. Because they weren’t having any success trying to hit it. The changeup as well.”
Liriano thinks it all comes down to the fastball, which also is struggling. His two-seamer has also struggled, with a .406 wOBA and 159 wRC+. Last year he wasn’t great, with a .346/131 split, although he relied on his slider heavily to bail him out. Liriano threw his fastball 42.8% of the time last year, and his slider 32.3% of the time. This year he’s at 52.1% with the fastball, and 29.3% with the slider, relying more on a pitch that hasn’t led to the best results, and not being able to use the pitch that has worked so well for him (while also seeing that pitch decline when he does use it).
So how can Liriano improve on this going forward?
“Just not getting behind in the count,” Liriano said. “When you’re behind in the count, they’re going to go up there and hit some pitches. I need to get better with the fastball, location-wise, and throw more strikes.”
That has been the big issue all year, and was the big issue in today’s loss. Liriano only issued one walk and a hit batter in the first three innings. He walked two with two outs in the fourth, including Jake Arrieta, but he got out of the jam. He hit Anthony Rizzo for the second time in the fifth inning, and walked two, loading the bases with two outs, but once again got out of it.
“You see some good things, and then we fall into some traps where the command has been a problem for us,” Hurdle said, noting Liriano’s control got worse as the game went on.
Liriano gave up a few hits in the sixth inning, and was replaced by Cory Luebke, who continued the control issues. Luebke walked three guys and not recording an out, leading to a three run inning. Arquimedes Caminero walked two, and Rob Scahill walked one, leading to 11 free passes on the day.
“We’re working on it,” Hurdle said of the walks. “It’s not something that anybody is comfortable with. Ten today, one intentional. Challenges everything. We’re aware, we’re working on things, we’re trying to get better. We’re not getting better as quickly as we need to. ”
The struggles today led to a 6-0 loss, continuing a trend of poor pitching by the majority of the staff recently. Hurdle discussed some of the ways they were trying to work with the entire pitching staff to get them out of this funk.
“The side work they do, we’ve tried a couple of different things already. We’ve tried backing off, we’ve tried adding a side bullpen. We’ve tried some ground work, some towel work. All the different experiences they’ve used in the past, and training methods, have been put in play in a rotation. Some guys like some things different more than others.”
In Liriano’s case, the video work is the preferred method of trying to turn things around.
“That’s what I’ve been doing the last two weeks, three weeks,” Liriano said of watching video. “Just trying to find a way to find myself and get better, and not missing as many pitches as I’m missing right now.”
As I wrote last night, the Pirates need something to change quickly, but there is no obvious change in sight. They don’t have any additional prospects beyond Jameson Taillon who are ready right now, and even if they did, the problems are so widespread that one prospect coming up isn’t going to fix the overall team problems.
“Some times, for a long time off the mound it’s looked easy for us, because they’ve done so well,” Hurdle said. “It just goes to show there is a very large degree of difficulty up here. When you don’t get consistency it shows up.”
Arrieta Shuts the Pirates Down Again
It’s a pretty common theme that when Jake Arrieta takes the mound against the Pirates, he completely shuts them down. In his career heading into this game he had a 1.58 ERA in 74 innings, and it feels like they all came in the last year. Today was no different, as he went six shutout innings, giving up two hits, three walks and striking out 11.
The Pirates did challenge in the sixth inning. Down 2-0 at the time, Arrieta had some control problems which led to three straight one-out walks — the only walks of the day for the right-hander. He went to a 3-1 count against David Freese, and threw what would have been ball four, but Freese swung at the pitch. Arrieta struck Freese out on the next pitch. He also went to a full count against Matt Joyce in the next at-bat, also battling back to strike Joyce out and end the only threat of the day.
“We had some opportunities,” Josh Harrison said after the game. “Sometimes you get it done, sometimes you don’t.”
Harrison Gets a Scare in the 7th
The Pirates have had another concerning trend lately, with a lot of players going down with injuries. That almost happened today, when Harrison was involved in a collision at second base with Anthony Rizzo. Harrison was trying to record a force out at second, receiving a throw from Mercer. The throw was a bit late, and pulled Harrison over on top of the bag. Rizzo didn’t slide, and took Harrison out, beating the ball to the bag, but getting called out after he went past the base and was tagged/tangled up with Harrison while Harrison still had the ball.
Harrison showed the umpire the ball, then started to stand up and went down in pain.
“When I caught the ball, I couldn’t tell if I was on the bag or not, if it beat him,” Harrison said. “And then, after we collided, I knew my glove had hit him, so I was showing I got him. And then when I stood up was when I realized that my leg was kind of dead. So I was like let me drop back down. After about five seconds, the little charley horse went away.”
Harrison said it was similar to a charley horse, and that he regained feeling back in his leg after a few minutes. The play ended the inning, and he remained in the game after that play. Both Harrison and Hurdle felt that the play was clean and unintentional by Rizzo, with Harrison saying that Rizzo is “not that type of guy.” As for any lingering effects, it doesn’t seem like Harrison will join the injury reports over this.
“It could have been worse,” Harrison said. “I’ve played through worse.”
