Porcello’s a must-see
All eyes on Cy Young winner
FORT MYERS — They didn’t have to be there on the main diamond at 11:10 a.m. on a Sunday to watch Rick Porcello throw a simulated game, but Red Sox rotation mates David Price and Eduardo Rodriguez showed up anyway.
Rodriguez, the promising young starter who has yet to put it all together, crouched behind the L-screen and studied Porcello’s every pitch. Price lined up at shortstop, then second base, to chase balls and observe.
Porcello may not have the allure that the great pitchers of Fenway Park have often possessed. He knows he isn’t going to light up a radar gun or set strikeout records. What he does is bland. It’s methodical.
But his teammates still show up to watch.
“Definitely at this stage in spring training, my priority is fastball command,” Porcello said. “I’m mainly looking to execute sinkers to both sides of the plate and get comfortable out of the windup and the stretch. I threw a couple four-seamers and curveballs, a couple changeups. But the priority is just executing the fastball right now.”
Porcello’s method may sound boring, but there’s reasoning behind it.
Last spring, the ball was flying out of the park when Porcello pitched. He finished Grapefruit League play with a 9.77 ERA while allowing 29 hits in 152⁄3 innings.
The point, he kept telling everybody, was to make sure he was throwing his low-90s fastball with precision. A smooth and consistent delivery was all that mattered to him.
That’s all well and good to say, but Porcello went and backed it up on his way to the Cy Young Award by throwing 223 innings and walking just 32 in the regular season. He walked only four in his last 58 innings.
“I really think as painful as the spring training was, it allowed me to just focus on the things I can control and not worry about the results as much,” he said. “It really paid dividends once I got into the season.”
So focused was he on the fastball command yesterday that, after he recorded his third out of the allotted two innings he was supposed to pitch in the simulated game, Porcello demanded the catcher and hitter stay in place for one more pitch.
“I don’t like ending on a changeup,” he said. “I want to end on a fastball. That’s my emphasis. It probably wouldn’t have mattered if I had not thrown that last fastball but I just executed down and away. I guess maybe that’s a superstition. I bounced a changeup, I didn’t want to end on that. If I bounced another one I would’ve been done. You can’t end on a miss.”
Porcello’s methods should give the Red Sox every reason to believe in him all over again.
It’s not that Porcello is guaranteed to go out and put up another season like 2016, when the Sox went 25-8 on days he took the mound. Porcello posted a 3.15 ERA and an MLB-leading strikeout-to-walk ratio of 5.91 in what was a breakout season. But there are few, if any, statistics to indicate his breakout season was a fluke and a drastic regression is coming.
It wasn’t smoke and mirrors. It was command. It’s that simple. It was the result of this boring, bland, methodical emphasis and mastery of making the same exact motion over and over, allowing him to feel confident throwing any pitch to any spot.
His walk rate of 1.3 batters per nine innings proved that he’s the “prototypical, classic definition of a pitcher,” said manager John Farrell.
“His command inside the strike zone with intent — to be able to move the ball around, to elevate pitches by design, change speeds — he epitomizes that, or, at least, last year he epitomized that,” Farrell said. “You can throw out the radar gun. The two top winners in the American League last year were he and (the Toronto Blue Jays’) J.A. Happ, guys that pitched with average major-league velocity. But it’s their know-how, their ability to read swings and ultimately repeat pitches, that goes a long way to slow big-league hitters down.”
In the last century there have been only 38 qualified seasons in which a pitcher had a strikeout-to-walk rate as good as Porcello’s last year.
“He regained the form of his fastball hitting spots and that’s what you’ve got to do,” Price said recently. “It’s not about how hard you throw or how good your offspeed is. It’s about executing pitches, hitting spots and for the most part Rick did that really well last year.”
A year later, it’s still all about the process.
“Until I feel like I’m not executing pitches and don’t feel the way I need to feel on the mound, I’m going to continue to maintain that routine that I developed and stay with it,” Porcello said. “And then I’ll make the adjustments as they come.”
A pitcher’s prime is often expected between the ages of 29-31. Porcello is just 28 and may have already found it.
“I don’t see any reason to change,” he said.