Did Rick Porcello Have a Breakout Year?

It's been a typical up and down year for Rick Porcello in 2013.  He started the year off horribly, with an ERA of 6.28 and a WHIP of 1.42 through his first 9 games.  Then he had a nice 4-game run of quality starts with an ERA of 1.33 and a WHIP of 0.70.  Then a couple of games where he surrendered 6 and 7 runs each.  Followed by another nice stretch of 8 games, 7 of which were quality starts with a 2.84 ERA and a WHIP of 1.36, only to go into another slump in the next 5 games with a 7.36 ERA and a 1.55 WHIP.  Finally, he's ending the season on a high note with his final 3 games started with a 1.66 ERA and a 0.97 WHIP, which included his first career complete game.  Add everything together and we get a 4.38 ERA and a 1.29 WHIP for the 2013 season.  How does this stack up with his previous years?

Year	IP	ERA	WHIP	AVG	BB%	K%	GB%
2009	170 2/3	3.96	1.34	0.265	7.2%	12.4%	54.2%
2010	162 2/3	4.92	1.39	0.287	5.4%	12.0%	50.3%
2011	182	4.75	1.41	0.288	5.9%	13.3%	51.4%
2012	176 1/3	4.59	1.53	0.308	5.6%	13.7%	53.2%
2013	174 2/3	4.38	1.29	0.268	5.8%	19.1%	55.2%

Porcello has a nice trend going here, lowering his ERA by about 0.20 each year since 2010.  Porcello's WHIP is also at an all-time low, due to having a steady low BB rate while his opponent's batting average hasn't been this low since his rookie year.  His strikeout rate and ground ball rate are career highs, which have also led to career bests in defense independent stats:

Year	FIP	xFIP	tERA	SIERA
2009	4.77	4.27	4.99	4.48
2010	4.31	4.24	4.50	4.37
2011	4.06	4.02	4.49	4.14
2012	3.91	3.89	4.95	4.00
2013	3.56	3.23	4.26	3.43

Porcello's FIP, xFIP, tERA and SIERA are all career bests, which is a great encouragement to his development.  Part of his success could be attributed to a change in repertoire   During the 2012 off-season, it was announced that Porcello would abandon his slider and start throwing his curveball more often.  True his word, Porcello has only thrown his slider 6.5% of the time, the lowest since his rookie season and he has thrown his curveball 16.5% of the time, a new career high.  How effective has his pitches been?  According to Brooks Baseball:

Pitch Type	Count	AB	K	AVG
4-Seamer	556	108	26	0.278
Sinker	1164	317	49	0.293
Changeup	430	124	25	0.234
Slider	182	38	11	0.263
Curveball	460	88	29	0.216

Clearly his go-to pitch is his sinker, and has been ever since he's been in the majors.  It hasn't been a great pitch for him this year as batters are getting hits off of it at a higher rate than any of his other pitches.  His secondary pitches, his changeup and curveball, have been outstanding this year.  He has racked up 54 strikeouts combined on those 2 pitches and he's keeping opponents' batting averages down.  Porcello only struck out 31 batters on his changeup/slider combination in 2012.  His development on his secondary pitches are a big reason why his strikeout rate has risen this year.

Lefty/Righty Splits

Year	Split	PA	K	AVG	OBP	SLG
2013	vs. RHB	350	83	0.238	0.264	0.334
2013	vs. LHB	378	56	0.302	0.362	0.453
Career	vs. RHB	1673	261	0.261	0.302	0.380
Career	vs. LHB	2042	262	0.307	0.358	0.462

One of Porcello's main issues this year has been the inability to get left-handed hitters out, and as shown above, this has been a big problem all through his ML career.  If Porcello is going to take the next big step forward, he's going to have to learn how to get left-handed hitters out better.  

Vs. RHB:

Pitch Type	Count	AB	K	AVG
4-Seamer	212	45	15	0.222
Sinker	732	199	40	0.256
Changeup	115	32	12	0.188
Slider	121	25	7	0.240
Curveball	165	30	9	0.200

Vs. LHB:

Pitch Type	Count	AB	K	AVG
4-Seamer	344	63	11	0.318
Sinker	432	118	9	0.356
Changeup	315	92	13	0.250
Slider	61	13	4	0.308
Curveball	295	58	20	0.224

His sinker and 2-seamer have been major problems for Porcello against left-handed hitters.  However, his changeup and especially his curveball have been great against them.  Maybe throwing those pitches a little more often will put him on the right path.   

Porcello'd Out

  
A meme over at Bless You Boys has been to "Porcello out" anything that may look bad on a player's record.  

Porcello-verb- to eradicate an outlier from a statistical sample of data.

To apply this to Rick Porcello himself, we take out his 4 worst starts of the season, both games against the Angels, and a game each against the Orioles and Red Sox.  Porcello had given up 30 ER in 16 innings in those games.    After we do that, we get a statistical line of:

	IP	ERA	WHIP	K%
2013 Total	174 2/3	4.38	1.29	19.1%
Porcello'd Out	158 2/3	3.12	1.15	20.2%

All of a sudden, Porcello looks like a fantastic starter.  However, this is 12.2% of all the batters he has faced this year thrown out the window.  If we were to do that to any pitcher or hitter, they would also look much better.  

I'm going to apply this philosophy, but I'm only going to focus on Porcello's quality starts.  I'm going to "Porcello out" everything that isn't a quality start for each of Porcello's five years that he's been in the majors and see if there is any sign of improvements.  

A Quality start is one in which the pitcher has:

• Pitched at least 6 innings and 
• Given up 3 or fewer earned runs.  

Year	QS	QS%	IP	IP/QS	ERA	WHIP	K%
2009	11	35.5%	72 1/3	6.58	1.87	0.97	10.3%
2010	13	48.1%	88 2/3	6.82	2.23	1.11	11.3%
2011	19	61.3%	127	6.68	2.76	1.14	15.1%
2012	13	41.9%	87 2/3	6.74	2.36	1.12	15.1%
2013	18	62.1%	120 2/3	6.70	2.39	1.04	21.8%

Another term to describe this is cherry picking.  I'm purposely selecting all the good starts in Porcello's sample size.  Not much can be determined by looking at these stats.  In 2009, 2010 and 2012, Porcello pitched less than half his starts as quality starts.  His 2011 season is comparable to his 2013 season in terms of percentage of quality starts and innings pitched, however his ERA, WHIP and strikeout rate were better in 2013; he was more effective in his quality starts in one less start.

So did Rick Porcello have a breakout year?  No, not really.  What we have here is someone who greatly improved his strikeout rate by having a better changeup and slider.  He's definitely heading in the right direction, but there are still some areas he needs to improve on.  His sinker can be ineffective at times, he still struggles against left-handed batters and he still has the occasional blow out game.  When he corrects these problems, then he'll have a breakout year.