This shouldn’t be surprising, but I’m not a big fan of anecdotal analysis like, “Francisco Liriano is only good every other year.” It works nice as a descriptive device, but it doesn’t give us much actual understanding about Francisco Liriano. In Liriano’s case, the pattern doesn’t even hold true: Liriano was excellent in 2006, decent in 2008, excellent in 2010, and then not very good at all until coming to the Pirates in 2013.
What is interesting, though, is that in a lot of cases, there is some truth that exists under the anecdote, and you simply have to find a way to get at it. The early part of Liriano’s career is easy to analyze: he was great but over-taxed for a 22-year old rookie in 2006, which lead to Tommy John surgery that knocked him out for the last part of 2006, 2007, and early 2008. He didn’t really get back on track until 2010, where he was great but threw a career-high 191 innings. My guess is that that workload derailed him a bit, because in 2011 he pitched poorly and had the worst strikeout rate of his career. His strikeouts came back some in 2012, but it took time with the Pirates’ coaches in 2013 to get him back on track. In that season, Liriano missed some early time with his weird arm problem, but worked straight from his debut on May 11th through to the end of the playoffs. His 161 innings weren’t many more than he threw in 2012, but they were concentrated in fewer starts. Maybe as a result of that, he spent the first half of 2014 dinged up and pitching sub-optimally, until a month on the disabled list (nominally for a strained oblique, but he later admitted there were a few issues) put him right for the stretch run.
Francisco Liriano isn’t cursed to pitch poorly every other year, he’s just not all that durable. Pitchers that pitch don’t get pulled from starts early or moved to the bullpen, so in Liriano’s good years he pitches more, which wears him down, which makes him less effective in the next season. That’s the road I thought he was headed down last year until the trip to the DL reset him. If we accept that Liriano is a 160 inning pitcher — he’s 31 and has only approached 200 innings once –, I’m curious to see how the Pirates handle him in 2015. His 2014 innings were a little more spread out over the course of the season, so what happens if he starts the 2015 season in better shape than 2014? If he’s got a low inning ceiling and he’s pitching well in April and May, how do you to ensure a healthy Francisco Liriano is on the mound at the end of the year? This is the one issue that made me wonder if the Pirates wouldn’t be more interested in another starter. They’ve committed to Liriano with the biggest free agent contract in team history, though, and so how they maximize those 160 innings is a big question for me going forward.
<500 is an ongoing series previewing 2015 for each key Pirate in fewer than 500 words.
Photo by Justin K. Aller/Getty Images
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