Nothing, It Turns Out

Sweet Oliver. Beautiful, unpredictable Oliver. All-or-Nothing Ollie. The apple of my pitching eye. Good lord, you're not getting it done in 2008.

Wednesday night's late start out in Anaheim was the latest hiccup for the Mets' putative No. 3 starter. He got lucky for three or so innings, allowing a lot of hard-hit balls that wound up in New York gloves, and generally looking like crap even while hanging onto a 3-1 lead. He gave it up in the fifth, allowing the first five men to reach before getting out of the inning with the rare 5-2-4 double play. It still put the Mets in a 4-3 hole that they needed extra innings (and an uncommon Damian Easley home run) to escape.

His line for the night? Six innings, nine hits to go with his three walks and a pair of strikeouts. The outing pushed his season ERA to 5.04, and his seasonal WHIP to a ghastly 1.56. He's walked 51 batters in just over 78 innings, and he's just been generally atrocious, especially when compared to last year's breakout. He hasn't consolidated those gains; he's given everything back, and then some.

What's going on here?

His rate stats, as you might have deduced, are obviously way off. His K/9 has slid from 8.85 to 7.47, a pretty big dip, but the real culprit has been his rapidly vanishing control. He's walking 5.86 batters per nine innings, which is absolute garbage, and the worst rate among all MLB starters, if you can believe that. His 1.46 HR allowed/9 is also in the bottom 10 leaguewide.

Taking a look at the batted ball and other data they have at Fangraphs gives us a little better idea of what's going on.

Velocity and pitch selection

Fangraphs has his average fastball velocity at 90.3 mph, almost exactly what it was in 2007, when he was plenty effective. His slider velocity is up slightly, at 78.5 mph, but not much, and he almost never throws the change or his curveball.

In fact, that's one of the differences from 2007; he's really NEVER using his change anymore. In '07, Perez threw his changeup 5.5 percent of the time and his floppy curve 2.4 percent of the time. This year? Both those numbers have been sliced substantially. He throws the curve 1.3 percent of the time, and his change is all the way down to 2.3 percent. He's made up for those differences by simply throwing more fastballs and sliders.

Just to be clear, Perez is now throwing his changeup less than he threw his curve last year, when he almost never used it. From the standpoint of keeping hitters off-balance, this can't be a good thing.

And indeed, when you consider that southpaws mostly use the change against right-handed batters, it might help to explain why Perez's WHIP against righties is 1.77 and 0.98 against other lefties.

Batted ball

In 2007, Perez was the second-biggest flyball pitcher in the game, with a 0.65 GB/FB ratio behind only the 0.53 of San Diego's Chris Young. Thus far in 2008, that hasn't been the case. Ollie's been allowing more grounders, and his GB/FB ratio is up to 0.87, which is still pretty extreme, but no longer in the top (or bottom, depending on your perspective) 10.

But the balls he's getting in the air are simply not as advantageous this year. His line drive percentage is up big-time, from 16.8 percent to 21.4 percent, and his infield fly ratio is WAY down, from 12.9 percent to 5.3 percent. When he does give up a flyball, it's about 56 percent more likely to fly out of the yard.

Put more simply, Perez isn't fooling as many people this year -- hence the lack of pop-outs and relative lack of easier flyballs -- and when batters are making contact, they're killing the ball.

I don't have enough data about pitch movement to determine why that is. It's possible the sliders he's throwing are too flat, or his fastball has lost movement, or something else I won't be able to determine from the tools here. Velocity-wise, nothing really has changed.

But becoming essentially a two-pitch pitcher has clearly not played to the advantage of the Mets or Perez. It's not helping his command thus far, and it seems to be rendering him way too predictable. When you're a righty, and you know you're either getting a fastball over the plate or a floating slider, and the guy's just as likely to throw the ball four pitches well outside of the strike zone before you get a chance to swing, you can sit on either pitch for as long as you want.

If Rick Peterson were still sachaying around Shea Stadium, I'd tell him this was something he needed to fix. But since we've got a new cowboy in town, I'll just go ahead and direct this his way.

Dan Warthen, the ball's in your court.