Porcello struggles again in loss to Chi Sox

In the beginning of the season, Porcello was pitching over his head. His BABIP was well below normal and his FIP was well above his ERA. He was due for a heavy fall and that has come. Now, he has been incredibly unlucky in his last 4 starts as most of his flyballs are going for HR's and his BABIP has been very high the last 4 starts. Eventually, his luck in the beginning of the year and his bad luck recently will regress to the mean.

With that said, his peripheral numbers suggest he is basically a #5 starter. Going into tonight (and this number is higher now), Procello had a 5.14 FIP. That is good for 139th in MLB among starters with at least 50 IP. Essentially, that is an average total for a #5 starter (150 starters in MLB and that number would fall slightly below the median of 121-150.) Considering we are counting on him to be our #3 (and that is the organizations fault; not his), that is not good enough. Also, Armando Galaragga, our #4 starter, has a FIP of 5.26. That is 144th among MLB starters. Our back of the rotation has been a concern all year and it will probably continue to be so the rest of this season. Are there some positive signs? Yes. Galaragga has been better in his last 5 starts and Luke French has a FIP below 4 in his first 4 starts. As mentioned above, Porcello will not continue to be this unlucky. But, we have a less stable back of the rotation than the White Sox and Twins have and that might put us at a disadvantage going forward. Ideally, another starter would be added to be our #3 starter. Jarrod Washburn would be ideal but he might be too expensive to get. Jon Garland and Zack Duke could be other options.

Offensively, we were a bit unlucky tonight. Thames crushed two balls that were eventually caught and a large number of our hits were going directly at the Sox position players. But, we were probably due for a night like that after we were the beneficiary of several lucky bounces in the first 3 games of this series. 8 innings and only 1 ER for Richard sounds like a dominating performance. But, it was not one. He only struck out 3 and had 11 fly ball outs. I'm not going to knock the kid. He has decent stuff, a real nice build and will be a dependable back of the rotation starter (at worst) for the Sox for a long time. But, it is important to not overreact to this. Nights like this one happen quite a bit to a baseball team's offense.

As I mentioned in my last game recap post, though, Ryan Raburn's playing time has got to be hanging on a string. He made 2 errors on one play in the 6th inning and basically ended our chances of a comeback with a killer double play late in the game when Richard appeared to be on the ropes. We need a new LF and I am confident that Dombrowski will acquire some sort of upgrade over Raburn.

So, where does this leave us? Well, we took the series from the Sox and are now 2 games up on them and 4 up on the Twins. Those two rivals will square off next and we will take on Texas. It is Galaragga vs. Tommy Hunter tomorrow night at Texas.