What happened to this guy? He was supposed to be the next great left handed pitcher in MLB. With the Pirates in 2004 (his first full season after a couple partials), he had a 2.98 ERA with a staggering 239 Strikeouts in 196 innings (11.0 Ks per 9 which led the league) as a 22 year old. His ERA+, which is a measure of how good someone is (or isn't) against the average pitcher, was 145 that year. 100 is average. The best number from the current "aces" of the Pirates staff Zach Duke/Maholm is Maholm's 114 in 2008.
Perez was so good that year the Pirates would have lines of people around the block buying tickets any home game he started. I know cause I waited in line for a half hour or so to get tickets on a random Wednesday afternoon game in August. Perez was literally worth the price of admission. He was super animated and just plain fun to watch with his unorthodox motion, up to 98 mph fastball with movement, and nasty slider. You could even see the crowd watching to be sure he did his superstitious skip over the foul line on the way to the dugout. The Pirates seemingly had a Cy Young candidate for years to come. This was the kind of pitcher the organization had literally never had in a 100+ years.
Something changed in the winter of 2004/2005 though. The most commonly held belief is summed up by the PG (very good article on the issues before the 2006 season):
.....Perez was instructed to skip winter ball in Mexico to rest. He took the order too literally, though, and did virtually nothing to keep his arm in shape. That essentially wiped out his mini camp.
Just before spring training, he slept awkwardly on his left shoulder and fell so far behind it took him until late June to begin rounding into form.
In that 2005 season, he was not very good at all and even missed two months after breaking his toe while kicking a laundry cart out of anger. He never came close to hitting 98 mph. Most of the time he was 91 or 92 at best with terrible control. He was so bad in 2006 that the Pirates sent him to AAA and ultimately traded him to the Mets for Xavier Nady. It was an obvious sign that the Pirates had given up on him. With the Mets, he was good but not great in 2007 and has gotten progressively worse since.
He has never come close to duplicating the 2004 season for more than one game here and there. He is walking more hitters than ever while striking out less. His fastball in 2010 is averaging 88 mph (soft tosser Zach Duke territory), 10 miles per hour slower than he would hit in 2004. He is just 28 years old, but all signs point to him being, as Fangraphs describes above, "broken." At least the Mets gave him a big 3 year extension before the 2009 season.
Is Oliver Perez another casualty of the Dave Littlefield regime's laziness? Should someone have been sent to Mexico that fateful winter to monitor a 23 year old kid's off season program? Especially one as emotional and fragile as Perez? And who was THE franchise ace? I think so. Is everything in Perez's career since related to that winter? I doubt it. But noone can argue that he has never looked the same.
What could have been.
I think his problems started in 2004, at the end of the season, when the umpires stopped letting him get away with that "pause" in his delivery.
ReplyDeletePossible but that is very adjustable as he only did it occasionally. I remember wondering how the umpires could say anything when he did that with no one on base. Its no different from the ridiculous windups some of the Japanese pitchers do. I can see it being illegal with guys on base (probably a balk) though.
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