Astros waste a great curveball, trying to make McCullers a starter
We saw the definitive Lance McCullers Jr. when he threw 24 consecutive curveballs to the New York Yankees, who couldn’t hit any of them. The Houston righty retired the six batters he faced in two innings and eliminated the Yanks from the 2017 American League Championship Series.
That was one of the most overwhelming relief efforts in baseball history, and it contrasts sharply with McCullers’ performance as a starting pitcher. He wants to be a starter and the Astros want him to be a starter, but in seven years of professional baseball he’s never achieved many turns in a rotation. He’s never pitched more than 128 innings in a season.
So now, as usual, he’s rehabbing his arm. This time it’s his most serious injury yet – that most radical yet conventional of surgeries, named for the should-be Hall of Fame pitcher, Tommy John.
McCullers on Sunday faced two batters for the St. Louis Cardinals and retired them both. The significance, as he put it: “My first time to warm up to start a game since August of 2018.”
All he wanted to do was perform a quick test of his range of motion, the comfort and strength of his right forearm. Mission accomplished, he said. “Only one or two pitches I didn’t execute the way I wanted to.”
It was hardly vintage McCullers, no way it could have been. Before his latest injury, he consistently threw his four-seam fastball 95 mph; his peak Sunday was 94.
Dusty Baker, the Astros’ manager who at 70 has seen just about all, saw what he wanted to see: “smooth with his delivery. He didn’t labor, didn’t overthrow. His velocity was good at 91, 92 miles per hour. His breaking ball was good and changeup was good.”
Baker in previous managerial jobs has been accused of stressing his starting pitchers – not keeping them fresh for the postseason. But he’s being cautious with McCullers, who at age 26 should be about to blossom into whatever he can be.
The main issue with Tommy John surgery is not a return of velocity. But it typically takes a pitcher at least two full years to regain the downward thrust of his breaking ball. Though they won’t say so publicly, the Astros are concerned that McCullers’ curve in 2020 will not be what it was in 2017.
Baker and pitching coach Brent Strom have him on a path to a 5-inning preseason game at the end of March. The hope is he can go 5 when the regular season begins. He’s their No. 3 starter behind Justin Verlander and Zack Greinke and just ahead of Jose Urquidy, the 24-year-old unlikely hero of the last World Series.
The fifth starter apparently will be chosen from Josh James, Austin Pruitt and Framber Valdez, none of whom inspire much confidence. Pruitt, 32, wasn’t quite good enough to be No. 5 at Tampa Bay.
James is 26 and Valdez 27, and their arms are rotation-worthy. But as one of the team’s scouts put it: “They haven’t shown that they know how to pitch.”
As a fallback position the Astros could go to the 32-year-old Brad Peacock. But he’s more effective relieving than starting, and he’s rehabbing a nerve injury in his neck.
Because of the thinness of the starting rotation the Astros persist in risking their most valuable mound asset. McCullers’ power curveball (more a knuckle curve) could be the most unhittable pitch in the sport. I think the old batting guru Tommy McCraw was right when he said, “Nobody can hit a good curveball. They hit curves that don’t break a lot or don’t get properly located.”
McCullers in the 2017 ALCS showed the truth of that statement. His curve is every bit as lethal a weapon as Josh Hader’s heater.
For all Jeff Luhnow’s visionary brilliance, he never put together much of a bullpen, completely ignoring the left side of it. McCullers would be a righty nobody would want to face. Better to have him in the bullpen than heading for Injury Reserve, which is where the rotation inevitably lands him.
