Mike Pelfrey is off to a blazing start to the 2010 Major League Baseball season.  He is 3-0 with a save and a 0.86 ERA in 4 games (3 starts) so far and has yet to give up a home run.  Every game Pelfrey has pitched in this season the Mets have earned a victory.  This is pretty shocking since Pelfrey is coming off a year in 2009 where he was 10-12 with a 5.03 ERA.  So what has been the cause for the sudden success for the big guy you may ask yourself.

Pelfrey was a good candidate to bounce back for a couple of reasons.  He was one of the most unlucky pitchers in 2009 with a 0.64 difference between his ERA and FIP.  More specifically he was the 5th unluckiest pitcher in the MLB.  He was also victimized by his defense last year thanks with the Mets running Gary Sheffield, Luis Castillo, and Dan Murphy out there everyday, who were all below average fielders leading to his gaudy .321 BABIP (14th highest in MLB).  Being luckier this season isn’t all that has caused his turn around.  He has made a couple subtle changes that have resulted in early season success.

For starters he is doing the most important thing a pitcher can do by throwing more strikes and missing more bats.  As the cliché in baseball goes “The most important pitch in baseball is strike one.” This season Big Pelf is throwing a first pitch strike 65.8% of the time, good for 9th in the league, opposed to just 58.1% last year.  If you look at some of the pitchers ahead of him you will see pitchers whom are all great: Justin Verlander, Adam Wainwright, Josh Beckett, Jorge de la Rosa, etc.  Sometimes there are clichés like this for a reason. They just work!  Once you establish strike one you can do whatever you want with the sequence of pitches.  He has also increased his K/9 by 1.64 and his swinging strike% by 0.5 (a lot more significant than it looks like).  This shows that he is commanding his pitches much better making it difficult for hitters to square up on the ball.

Another major change that has made a big impact is his new split-fingered fastball.  The new pitch has done two things for Big Pelf: (1)Given him another plus off-speed pitch for his repertoire. (2)By giving him another effective off-speed pitch it has made his fastball a lot more effective.  Last year his fastball was hit hard and one of the worst pitches in baseball and now it has a 4.4 wFB, 7th in MLB.  His split-fingered fastball is 2nd with a 2.1 wSF and 1st with a 14.24 wSF/C (the /C just denotes the stat per 100 pitches).  All of spring training the talk was about how good this pitch was and it looks as if the talk was well warranted.  The addition has made Big Pelf look like a completely different, more confident, pitcher than last season.

On the flip side we don’t want to get too far ahead of ourselves because Pelfrey is bound for some regression. No one, and I don’t care if it is Cy Young, is going to be able to maintain such a low ERA for a full season.   He has a great FIP, 2.78, and a great xFIP, 3.87, but has been extremely fortunate with a .231 BABIP.  I still see no reason why if he continues to pitch the way he is and his BABIP balances out that he can’t finish the season with a low 3 ERA.

With all this talk about his gaudy ERA and win success the most important thing Pelf has done for the Mets this season, in my opinion, is turn into the workhorse of the rotation.  In a rotation where it seems you are lucky to get 6 innings out of your starter, Pelfrey has reached the 6th inning in all of his starts, reached the 7th inning twice, and was even able to come in during the 20 inning game and secure the victory.  Has Mike Pelfrey finally reached the hype he had when the Mets drafted him 9th overall in 2005? Mets fans can only hope.