After his 1-0 loss to the Mets last week, continuing his second year of unexpectedly fine pitching, I wanted to note a couple of things about Livan Hernandez. He takes a beating from the stat nerds, who are right about lots of things, but Livo is a perfect example of how you have to couple numbers with on-the-ground baseball analysis.
What stat mavens don't know is that Hernandez has changed his pitching style in recent years and now calls himself a sinkerball pitcher. Almost all his fastballs are now sinking two-seamers at the knees or away while his rare four-seamers are almost always at or above the top of the strike zone. His lower home run rate is a direct consequence of a conscious change in approach. That's why his current sub-4.00 ERA's in '10 and '11 __similar to his combined ERAs around 3.80 in '00-'02-and'03 when he pitched much differently__ are not a fluke and, as long as he's healthy, will probably continue. He's not "lucky" or "due to give up homers." He has adapted. His critics are the ones who are behind.
Also, early in his career, even though he threw much harder then, Hernandez allowed hitters to pull the ball (on which he gave up most of his homers) far more often than they hit it to the opposite field (on which he has almost never given up homers in any year of his career). In the last three years, he has (somehow) learned to get MORE hitters to put the ball in play to the opposite field than are able to pull the ball off him. This applies to both RH and LH hitters. You can dig up the stats if you want at Baseball Reference. This is a rare ability for any pitcher. How he does it (with a fastball that tops at 86) I have no idea. But he's been doing it for nearly 100 starts.
Everybody thinks they are smarter than Livan and that he's just lucky. They say, "How does he do it?" The point is that HE actually does know how he does it. And the stats don't show it. Those who think his real ERA and his theoretical xFip "should" converge may continue to be disappoin ted.
Someday, he finally will get old and his numbers will implode. But not the way he's pitching now. Overall, his luck on BABHiP has been normal (.298 the last two years combined). However, his most remarkable quality in '10-'11, which has been lost because he has had incredibly low run support, is that in 25 of his 43 starts he has pitched 6 innings or more and had an ERA for that game of 3.00 or less. In other words, no cheap quality starts with 3 earned runs in six innings. The minimum would be 6 innings and only two earned runs. For most pitchers, this standard __maybe call it a "quality-plus" start__ comes pretty close to their win total.
On a .500 or better team with normal-to-good run support, Hernandez would probably have >20 wins the last two years.
