After Juan Nicasio’s first start, which was obviously hugely positive, I ran a brief list of things that we couldn’t draw conclusions about after one start. They were: If he can really survive with two pitches (he only threw five changeups tonight), how he adjusts when hitters adjust, if he has lefty problems, how he holds up for a long stretch as a big league starter, none of those questions can have answers right now.
Juan Nicasio’s second start leaves a bunch of those questions hanging in the air. He threw zero changeups, and only got four swinging strikes in 92 pitches with 71 fastballs and 21 sliders (two whiffs with each pitch). He struggled with the strike zone. His velocity started out low and sort of peaked back up and then dipped again, all in three innings. In other words, he looked a lot like the Juan Nicasio the world was familiar with before Ray Searage started working with him in spring training.
I wouldn’t recommend jumping to conclusions after this start any more than I would after his first one; Nicasio’s base stuff is still good, most of his problems yesterday were rooted in control, and the fact that his velocity bounced back up after it started low gives me hope that maybe the cold weather in Detroit and the absence of that first start adrenaline all contributed to a slow start that dug a hole he couldn’t get out of. The Pirates aren’t asking him to be more than a fourth or fifth starter, which means that — in the grand tradition of Charlie Morton and Jeff Locke — his job is to keep the Pirates in games and occasionally turn in good starts. Yesterday doesn’t preclude him from being able to do that, it just reminds us that it’s not a slam dunk that it’s going to happen.
Nicasio wasn’t the Pirates’ only problem yesterday; the other problem was that the rotation has, in general, not pitched well enough to go beyond five (and has not at all gone beyond six), and so the bullpen was pretty depleted coming into the game. That left the team leaning hard on Kyle Lobstein and Cory Luebke, who were unable to keep the Pirates in the game after Starling Marte cut the Tigers’ lead to 4-2 with a two-run homer. That’s partially because Clint Hurdle surely already knew that Ryan Vogelsong would be starting for Francisco Liriano today, due to Liriano’s nebulous hamstring issues, but it highlights the problem that we’ve all been worried about since the depths of the winter: it doesn’t matter how good your bullpen is, no one can pitch every night, and if your rotation isn’t deep enough to consistently pitch into the sixth or seventh innings, the bullpen will eventually start to show cracks.
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