Can The Cardinals Count On Adam Wainwright?

Adam Wainwright is slated to start Game 5 of the National League Championship Series for the Cardinals on Thursday, which would normally be music to the ears of St. Louis fans. Wainwright has been one of the best pitchers in the game for a decade. He is probably on his way to another top-five Cy Young Award finish, and in terms of WAR, he already is one of the five best starters in the storied history of the Cardinals franchise. In fact, if he were to post another typical Wainwright season in 2015, he will jump to No. 2, behind only the legendary Bob Gibson.

But the 2014 postseason hasn’t gone so well for Wainwright. In Game 1 of the NLDS, the Dodgers pounded him for 13 baserunners and six runs in 4 1/3 innings, a performance that was overshadowed by Clayton Kershaw’s late collapse. In Game 1 of the NLCS, Wainwright allowed nine baserunners over 4 2/3 innings in a game the Cardinals would lose 3-0, the first time in his career he has had back-to-back starts of fewer than five innings.

Two lousy starts against teams good enough to make it to the postseason would generally be considered merely a blip when compared to Wainwright’s long, successful history. But this might be different. Wainwright, who missed all of 2011 after Tommy John surgery and skipped a start in June due to what the Cardinals called tendinitis in his elbow, is on record as saying that his elbow is “not 100 percent,” even telling reporters “my arm doesn’t feel great” after the NLCS loss.

Wainwright is going to start a pivotal game Thursday, and Cardinals manager Mike Matheny is saying all the right things about trusting his ace. But really, how worried should the Cardinals be?

Anytime a pitcher with a serious arm injury in his recent past talks about how poorly his arm feels, it’s a cause for concern, and Wainwright isn’t immune from that. Recent research at The Hardball Times shows that pitchers who have undergone a Tommy John surgery last, on average, approximately 650 innings before needing a second procedure. Obviously, every pitcher is unique and there’s no such thing as a “magic number,” but Wainwright has thrown 726 1/3 innings (including the postseason) since his surgery, and now he is having trouble. It’s the most any pitcher in baseball has thrown over the past three seasons, and especially considering his comments, it’s not to be taken lightly.

When Wainwright missed that start in June, it generated enough concern that he received a cortisone shot and underwent an MRI. He returned to allow only two earned runs over his next four starts, alleviating much of the concern. But take a look at the underlying peripherals (to the right):

In July, immediately following his elbow scare, Wainwright began striking out fewer batters and walking more, both considerably different than before. In August, that improved a bit, though some terrible batted-ball luck, an early disaster start (7 earned runs in 5 1/3 innings) and what he referred to as a “dead arm” contributed to a 5.17 ERA. In September, that K/BB trend continued going back in the right direction, and he looked like his old self, winning the NL Pitcher of the Month award for his efforts. (Of course, making two starts against the collapsing Brewers and one against the long-eliminated Rockies didn’t hurt.)

With that positive progression, there were few concerns about Wainwright headed into the NLDS, although he reportedly had given up bullpen sessions in September to reduce the workload on his arm. But it took less than one inning for the same discomfort that Wainwright had felt in June to return — for what it’s worth, the pitcher says all of this has been in the back of his elbow, not in the same area that he had injured before his surgery — and without the chance to skip a start, Wainwright had to get by with what he had. While his velocity didn’t disappear, the bite and command on his pitches did.

Forced to nibble, Wainwright threw only 34 pitches in the zone against the Dodgers and 68 outside it. That 33 percent strike-zone percentage was his lowest mark for a start since at least 2009, playoffs or otherwise. Though he was able to do somewhat better against the Giants in the NLCS (45.9 percent zone percentage), it was still below the 50.0 zone percentage he posted during the 2014 regular season. And even though he had a great month of September, his zone percentage for that month was below his season mark too. So whether it’s injury-related or not, Wainwright’s strike-zone rate has been trending in the wrong direction.

In addition, Wainwright has changed his pitch usage. Wainwright throws four primary pitches: a four-seam fastball, a cutter, a sinker and a curve. (He occasionally mixes in a changeup or slider, but we’ll leave those out here, as he rarely throws them.) Looking at the three portions of his season — his healthy first half, his uncertain second half and his two postseason games — we can see the difference, according to Brooksbaseball.net’s pitch-tracker system.

The fastball usage didn’t change much and the curve went up slightly, but the big difference was trading out sinkers for cutters, especially against San Francisco, when he threw only two sinkers and 47 cutters.

Theoretically, that’s not a problem. Wainwright’s cutter is deadly, ranked as one of the best in baseball by FanGraphs. So is his curveball. His other pitches exist mainly to set them up, but that’s not how he has been pitching in October, when he has been relying on mainly just those two pitches.

Take, for example, the first pitch of a plate appearance against righties. In the first segment (through June 10), again according to Brooksbaseball.net, he had been using the sinker to start off the at-bat most often, 31 percent of the time. In October, that has been 57 percent of the time, and he has continued using it later in counts. Even a great pitch is less effective if hitters don’t have much else to think about.

Now, to listen to Wainwright explain it, his playoff issues have been mechanical in nature, suggesting that his inability to make his pitches stemmed from being “dramatically late getting the ball out of my glove” and that his “stride length is about a foot shorter than it should be,” which could explain why he hasn’t been able to use all of his pitches. He says he has watched film with catcher A.J. Pierzynski and that he has himself all sorted out for Thursday.

Perhaps that’s the case and he’ll come out looking like the usual Wainwright in a game the Cardinals badly need to win. But we also have ways of measuring release points for pitchers, and there’s really nothing that shows up as being different for Wainwright in that regard in the postseason. Besides, we’ve seen this show before. In June, he was able to take time off, get a cortisone shot and slowly work himself back into shape for an excellent September.

He doesn’t have that luxury now. If things go bad early on Thursday, Matheny might need to be more aggressive with his ace than he’d otherwise like to be.