Volquez latest rehabbed arm to get ball on big stage for Pirates
No one wanted Edinson Volquez in the offseason.
Now the Pirates are giving him the ball in the biggest moment of the year.
General manager Neal Huntington says the Pirates cannot afford to pay for successful history in free agency. Paying for 20 wins or 200 strikeouts? That's expensive. The small-market club has to pay for future performance and projected improvement. No team has done a better job of finding and creating starting pitcher value in recent seasons than the Pirates. In each of the past four seasons, a first-year Pirates pitcher has led the club in wins, speaking to their ability to rehabilitate pitchers from A.J. Burnett to Francisco Liriano to Volquez, who signed a modest one-year, $5 million-deal in a pitcher-needy game.
A year after Liriano, a fellow reclamation project, pitched the Pirates into the NLDS with a win over the Reds in the wild-card game, another rehabilitated pitcher, Volquez, will start in the play-in game against the San Francisco Giants and their ace Madison Bumgarner at 8:07 p.m. Wednesday.
It's a significant challenge: Bumgarner is 18-10 with a 2.98 ERA this season. He's also 3-2 with a 3.79 ERA in his postseason career, covering 36 innings. Volquez has started one postseason game. He allowed four runs in 1 2⁄3 innings in the 2010 NLDS with the Reds against the Philadelphia Phillies.
Volquez didn't seem nervous on Tuesday when meeting with, and often laughing before, the press.
“(Liriano) said he's a little nervous and he's not even pitching,” Volquez said. “(Monday) I was sleeping the whole day and was chilling in my house. I think I'm ready to pitch this game. I think I deserve it.”
Volquez and Liriano are close friends. One reason Volquez signed with the Pirates is he saw how the club helped Liriano.
“Before (2013) he was struggling,” Volquez said. “He signed with this team and they made him better. They fixed him.”
In many ways Volquez was like Liriano. He was once one of the most promising arms in the game. Volquez was dominant in his first season with the Reds in 2006, who traded Josh Hamilton to acquire him. But he hurt his elbow, required Tommy John surgery like Liriano, and become an electric-armed enigma.
Like Liriano, as the Pirates analysts scoured the free agent market this offseason, they saw a pitcher who had three above-average pitchers: a mid-90s fastball, disappearing changeup and a knee-buckling curve. They saw a pitcher with one considerable wart: he couldn't find the plate. They thought their coaches, Pirates pitching guru Jim Benedict and pitching coach Ray Searage, could help improve his command.
Benedict and Searage are given video to watch of every pitcher the Pirates are interested in acquiring. They are asked for their opinions on what can be fixed and what cannot. And as they watched Volquez, they saw a significant flaw. They saw Volquez's front side opened too quick, there was too much rotational movement in his delivery, leading to the control issues. They thought they could help. Instead of trying to overhaul everything, Benedict and Searage are praised by pitchers for their abilities to communicate and make limited tweaks instead of overhauls.
With Volquez the message was simple and consistent: follow the line. They wanted Volquez to imagine he was staying on a straight line in his delivery to home-plate.
“It was mechanical. … I was opening to the first-base side,” Volquez said. “I'm more able to repeat my delivery. I've thrown more strikes and stayed aggressive in the zone. I have more consistency in the strike zone.”
After a shaky spring of adjustments, Volquez excelled. He went 13-7 this year with a 3.04 ERA, nearly a three-run improvement from his MLB-worst 5.71 ERA last season. Hurdle had Gerrit Cole pitch in what turned out to be an irrelevant game Sunday in part because of his confidence in Volquez, who has thrown 18 straight scoreless innings.
“He has a personality we don't have a lot of. He's an excitable guy. He has emotion that gets channelled well,” Hurdle said. “He might have changed our clubhouse a little bit and we might have changed Edinson a little bit.”
Travis Sawchik is a staff writer for Trib Total Media. Reach him at tsawchik@tribweb.com or via Twitter @Sawchik_Trib.
