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Don’t Give Up On Kyle Kendrick Yet

By Michelle Stalnaker

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The Rockies’ rotation is always in desperate need of quality starts. Kendrick has been delivering those lately.

I’m definitely one of those people who thought that Kyle Kendrick was a good pickup for the Rockies, and went on record as saying so before the season started. And that’s my voice, so I can’t even accuse someone of hacking into my Fansided account and blogging as me. It’s definitely me.

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So naturally as the season began I was feeling like I might eat my words. Of course, all preseason predictions are subject to modification when actual games start being played, and none of us claims to be perfect. But I still prefer not to find a Grand-Canyon-sized chasm between what I thought would happen and what actually happens. You understand.

Lucky for me, Kendrick has been turning things around, and more often than not doing exactly what I had hoped he would do–not behave anything like an ace, but still turn in quality starts regularly and keep his team in the game. Let’s take a quick look at his strengths and weaknesses and consider how those might affect the team going forward.

Going Deep

In his last six starts, Kendrick has averaged about 6 2/3 innings an outing. This is monumentally huge. As a team, the Rockies are dead last in the majors with only 303 innings pitched by their starters, so anytime a starter can go deep, he’s doing the team an enormous favor (well, he’s actually just doing his job, but our standards for these things have gotten low). Kendrick only averaged about 5 1/3 innings in his first six starts, so the improvement is real.

Managing Baserunners

Kendrick really isn’t allowing any fewer baserunners now than he did earlier in the season. The difference in his WHIP from his first six starts to his last six is about 0.6. But he’s allowing significantly fewer of those guys to score. If it weren’t for some bum relievers who can’t keep inherited runners from scoring (*cough* Boone Logan *cough*), Kendrick’s ERA would not still be 6.16. His LOB% has averaged 70% over his last six starts compared to 60% in his first starts.

First Inning Woes

As Richard Bergstrom recently pointed out, Kendrick has a nasty tendency to give up lots of first inning runs. Without those, in fact, his ERA would be 4.81, almost a run and a half less than it is, and perfectly acceptable. Kendrick’s status as a veteran means he has the ability to read lineups, make adjustments, and get better as the game goes on. If he were a better pitcher, he wouldn’t struggle so much the first time through. I wish he were a better pitcher, but he is not, so I think the fact that his first innings are so much worse than the rest of his innings is something we’ll have to live with.

K/BB

Kendrick is not necessarily a strikeout pitcher; his K/9 rate has usually hovered in the 4-5 range. He has still always struck out more guys than he’s walked, but given his low strikeout rates, that isn’t necessarily saying very much. This season, he is striking out about one-and-a-half batters for everyone he walks, and his walk rate is nearly 3 per 9. He has shown some slight improvement in his most recent starts, but is still issuing a handful of free passes per outing, which drives up his pitch count and makes it harder to do the first two things on this list.

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I really believe that the Kendrick we’ve seen these last six starts is closer to the real thing than what we saw earlier in the season. He’s never going to be a sure thing, but I think he has the potential to settle in and be solid most of the time. The rotation has more depth than it has had in years, and we’ve seen exciting things lately from Chad Bettis, David Hale, and Chris Rusin. We don’t need Kyle Kendrick to be great. We just need him to be Kyle Kendrick.

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