Awesome In August

August has seen a lot of good pitching performances – Tim Lincecum has a 1.96 FIP, CC Sabathia has an 8.00 K/BB rate, and Ryan Dempster hasn’t alllowed a single home run all month. All these guys are carrying their pitching staffs and performing extremely well.

However, it’s hard to argue that anyone has been as good as Ricky Nolasco this month, especially in terms of dominating the strike zone. In five August starts spanning 37 innings, he has walked 3 batters and struck out 43. That’s a 14.33 K/BB rate, making Sabathia look like a relative scrub. Striking out more than a batter per inning is impressive – doing it while walking one batter every 12 innings is ridiculous.

He has double digit strikeouts in three of his five August starts, and in the two starts he didn’t rack up the strikeouts, he instead induced a ton of groundballs; 15 against the Mets and 12 against the Cardinals. In fact, Nolasco has flashed the tremendous ability of being able to rack up both strikeouts and groundballs, putting up a 10.46 K/9 and a 51.6% GB% in August.

With very few exceptions, pitchers who can rack up both a lot of strikeouts and a lot of groundballs are among the very best pitchers in baseball. In 2008, two pitchers have sustained season long strikeout rates of at least 8.00 K/9 and a 50% GB% or higher – Chad Billingsley and Edinson Volquez. Roy Halladay just misses the strikeout criteria. Those guys are all having All-Star seasons, and Volquez is doing it with lousy command.

Granted, it’s only a month, so Nolasco’s performance doesn’t carry nearly as much weight, but there aren’t many pitchers in baseball that have the ability to run a a strikeout rate over 10.00 and a GB% over 50% for any length of time. That Nolasco was able to do both while simultaneously not walking anyone is pretty remarkable.

He did give up 5 home runs during August, which is why his FIP (and ERA) are higher than some of the other good August pitching runs we’ve seen, but the high concentration of no contact/weak contact still makes this one of the most impressive five start stretches we’ve seen so far this year.

Nolasco isn’t a household name yet, but he can’t pitch like this for much longer and remain any kind of secret.