Try Another Pitch, Fausto

Last year, Fausto Carmona was a sensation, coming from out of nowhere to become a frontline starter and help propel the Indians into contention. This year, Carmona has been more of an enigma, posting an excellent 2.60 ERA but with a horrendous 26 walks and 13 strikeouts in 34 innings pitched. His command has deserted him, and while his famous “turbo sinker” is still getting ground balls, he’s putting a lot of men on base and is lucky to have been able to leave so many stranded.

When looking over Carmona’s pitch selection data here on fangraphs, one thing jumped out to me – he’s throwing the fastball 81% of the time, which puts him behind only Daniel Cabrera and Aaron Cook among guys who just huck fastball after fastball at the plate. While Cook has impeccable command, most pitchers don’t really want to be compared to Daniel Cabrera pretty much ever, and it’s possible that Carmona is simply trying to hard too put his fastball over the plate.

He’s always thrown a lot of fastballs (last year, he was at 75% versus a league average of 59%), but he’s throwing fewer of his off speed pitches this year in order to make room for the uptick in hard stuff, and despite the shiny ERA, it’s not working very well. With Carmona’s fastball command deserting him, he’d be best served not relying on it almost exclusively, because right now, hitters are far too willing to let him give them the free pass.

With Cleveland’s offense struggling, they’re going to rely on their pitching to get them through, and Carmona is a huge part of that rotation. They have to get him going, and they don’t have a whole lot more time to get him straightened out.