By Shiloh
March 14, 2007 -

We often hear it said of a pitcher (Ollie Perez leaps to mind) that he has great potential, but he’s not “consistent.” I would like to propose that, when we look for “consistency” in a pitcher we are looking for the wrong characteristic.

It may be that there are pitchers who are consistently bad. But there is no such thing as a pitcher who is consistently excellent. The very finest pitchers all have bad days and bad innings, and absolutely all of them throw bad pitches from time to time.

“Of course,” you will say, “the questions are how bad and how often.” Agreed. But I submit that the issue is not “consistency.” Rather, it’s the ability to keep a grip on oneself, pitch through the tough times, and thus minimize the damage.

I think, for example, of Carpenter in the playoffs last October. In neither of his starts against us did he have his great stuff. But he knuckled down and kept the games within reach, sadly for us. One could say the same of Glavine in game five. Neither Carpenter nor Glavine displayed “consistency.” Both were effective, nonetheless. For precisely that reason, the two pitchers who have impressed me most this spring are Perez and Pelfrey—not because they’ve had great stuff, but because they’ve displayed the ability to be effective even when they didn’t.

Perez has had one bad inning in each of his starts, but he pitched through them, and came back strong the next inning. Pelfrey has been sharp in his outings—until today. Today, he was clearly not sharp. Was it a bad outing? I think not. For all the men he put on base, he kept getting key outs, and wound up holding the damage to one run. To me, it was a spectacular performance and a far better indication of his ability to be an effective major-league pitcher than “consistency.”

To some extent, the ability to keep oneself from coming unstrung after giving up a homer or when having control problems is a maturity thing—both emotional maturity and pitching experience. Young pitchers have to learn how to manage themselves when things are not going well. I would say that Humber has been a classic example of that this spring. I think he will learn—his strong second inning during his last outing was a really good sign. But some guys never learn, and they don’t last long in the big leagues, because they’re too “inconsistent.”

It has been said that “consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” That old saw is not intended to imply that inconsistency is a virtue. Wouldn’t we love to have five starting pitchers none of whom ever threw a bad pitch. But this is the real world. And in the real world, inconsistency is a fact of life, not a fault. What we should be looking for in our pitchers is not “consistency,” but the ability to stay cool and pitch around their inevitable inconsistencies.