The performance of the starting pitching staff this season has left many of us scratching our heads at this point, so it's fair to ask what is going on and if it will be sustainable in at least some degree.  Of course, Paddy Cake has been one of the biggest cause of scalp irritation so far, so let's see what we can learn about our starters, and see if the 2008 performances so far are sustainable.

For the most part, Vinny's pitching statistics are not spectacular.  His BB/9 (3.2), K/9 (5.86) are  worse than his career lines, (by comparison, his BB/9 and K/9 in 2006 was 3.15 and 7.02), his HR/9 rate (1.07) is about the same as previous years.   His BABIP is exactly at .300, and all this translate to a fielding-independent expected ERA of around 4.5.  His ERA right now is much lower, largely because of the amount of baserunners that have been stranded.  Of all baserunners reaching, 81.1% of them has been left on base.  On average, 70% of left on base is a reasonable number, and only the best and luckiest pitchers get to 80% left on base (no more than 1-2 per year).  So it is expected that this will regress to his career average of around 72% LOB.  A rough calculation shows that this regression along should put his expected ERA at around 4.3 (calculation assumes same ratio of unearned to earned runs).  (Incidentally, the LOB% of Gabbard and Edinson Volquez are both around 90%)  So he is getting a bit lucky, but even with the regression, the results should still be decent.

Just for fun, let's try to see if we can be more substantive in terms of balls in play profile and pitch selections.  22% of balls in play are line drives, 41.8% ground balls and 36.4% fly.  So far his ground ball rate has been slightly down from previous years and fly ball rate slightly up.  The high line drive percentage is a cause of concern.  Padilla has historically given up a lot of line drives, but he has been able to overcome that with high strikeout rates.  Now that his K rate is down, it becomes a bit unsettling.

We all know he is throwing a lot of fastball this year, and this is certainly true- he is throwing 80.4% fastballs.  He has cut down his numbers of curveballs from 14.6% last year to 6.1%, and is throwing similar numbers of sliders (7.5%) and change (6.2%) as he has throughout his career. 

I tried to used the Pitch f/x tool, but it doesn't work correctly for Vinny.  Namely, it calls every single one of his off-speed pitches as sliders, so I'll concentrate on the fastball instead, and it looks like this:

Yeah, so the movement profile of his fastball is a very large blob.  He throws his fastball on average at 92 mph, touching 96 at times.  The fastball has quite a bit of horizontal movement (average of about -6.7 inches), and quite a bit of variety, whether be design or inconsistency.  By comparison,  many pitchers with good fastball, such as Tim Lincecum are more consistent in terms of movement.  There is also a large number of fastballs here that are sinkers or mistake pitches (those with little horizontal and vertical movements).

37.8% of his fastballs are thrown for balls, which is a bit high, but nothing alarming given the movement it has. 4% of the fastballs miss bats, and 18.6% are called strikes.  Speaking of called strikes, the locations of fastballs looks like this:

called strikes:

balls:

So all this says that Padilla has a live fastball, and he gets the wide strike zone common to pitchers with large horizontal movement on their fastballs.  However, he is hurt by not getting low strike calls.  In fact, this seem to be a problem with many Rangers pitchers in general (maybe I will look into this a bit deeper at some later time).  This lack of low strike calls could be related to, if not the cause of, his low ground ball rates.  Also, given the velocity and movement of the fastball, he should be able to use more off-speed pitches to miss bats.  His change is around 80 mph, but he doesn't use it very often (and it doesn't look all that good when he does).

Finally, one last interesting observation about this season so far is the reversed platoon split.  Usually Vinny destroys right handed batters but has nothing on left handed bats.  This season, there is little difference in the splits.   Also, he is especially prone to giving up HR balls early in the season.  May is normally his worst month, but he gets steadily better as the season continues.  These factors are minor and should not affect the big picture very much.

So in conclusion, I expect Padilla to regress a bit in the near future, but his stuff and peripherals are good enough that he should be a solid pitcher.  Nevertheless, he needs to find a way to increase his K rates, since his stuff has not diminished at all.  However, it's hard to do this in the major league level when you throw such a large amount of fastball that are not spectacular in velocity.  Especially when you can't get calls for pitches lower in the strike zone, you are forced to throw them higher, and that does not bode well if they get hit in the dog days of TBIA.