Lucas French Start Revisited

Well, Lucas French made his debut as a starter in the major leagues on Friday in the Metrodome -- you know, that 16 inning game that Detroit won? Before we get to the graphs, let's look at the numbers:

4.2 IP, 6 H, 2 R, 2 ER, 3 K, 2 BB, 1 HR allowed, 81 pitches, 50 strikes, 1 ground out, 10 fly outs.

When I grabbed the gameday data, it classified a lot of cutters and only 3 sliders. I don't know if he throws a cutter or not, but only one of them were up in the area with his fastballs, so I'm assuming that they were sliders, not fastballs.

With that correction made, here's some graphs. First, a release point graph. Click all graphs to enlarge.

I toyed around with varying symbols and colors and I think this works decently well. If not, I'm always open to suggestions. Pretty good cluster on all of his pitches. Given his lack of velocity, he cannot have multiple distinguishable release points for each of his pitches or else he'd get killed.

Now, a movement graph:


And moving on to his pitch flight graphs:

His fastball looks decent and his slider/change-up combo really have the same amounts of downward movement. They just move opposite directions, obviously. His average velocities in this game were 86.9 MPH on the fastball, 78.1 on the slider, and 79.9 on the change-up.

Really, this doesn't do anything to sway my initial impression of Luke French's flight paths where I said:

On the whole though, he seems to have a pretty generic arsenal for a left-handed pitcher. His stuff isn't overwhelming in the least, and he doesn't have some crazy amount of movement. His 2009 line in Toledo seems to be such an outlier when compared to his career norms -- especially given his stuff.

I think he maxes out as a No. 5 starter in the majors in a best case scenario. He's a lower-40% ground ball pitcher (4 of every 10 balls in play), about the same with fly balls, and a couple of hard hit balls in there, as well. He's not going to miss a lot of bats, but also keeps the walks down. I think he's more organizational filler that every team needs -- a consistent guy to take the ball every fifth day in their Triple-A affiliate, but I don't look for him to stick in the D long at all. Not impressed. Hopefully he's able to prove me wrong, though.