After another dazzling outing last night against the Phillies, Oliver Perez has been on quite a run. Over his last 5 starts, including a game against the Yankees and 2 against the Phils, OP has gone 33.2 innings with a 39/12 K/BB ratio and 1.34 ERA. Why are his last 5 starts significant? It’s because apparently he had changed his mechanics before the start against the Yankees that allowed him to improve his control. I hate to bring up these types of things to explain a player’s success, because 99% of the time the explanation is really just another example of the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy. But so far, the evidence does support the possibility that a mechanical change has been a big part of his recent success.

Since we here at FBG never take anyone’s word for it without looking deeper to confirm an assertion’s validity, let’s see what we can find. Before Oliver’s start against the Yankees, he had thrown just 59% of his pitches for strikes. From the Yankees start on, he’s improved that slightly to 63%, which doesn’t seem like enough to really consider it meaningful. However, one of the five starts was a 6 inning, 6 walk affair against the Rockies, which is skewing the results. Although not a fan at all of simply throwing out a bad game here and a good game there to manipulate a player’s stats, removing the Rockies game increases his strike % to 65%. Even that isn’t much of a jump from the 63% mark that included the Rockies game.

If you’re a Mets fan, you probably could vouch for how inconsistent Oliver has always been. As a flyball pitcher with poor control, he’s extremely susceptible to the long ball, so he’s going to have outings where he allows multiple HRs, which most likely won’t be solo shots given all the walks he allows. Add that all up, and that’s your recipe for one of those disasters we’re used to seeing from him every so often.

After looking at the data and seeing that he’s barely throwing more strikes than he had been before making his so-called adjustments, it’s hard to believe anything has really changed. I don’t think I’d expect any better than you normally would have going forward and his latest streak seems to be just that, a streak, rather than genuine improvement. If any PITCHf/x gurus out there want to take a look at his game logs to determine if he’s getting more movement or if his velocity has increased over his last 5 starts, that would certainly be quite helpful.

Questions, comments, criticisms, praise, expert league invitations? Email me at FBGeneralsMike@gmail.com.