Going into this year, Zach Duke appeared to be the best pitcher on the Pirates roster. Upon a quick glance of his numbers in 2010 right now, you can tell that he certainly is not. The numbers show that he has been pretty bad this year. But when you look at those numbers more closely… it gets worse.
Duke's season ERA stands at 5.30 after his 7th loss of the season last night against the Washington Nationals. He gave up only 3 earned runs, but lasted only 5 innings and surrendered 8 hits. The hits have been coming in bunches against Duke this year, and his season WHIP stands at 1.73 (not good).
Duke has allowed 9 or more hits in 6 of his 13 starts. He has allowed a total of 103 hits this season, which is around 1.3 hits per inning. He's been pretty with the walks this year, which has helped his WHIP not inflate too much. But just think about that, Duke is allowing well over 1 hit per inning, and his average against is over .330; how can you expect to be successful when you are getting hit that much?
Despite all that, Duke hasn't been giving up as many earned runs as you would think. He had one start (May 7th vs. St. Louis) when he gave up 9 hits but didn't allow a single earned run (he did allow 3 unearned runs, but he certainly deserved to be tagged with a couple earned).
Another worrisome point is that he is allowing a lot of home runs. He has 12 allowed in 13 starts. That equates to 1.45 HR/9, compared to .92 and .97, the numbers in that category he put up in his last 2 years with the Pirates.
I'm not done yet, still got more bad news. Duke's line drive percentage is up to 21%, compared to 19% last year. His velocity is down across the board, and that doesn't really make sense judges on his age.
It's not like we didn't see this coming, I made a post before the season detailing why Duke was headed for a bad season.
Zach Duke has never had anything close to ace-calibur stuff, but he has gotten away with good knowledge of his job and a lot of good luck. However, the luck is going away this year and hitters are seeing the ball out of his hand better than ever. He is getting pounded most times he takes the mound, and is losing trade value fast. That last part is probably the worst news out of all of this for Pirate fans. It really doesn't seem like a good idea to give this guy a new contract, so we were all hoping to get good value for him at the trade deadline, however it doesn't seem like that is going to happen now. We will have to further depend on the young arms we have all throughout the system to help this team win in future years, because it sure doesn't look like Zach Duke is gonna help much.
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