Porcello Unleashed

I don't know if I have posted about this before, but I have always been waiting for Rick Porcello to be allowed to expand his pitching arsenal. His first couple of years ahve been focused more on his main fastball and sinker to get him by with a little dash of this, or that. Now it sounds like we may finally get to see a bit more variety.

As an article on MLB.com posted a couple weeks back (I completely missed it actually until a couple days ago), Porcello is much more than a 3 pitch guy. When he was drafted he had a few more pitches at his disposal, but the Tigers made him into that groundball pitcher his first season, and he was quite successful. Then last year he began to have a bit of trouble keeping the sinker down and his ratios went to hell as well as all his other stats.

At this point he has the sinker, a curve ball, and a slider as his non-standard pitches. The kind of arsenal, that if able to be used effectively puts him on a completely different level.
While both the slider, and the curve ball seem to be still in the tinkering phases, it is said there that he has improved both quite a bit, and we should be seeing a much larger assortment of pitches this year. This has been my dream since he was drafted. a 4-5 pitch guy. Can you imagine if he can keep all these pitches under control?

It's not like that is the extent of it either. He has a bit of a cutter on his fastball he throws at times too with a slightly different speed than his top heat. Throw a bit of a change up in there and this guy with control of even half this arsenal is dangerous. I can't wait.