Written by: JJ Stankevitz on 22nd August 2009

Saying that Jose Contreras has been kind of inconsistent would be like saying Jay Cutler has been kind of overhyped this year. At times, Contreras has been dominant, and at other times, Contreras has made Esteban Loaiza look like an attractive option again.

You can break Contreras’ season into three easy segments: pre-demotion, post-demotion to All-Star break, and post All-Star break. A look at to those numbers in each segment:

Pre-demotion (April 10 to May 8): six starts, 29.2 IP, 8.19 ERA, 5.2 K/9, 4.9 BB/9, 1.06 K/BB

Post-demotion to All Star break (June 8 to July 8): six starts, 43.2 IP, 2.06 ERA, 7.8 K/9, 1.2 BB/9, 6.33 K/BB

Post All-Star break (July 19 to present): seven starts, 35.1 IP, 6.37 ERA, 7.6 K/9, 4.6 BB/9, 1.67 K/BB

Of course, the post All-Star break segment includes Contreras’ last outing in which he allowed one run on three hits, one walk, and eight strikeouts over seven innings of work.

If you eliminate that outing, Contreras’ post All-Star break line looks like this: six starts, 28.1 IP, 7.62 ERA, 7.0 K/9, 5.4 BB/9, 1.29 K/BB.

It’s easy to see that walks are a pretty good indicator of whether or not Contreras is having success. A lot of that ties into whether or not Contreras is throwing his forkball for strikes. If he is, then that’s when we see Contreras dominate like he did after being brought back from Charlotte. When he isn’t, he loses any semblance of rhythm and it usually leads to the re-emergence of bad habits.

Usually, that means Contreras overuses his drop-down motion instead of throwing over the top. Just take a look at Contreras’ release point graph from one of his bad post-All Star starts, July 29 at Minnesota:

(image courtesy of FanGraphs)

See how all over the place Contreras’ release point is? He frequently would drop down to throw two-seamers and sliders, but stays over the top to throw his forkball (which registers as a curveball/changeup on this chart). It’s tough to throw a sidearm forkball, so hitters know that when Contreras drops down, it’s either going to be a fastball or a slider.

But when Contreras stays over the top, the forkball comes back into the minds of the hitters. Instead of seeing Contreras dropping down and protecting against the fastball and slider—which have a speed difference of about five or six miles per hour when Contreras throws from that angle—they now have to protect against a potentially devastating 77 mph forkball.

That extra pitch, which happens to be Contreras’ out pitch, is what he needs to get hitters to respect for him to have success. By dropping down so much, hitters have less respect for the forkball and more success against his other pitches.

If you want visual proof, look no further than Contreras’ start against the Royals Wednesday.

(image courtesy of FanGraphs)

Look at that. How many pitches did Contreras throw from the sidearm angle? One. That’s it. Everything else was from over the top, and it’s no surprise that Contreras had success shutting down a lineup that hit Sox pitching pretty well in the first two games of the series.

That’s not to say Contreras can’t be effective throwing from a sidearm angle. A quick look at the release graphs for all six of Contreras’ post-demotion to All-Star break starts shows that he did drop down quite frequently and successfully.

Contreras can do that when he has hitters respecting his forkball from over the top. If he’s smart with it, he’s usually placing the fastball on the outside corner and starting the slider on the outside corner and breaking it out of the strike zone.

But he can’t rely on that, and when he doesn’t have his forkball, he sometimes has a tendency to go to the sidearm well too often.

It’s obvious that somebody said something to Contreras before his start against Kansas City, because Contreras hasn’t thrown over the top at the rate he did that day in the last two years (FanGraphs’ release point database only goes back to 2007). There were a few outings in 2007 in which Contreras threw mostly over the top, but none of those starts saw Contreras drop down only once.

Given Contreras’ woes in his previous six starts, it’s good to see that he tried something different. It’ll be interesting to see how often he goes to that sidearm angle against a far superior Boston offense on Tuesday.

We’ve seen Contreras go on runs before where he’s dominant—and if he finds a way to get hot in the last month and a half of the season, he very well could be the ace of the staff down the stretch. But Boston will let us know if Contreras has one more of those magical streaks in him before his time with the White Sox is up.

I don’t think his start against Kansas City was a fluke by any means. If Contreras pitches against the Red Sox as he did against the Royals, it won’t matter if Willie Bloomquist or Jason Bay is hitting—he’s going to have a good outing.

Topics: jose contreras, White Sox