Improvements vs. lefties push Porcello into AL Cy race

On Monday night in Baltimore, Rick Porcello allowed two earned runs in a complete-game 5-2 victory, striking out seven without a walk. That outing lowered his season ERA to 3.08, second in the American League only to Masahiro Tanaka. It raised Porcello’s innings total to 210 2/3, putting him among only five AL pitchers with 200 innings, and he’ll get the chance to increase that Saturday evening against Tampa Bay. It improved his record to 21-4 — which, I don’t need to tell you how poor of an evaluating tool a win-loss record is, and a big part of that is Porcello getting an absurd 6.7 runs per start of support from Boston’s offense, but there’s a part of me that refuses not to be at least a little impressed by 21-4.

Porcello, over the past month or so, has gone from fringe AL Cy Young Award candidate to a legitimate possibility, perhaps even the front-runner. The argument is right there if you want to make it. Sure, you could probably make the argument that Porcello’s ERA is more a product of good fortune than performance by pointing to his .260 Batting Average On Balls In Play, which is 42 points lower than his career mark. But then also you’ve got to consider that his career mark is probably unfairly inflated by his being a ground-ball pitcher in front of Detroit’s usually below-average infield defense for so many years, and that the BABIPs of his strongest AL Cy Young Award competitors are similarly depressed.

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So you could make the case that Porcello’s numbers point more to good fortune than performance, or you could make the case that Porcello has made some legitimately compelling strides in the way he pitches.

This winter, FanGraphs’ Jeff Sullivan noted that, late last year, Porcello had morphed his curveball into a near-replica of the famous hook thrown by Adam Wainwright. Back in May, I wrote about how Porcello seemed to finally be learning the best mix of his two-seam and four-seam fastballs, and how to properly use the latter.

My tagline for that piece was, “When heightening the quantity of the four-seamer backfired, he heightened the quality instead.” In short, Porcello threw his four-seam fastball more than ever in 2015, his first season in Boston, at times throwing …

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