In the past few days, I’ve looked at two longtime relievers attempting to move into the starting rotation: Aaron Heilman and Neftali Feliz. Like Heilman and Feliz, Tigers lefty Phil Coke is also trying to make the switch; unlike Heilman and Feliz, he’s guaranteed to actually get the chance, being penciled into a rotation slot to open the season.
Will it take?
Coke’s best two pitches are a fastball and a changeup, which both rate as plus pitches out of the bullpen. His slider is an average pitch as well, so he does have the requisite three-pitch mix to start.
Coke isn’t likely to pitch in the 92-95 mph range as a starter, though, settling closer to 89-92. That’s still plenty, especially for a lefty, and Coke’s fastball has nice movement as well. The fastball may not rate as an outright plus pitch as a starter, but it won’t be below average, and from purely a “stuff” perspective, an average fastball and slider and plus changeup don’t preclude a lefty from making decent starts.
Another issue with moving from relief to the rotation is durability. Coke wasn’t especially durable in the minors, at least recently, as he threw 128 innings in 2006 and just 99 in 2007 before staying healthy in 2008. Still, though, he was worked hard in the bullpen the last two seasons and held up just fine, so that bodes well, and he certainly has the frame to throw nearly 200 innings. His mechanics from his starting days were fairly clean as well.
In the relief role, Coke wasn’t especially precise with his location; in particular, he rarely tried to put his slider in the strike zone, which is what made it such an unimpressive pitch from a statistical perspective. That’s going to need to change if he’s going to be anything other than an even-more-erratic Jonathan Sanchez in the rotation. The relief role does, of course, lend itself to wildness more than starting does, so just because he threw so many chase pitches in relief doesn’t mean that Coke necessarily has poor command or can’t make it as a starter; it just means that he’s got some adjustments to make.
Perhaps the most alarming issue with Coke’s pending transition is that, despite his excellent changeup, he ran into a lot of trouble against righties last season, with a 1.17 K/BB, compared to 4 against lefties. His xFIP against righties was nearly two runs higher than against his fellow lefties.
What caused the problem, you ask? Well, while the changeup was stunningly effective against righties (25.7% whiff rate!), it only comprised 18.7% of his offerings to them, and the other 82.3% weren’t very good. His fastball only drew whiffs 4.4% of the time against righties, as opposed to 12.1% against lefties, and he got ridiculously gunshy with the breaking stuff–just 38 of 93 breaking pitches to righties went for strikes, and most of those strikes came on chase pitches out of the zone.
In order for the transition to take, Coke’s going to need to retool his approach to righties. The changeup can still be effective with higher usage, and the breaking ball should be okay if he can throw it for quality strikes. Since he was often brought in from the bullpen just to face lefties and maybe the occasional righty, it makes sense that he pitched around righties–often, there was another lefty waiting after the righty. Coke won’t have that luxury as a starting pitcher, and if he doesn’t recognize that quickly, he’s going to have a lot of starts in which he doesn’t get out of the fourth inning.
The stuff is there for this to work, at least to a reasonable degree, but pitching coach Rick Knapp needs to make sure that Coke gets more aggressive in the zone to righties and throws more offspeed stuff to them.