The Case For Ollie

By Jack Flynn
Posted Thursday, April 24, 2008

The clock is ticking.

The New York Mets have less than 30 regular-season starts to decide what to do with Oliver Perez, who will be a free agent after this season and will certainly be seeking a multi-year deal that would make him a very rich man. It’s a tough decision for General Manager Omar Minaya, and there’s only one way for the Mets to find out if Perez is going to be worth the money.

Throw Oliver Perez out there as often as possible and see what he can do.

Pitch him every fifth day, regardless of whose turn it is in the rotation. Mike Pelfrey or Nelson Figueroa have to get skipped once in a while? No problem. A Perez start should take precedence over everyone else in the rotation except for Johan Santana, a true top-of-the-rotation ace who takes a back seat to no one.

Pitch him deep into games, even if his pitch count goes above 100 sometimes. Oh, I know, anytime a player starts racking up the Picher Abuse Points it’s a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions, right? His labrum will tear, his rotator cuff will fray and his elbow ligaments will snap all at once, all because he was asked to throw an extra 15 pitches in game situations.

I’ll take my chances, thank you very much. The pitch-count ceilings used today are arbitrary at best and completely misguided at worst. I believe that every pitcher has his own limit, based on any number of factors, and it’s up to the Mets to find what Ollie’s true pitch-count limit is. Once they find it, only ineffectiveness on any given day should keep him from reaching that ceiling.

Five months from now, after 30 more starts and 200 more innings, the Mets will know what they have with Perez. They will either have a second staff ace to go along with Santana, or they will have an inconsistent number three starter with the ability to dominate on some days and be dominated on others.

In the off-season, they can offer him a contract accordingly.

Perez is currently the third starter for the 2008 Mets, but many people agree that he still has the potential to be at least as dominant as Santana, the Mets’ most recent big-money acquisition. Perez certainly won’t get a deal averaging $20 million-plus next season, but there are rumors that he could be seeking a contract as high as 5 years, $75 million for his services. Those numbers are more of a reflection of his potential than his actual accomplishments.

With Perez, however, that potential still hasn’t fully been tapped. Now part of that is his own fault. Perez matches a strong fastball with sweeping breaking pitches, sometimes thrown from funky arm angles. His stuff has proved nearly impossible to consistently harness, however, leaving Ollie liable to high pitch counts and a lot of walks. That translates into fewer innings pitched and more pressure on the bullpen.

Last season, generally considered Perez’s renaissance year after miserable 2005 and 2006 campaigns, he averaged just over 6.1 innings a start. To his credit, manager Willie Randolph let Perez go over the 100-pitch mark 19 times, indicating a willingness to pitch Ollie to his limits while still keeping the best interests of the team in mind. The low innings total (just 177 innings overall) wasn’t a function of managerial over-cautiousness; it was a function of Perez’s inefficiency.

Randolph has not extended Perez that same courtesy in 2008. Three of Perez’s first four starts featured early hooks – less than six innings pitched or 100 pitches thrown. (That’s my personal definition of an early hook, not the Bill James version.) In each of the last three starts, Randolph has also pulled Perez in the middle of an inning, not giving him a chance to work out of a jam he’d created for himself.

Part of the reason we’re still talking about Oliver Perez’s potential five years later – instead of simply viewing him as one of the best pitchers in the National League – is that Perez is rarely given the chance to pitch out of jams. He is being treated like a porcelain doll, too precious to ever get taken out of the box and risk breaking. That’s not how a nunber pitcher develops into an ace; it’s how a number three pitcher stays a number three pitcher.

To be fair, Perez had a few high-profile meltdowns in 2007. It’s hard to forget May 7 in San Francisco, when two fifth-inning errors led to a memorable mound meltdown that culminated in a Rich Aurilia three-run homer. What people tend to forget, however, is that after that meltdown Perez ran off a string of five straight starts where he went 3-1 with a 2.19 ERA and pitched at least seven innings each time out.

Nevertheless, Ollie has begun to earn a reputation for losing his cool on the mound and disaster inevitably following. It’s a debatable point, but if Perez has developed at all since last year – if he has matured, or if he has just generally improved as a pitcher – the past should not influence this year’s thinking. At the very least, Perez should be given some chances to pitch out of his jams just to see what happens. If he survives, then he’ll be one step closer to being an ace. If he continues to melt down, the Mets will have a very clear indication of what Perez’s ceiling as a pitcher might be.

Money is not the issue with signing Perez, that’s for sure. With the Mets are moving into a new stadium in 2009 and drawing a $20 million annual check just for letting a bank put its name on the side, they can buy the sun, the moon and the stars if they so desire.

No, money is not the issue. The issue is whether or not Perez, who has been maddeningly inconsistent throughout his career, will ever fully develop into the type of pitcher he’s capable of being. The Mets have the next five months to decide if he’s worth the money he’ll be demanding. They owe it to themselves to give Perez every possible chance to prove himself worthy of those riches.