For Cubs fans, the Verducci effect is an old and familiar foe, even if they have never heard of it. First set forth by Sports Illustrated baseball guru Tom Verducci , the theory concerns escalating innings totals for young pitchers.
If, before a player's age 26 season, his team sends him out for 30 or more professional innings (Majors and Minors combined) in excess of his previous career high, they have violated the Verducci rule (an implicit corollary), and can expect declining performance and heightened risk of injury in the following season.
Both Mark Prior and Kerry Wood were overused, by this line of reckoning, and the results were predictably catastrophic.
As they have done several times over the last decade, the hapless Pittsburgh Pirates committed just such a sin in 2007. That year, they sent left-hander Tom Gorzelanny out for 201 2/3 innings, second-most on the team and some 40 1/3 innings more than he had accrued during a 2006 campaign split between Pittsburgh and Triple-A Indianapolis.
Over the course of that season, Gorzelanny won 14 games, walked just a shade over three batters per nine innings, struck out more than six per nine innings, and surrendered just 18 home runs.
In 2008, he collapsed in spectacular fashion. Despite narrowly topping 105 innings, he gave up 20 homers. His walk rate ballooned into an unsightly 5.98 per nine innings, made all the worse by a concomitant regression in his strikeout rate, such that walked more men than he whiffed for the year.
His ERA jumped by nearly three full runs, from 3.88 in 2007 to 6.66 in 2008.
Unsurprisingly, the bumbling Pirates failed to realize their own culpability in Gorzelanny's breakdown season. Instead of allowing him to assert himself anew as a solid middle-of-the-rotation starter, they shuttled him back and forth between the parent club and Triple-A.
Gorzelanny would get only nine appearances for the 2009 Pirates, all of them coming in relief, before being traded to the Cubs one day before the July 31 trading deadline.
Though his top-line number in Chicago were pedestrian, Gorzelanny struck out 40 and walked just 13 in 38 1/3 innings after the trade.
The 27 year-old left-hander will go into the Cubs camp next spring a nose ahead of the pack vying for the fifth spot in the starting rotation, providing he remains with the organization .
Assuming for a moment that he does stay, and wins the job over fellow southpaw Sean Marshall and right-handers Jeff Samardzija and Jay Jackson , Gorzelanny has the potential to return to his 2007 form in 2010. Verducci says the negative regressions enforced by the year-after effect are generally restricted to the short term.
In fact, the likelihood seems strong that his late-season success was less an aberrational course correction than the end of his suffering due to the Pirates' abuse.
None of this is meant to suggest that Gorzelanny will suddenly supplant the Cubs' current big three and become a front-line ace. He doesn't have that kind of skill set.
But as a fourth or fifth starter, he could provide surpassingly good value over 140-150 innings, all while being paid less than $2 million.
Even if an opportunity to acquire a top-flight starter relegate him to bullpen work alongside fellow lefties Marshall and John Grabow, I think the Cubs would do well to hang onto Gorzelanny, and see what he can give them in 2010.
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