A Tale of Two Francisco's

Francisco Liriano has made two starts for the Twins so far this season: one not so good and one not so bad. Luckily he's trending the right way. Here's a look at the two different Liriano's we've seen so far this year:

Walks/K's
In his first outting, Liriano was erratic and had trouble finding the plate, throwing 92 pitches and only 56 for strikes (60.8%). He walked 5 and only struk out 3 for a terrible BB/K ratio. In his second start, Liriano fared a bit better, throwing 96 pitches, 64 for strikes (66.6%). He struck out 8 while only walking 2. If Liriano can cut down on the number of walks allowed, he's going to be a dangerous fifth starter for Minnesota.

WPA
One of my favorite stats, WPA measures a players win probability added. This is on a scale of -1 to 1 where 1 would mean the player was solely responsible for the win and -1 meaning the opposite. In Liriano's first start, he posted a -0.120 wpa comapred to a 0.341 effort his second time around. This is a 0.461 swing which is pretty impressive, but also a bit concerning since there is such a large gap there. His third start will hopefully give us a better idea of where he's at this year.

GB/FB
One of the more telling stats between Liriano's two starts is the number of ground ball outs compared to fly ball outs that he was able to get. In his first start Liriano was only able to get 7 ground ball outs compared to 10 flyball outs. He turned this around in his second outing, getting 12 outs on the ground and only 5 in the air. If Liriano can continue to get outs on the ground, he will be able to pitch much more effectively. (In 2006, Liriano's break out year, he posted a 1.93 GB/FB ratio compared to last year, maybe his most disappointing year, when he posted only a 0.95 GB/FB ratio)

Liriano will face an Indians line-up that struggled against right-hander Kevin Slowey last night, but is heavily left-handed. He'll look to repeat his successful start his last time out and continue to give Twins fans a reason to hope that he can return to something near his dominating 2006 form.