Adam Wainwright isn't very good...

...right now, at least. Adam Wainwright is a good pitcher. A great pitcher, actually, if you look at his career stats and his stuff in general. I mean, a fastball that sits in the low-to-mid-90s plus a changeup plus one of the nastiest 12-6 curves in the game, the one that turned Carlos Beltran's knees to gravy to end the 2006 NLCS, Mr. Wainwright has some nasty stuff. He used to be a closer, and now he seems to be able to throw that sort of stuff with the length of a starter. In his magnum opus 2010 season, he won 20 games, struck out 213 batters and had a BABIP (batting average on balls in play) of .275. That means the hitters that Wainwright didn't strike out rarely even hit the ball hard. He was dirty, and his 2009 season was much of the same. Wainwright has clearly shown that being one of the best pitchers in baseball is typical of him.

But then there's this season. He is recovering from Tommy John surgery in 2011, so getting right back to where he left off wouldn't be very likely. And he had a good spring training, with a 1.45 ERA and an opponent's batting average of .169. The regular season, though, has hit Wainwright with all the kindness of a brick to the face. He's 0-3 so far and has been roughed up pretty good in every one of those starts. Wainwright's ERA stands at 9.88 and his OBA is .310. That's, well...bad. His most recent start saw him give up seven hits and four runs over five innings and allow two homers to the Reds. Not much progress there. So yeah, not an auspicious start. But where does the main problem lie? I dunno, let's look at the numbers over the SSS (small sample size, credit to tom s. of Viva El Birdos) of two starts (because that's as far as Fangraphs goes) first!

Well, first off, there's the BABIP. It's .320. When guys are making contact with Wainwright, they're hitting him hard. His very high 6.38 FIP (fielding independent pitching) supports that assertion. We can narrow the problem inherent there down to three things; either Wainwright's stuff simply isn't as good this season, with his secondary pitches aren't up to snuff, allowing opposing batters to adjust to his fastball much, much easier (hypothesis A), or he's just not as tight, mentally and mechanically, as in the past and is just making a lot of mistakes (hypothesis B). So there's that.

But then we have his K/9 ratio. It's 9.35, which is pretty damn good. And that number's going to stay pretty even after tonight's start, as Wainwright struck out five in five innings. This means that he's been able to get his out pitches to work well enough to send guys packing fairly consistently. So that basically eliminates hypothesis A. He's got pretty good stuff this season, at least good enough to get whiffs on a fairly regular basis. As I'm about to explain, hypothesis B has a pretty good amount of stuff backing it up.

First, there's all the home runs Wainwright's given up. He's given up five in 13.2 innings for a ratio of 3.3/9 innings. That's far, far higher than his past tree seasons, when he's kept that number around 0.6. There's also his HR/FB (fly ball) %, 37.5 through two games, which means fly balls Wainwright has given up have been finding their way into the seats quite a lot. And with two he gave up tonight, that number's not going to change very much. It's very high.

Credit: Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images

Now, you might say "Well duh, Ian, the guy's just leaving a lot of balls up and dudes are hitting them far in the air, just professional baseball-hitter-people are paid to do!" And that's partly true. But there's a wrinkle in this; through two games, Wainwright's GB% (percentage of balls in play that are ground balls) is 55.6%. That's actually very good, better than figures he recorded in his previous three full seasons. And that shows us that he isn't necessarily a fly ball pitcher this year, not at all. That's a number comparable to what Jake Westbrook, a sinkerballer, has shown in past seasons. And the point of being a sinkerballer is to throw the ball with the hope of the batter actually connecting and grounding out. And then there's the final number, which might tie everything together: left on base percentage (LOB%), a statistic measuring the percentage of baserunners a pitcher strands on base, AKA doesn't let them score. Wainwright's LOB%, through two games (again, after his last start things probably aren't going to change much) is 30.6%. That's quite poor, as the league average in this statistic usually hovers around 70%. And how this helps package all the other stuff about HR/FB and GB% that I was talking about, I am about to explain.

What this basically says is Wainwright has given up a good amount of big hits at inopportune times. Timing plays a pretty big role here. His GB% indicates that he hasn't been that bad at leaving the ball up a lot and has overall been pretty good at getting the ball down. The HR/FB% shows that when he does give up fly balls, they often go quite a long way, and his low LOB% tells us that a lot of these home runs (and a bunch of the other hits he's given up) have driven baserunners in. Which is true, as three of his five homers allowed came with runners on, including a grand slam on April 13 by the Cubs' Bryan LaHair. So when Wainwright has messed up, it's often been with runners on and resulted in the ball traveling a long way away from home plate.

Let me clarify, lots of these stats are just through two games and I have not conducted a full pitch-by-pitch analysis on Wainwright. But to me, the gist is that, this season, Wainwright has made mistakes (as all pitchers do), but they are in a higher quantity and have often come at very inopportune times. Most likely, he is just not as integrated with the flow of the game as he has been in the past, and mechanical and mental lapses have resulted in him not making the pitches he needs to in tight spots. He has shown with his strikeout numbers that his out pitches are there and with the GB% that his overall location has been decent. Now he just needs to smooth out the rest of his approach and get guys out when he needs to. He has a good pitching coach in Derek Lilliquist and ample experience in the regular and postseason. I have confidence he'll find his groove soon. And unless the rest of the rotation stays on their current tear, the Cardinals are going to be praying that he does.