The Daily Jolt is a dose of baseball reality every weekday morning.It's been four years since we were introduced to Felix Hernandez, four years since he was coronated as Seattle's pitching savior at 19 years old. We are still waiting for the King to truly flex his muscles in the major leagues. Monday night, as Hernandez helped his native Venezuela into the final round of the World Baseball Classic, we were reminded of why we will keep on waiting for the foreseeable future.
Hernandez was dominant over 4 2/3 innings, fanning seven Puerto Ricans, and only departing the game in the fifth inning because he surpassed the tournament-mandated 85-pitch limit for the second round. That performance was more than enough to pick up the win, and Team Venezuela needed every bit of it considering Ian Snell and a host of Puerto Rican relievers limited their mighty offense to just two runs.
Of course, with Hernandez it's not just about the numbers he puts up, but the fashion in which he compiles them.
Sometime last year, Tim Lincecum replaced King Felix as the must-see pitching attraction in baseball, at least for me. It's a visceral thing. Lincecum is diminutive and has quirky, unique mechanics. He has a mid-90s fastball and several devastating off-speed pitches. He's also a much more complete pitcher, having won the NL Cy Young Award last year, his first full season in the majors.
But even Lincecum might be hard-pressed to beat Hernandez in the pure stuff department. Felix can touch the upper-90s with his fastball. He complements it with a two-seam fastball that would make Greg Maddux happy, a diving curveball in the mid-80s and a biting slider.
Couple that type of repertoire with his 12-start debut in 2005, in which Hernandez went 4-4 with a 2.67 ERA and 77 strikeouts in 84 1/3 innings, and it'd be easy to wonder why he doesn't have a Cy Young Award of his own to claim.
But even though he's been in the majors for twice as long as Lincecum, Hernandez is still almost two years younger than his counterpart 810 miles to the south. Which is all another way of saying that while Hernandez has been a part of our baseball-loving lives since the middle of the decade, there's still reason to be patient with him.
King Felix might not have reached the sky-high expectations he created for himself after his meteoric rise to the majors in 2005, but he has been a well above-average pitcher, with a career 3.80 ERA and at least 190 innings pitched in each of the last three seasons.
The main thing between him and a pitcher like Lincecum, at least right now, seems to be an inability to avoid long slumps of under-performance. Last year, Hernandez went 0-5 with a 5.54 ERA from April 27 to May 26. In 2007, he had 4.85 ERA over a 10-start span from July 22 to Sept. 9. And in 2006, he went 4-5 with a 6.12 ERA from April 13 to May 31. All pitchers this side of 1999-00 Pedro Martinez struggle at some point during the season. It's making adjustments quickly to minimize the slump that separates the great from the above average.
His arsenal and his age make it seem like that leap from the latter to the former is right around the corner. So does history. According to baseball-refence.com's Play Index, only 23 pitchers since World War II have won 35 or more games before seasonal age 23. That list is littered with Hall of Famers (Catfish Hunter, Dennis Eckersley, Don Drysdale), should-be Hall of Famers (Bert Blyleven) and Cy Young winners (Dwight Gooden, Fernando Valenzuela, CC Sabathia, Denny McLain, Bret Saberhagen).
Until the leap is made, we'll just have to keep waiting, tantalized by King Felix's seemingly boundless potential.
