Cardinals' Pineiro Sinks to Top

ST. LOUIS -- The Cardinals are facing their most important game of the season, so it's good that they have Joel Pineiro to take the ball.

Who'd have guessed you'd read that sentence a couple years ago?

Pineiro was trying to overpower hitters with velocity that had long since left him as recently as last year, his fifth consecutive mediocre season. It took the insistence of Cardinals pitching coach Dave Duncan, the master of the fixer-upper, to get Pineiro to accept what he had become, and to get the most out of it. Starting in spring training, Duncan told Pineiro to just focus on the sinker instead of the four-seam fastball.

Now, Pineiro is arguably the best No. 3 starter in the majors -- no one else won 15 games and came in third on his staff -- and he's got the ball for Game 3 of the National League Division Series against the Dodgers on Saturday. Trailing 2-0 in the best-of-five series, the Cardinals have to win.

"He's not going to get rattled," said Cardinals pitcher John Smoltz, an expert on pitching in the playoffs. "He's got the command and stuff that's going to allow him to put the ball in action. If he was historically all over the place during the year, a game like this might exacerbate it, but he's a control pitcher who is going to control the strike zone and make things happen."

That's what he is now, anyway. Pineiro, 31, was a power pitcher when he first reached the big leagues with the Mariners in 2000. Through 2003, he was 37-20 with a 3.38 ERA, with all the looks of a dominant top-of-the-rotation guy. Then, what he was doing stopped working. His strikeouts decreased with his velocity, and his ERA rose. He lost his spot in the rotation, and then went to the Red Sox, where he got knocked around some more as a reliever. The Cardinals got him in the middle of 2007 and he showed some signs of progress at the end of the year, or maybe it was just the AL-to-NL bounce. Last year, the league caught back up to him, and he had another disappointing season. All told, Pineiro was 35-47 with a 5.34 ERA from 2004 to 2008.

"It was very frustrating," Pineiro said. "Usually I'm a guy that wants to challenge hitters and not walk anybody, but sometimes you try to overthrow the ball and then you start getting guys on. You go from one man on base, two men on base, then a big hit comes around and you're down 2-0 or 3-0 early."

In spring training this year, Duncan convinced Pineiro that he had to change what he was doing. He had a nasty sinker, but he didn't use it much. He also wasn't able to effectively throw his breaking ball or changeup. He was essentially a one-pitch pitcher, and it was the wrong pitch. Duncan had him focus on a different pitch, the sinker.


"He just told me to basically go out there and trust it," Pineiro said. "'This is going to be the one pitch I think that's going to help you out during the year and in your career.' He kind of made me throw that pitch every day in my bullpens, and it seemed to work out OK."

Pineiro went 15-12 with a 3.49 ERA. He pitched two shutouts, which were two more than he had in the previous five years combined.

"He's done an outstanding job," outfielder Ryan Ludwick said. "I think he gets overlooked a lot of times because of [Chris] Carpenter and [Adam] Wainwright. It's unfortunate. It could be a whole other story because if you look at his record it's not a firm indication of what he's done. There were a lot of times he pitched a one- or two-run game and we haven't given him the support. He could have five or six more wins."

Cardinals closer Ryan Franklin was Pineiro's teammate in Seattle. He said he sees the same tough competitor, but with a much more effective repertoire of pitches.

"He's not scared," Franklin said. "He goes out and goes after guys, except he goes after them now with a little sinker that's one of the best in the game. He's a pitcher now, not a thrower."

Pineiro says his only regret about the pitcher he's become is that it took him so long to get here: "I kind of told myself why didn't I learn that sinker eight years ago when I started coming up? It's just a learning process when you're young. You think you just throw hard and blow it by people."