Bannister encouraged by adjustments

Thursday morning.

Brian Bannister feels nervous over breakfast. And when Bannister feels nervous, he goes to the numbers. In rough times, he has always found comfort in numbers.

“Look at my xFIP,” he is saying as he pulls out a few pages he printed off the Internet site, “The Hardball Times.” He points out his xFIP — an advanced pitching statistic that stands for “Expected Fielding Independent Pitching.” The statistic calculates something that looks like ERA, only instead of measuring earned runs per nine innings, it measures three things that pitchers can control — strikeouts, walks and home runs allowed. According to the glossary, xFIP should take out a lot of noise of ERA. It promises to help you understand how well a pitcher pitched.

That’s good. At the moment — it is Thursday morning, just 36 hours before what might be the most important start of Brian Bannister’s still budding career — he is dying to understand what the heck has happened to him.

“Look,” he says, and here is his row of xFIP numbers:

2006: 6.29.

2007: 5.14.

2008: 4.59.

“Look at that,” he says again. “I’m actually pitching better than I was last year. My xFIP is down. It’s just that I got lucky last year.”

Then he stares at the numbers for another few seconds, and he offers a frustrated smile because he knows that, in the end, nobody else really cares about his xFIP. Nobody else really cares about his skyrocketing Left on Base Percentage. All anyone cares about is that he’s getting lit up. He’s giving up many more runs than he gave up last year. And Bannister knows that despite all his analysis and study, in this crazy pitching game, it really might be better to be lucky than good.

•••

Thursday night, less than 24 hours before his start.

Bannister isn’t sleeping all that well. He knows that he’s a three-run homer away from Omaha. And he and his wife, Megan, are expecting their first child in a couple of months. There’s too much to think about.

Brian has never kidded himself about this game. He grew up around baseball, of course. His father, Floyd, was a college legend and the first pick in the amateur draft. He pitched in the big leagues for 15 years. Brian never had it made like his Dad. Brian was a college walk-on. He was taken in the seventh round by the New York Mets. His fastball made scouts yawn. He got traded before his rookie season for a guy who could throw 100 mph. He began his rookie year in the minor leagues.

Then, finally, he made it to the Kansas City Royals. And he was a revelation. He used advanced statistical measures, and he threw strikes, and he challenged hitters, and nobody seemed able to get good wood on the ball against him. With three weeks left in the season, Bannister seemed to have a very real chance to be named rookie of the year. And even though he struggled those last three weeks, he still finished 12-9 with a 3.87 ERA, an excellent year. This year, at the start, he was just about unhittable. He began the year 3-0 with an 0.86 ERA.

Things have been miserable since then. The last three months he has been getting battered. His ERA is 6.64 since April 30. His last three starts, his ERA is almost 10. Bannister knows that ERA is a terrible way to measure a pitcher’s true performance. There are countless uncontrollable factors that go into how many runs a pitcher gives up — luck, the quality of defense, the ballpark dimensions, the size of the umpire’s strike zone that day. He understands that lies and tricks hide in the numbers — he scored a perfect 800 on the math portion of his SAT.

He also knows that ERA is all anyone really cares about. And his is lousy.

Bannister can’t sleep, so he reads about Arizona’s Brandon Webb, who won the Cy Young Award in 2006, finished second in 2007 and leads the National League in wins right now. Bannister’s reading how Webb attacks hitters — he begins by throwing the ball over the heart of the plate and then, once he gets ahead of a hitter, he pitches more toward the outside corner. It’s a good plan. Bannister would like to do that.

Of course, Bannister also would like to have a sinkerball like Webb’s, a pitch that dives down like a fighter jet an instant before it reaches home plate. Well, he often says, God gave some pitchers more gifts than others.

•••

Friday morning, eight hours before game time.

Bannister walks around Town Center Plaza in Leawood; he’s still trying to keep his mind off the game. He knows that people say he thinks too much. There is a baseball motto: “Don’t think. Just throw.”

And sure, that’s fine advice if you have Brandon Webb’s sinker or Josh Beckett’s fastball or Joakim Soria’s curve. That Soria is a beauty. Bannister has asked him countless times this year to explain how he throws that wicked curve; Soria’s the only guy Bannister has ever seen who throws it with his fingers running along the seams rather than across them. He asks Soria: What finger do you put pressure on? How far back do you hold it in your hand? Soria doesn’t know. He says, “I just throw it.”

Figures. That’s how it is when you’re gifted.

But Bannister knows he is not gifted, not in the same way, and he figures that to get people out with his stuff, he has to stay a step ahead of the hitter, maybe two steps ahead, to be safe.

Anyway, he can’t just shut off his mind; he isn’t built that way. He has always been a thinker, a puzzle solver. And he loves this game. He loves studying it. He has to make some sense out of it. The last three months he has been banging his head against the wall trying to figure out what is going wrong. For a while now, he has thought that he needs to strike out more batters. So he added a new pitch, a nasty little change-up that dives down. A few batters have swung and missed it. He’s encouraged.

Then, he’s been giving up so many home runs that he realized he needed to get a pitch that dives down more. So he’s been working on a new two-seam fastball that is looking pretty good. He hopes to use that pitch a lot tonight so he can get ground balls.

Then, one day last week, he was looking at his numbers and this struck him.

Opponent’s batting average with no one on base: .242.

Opponent’s batting average with men on base: .348.

Well, that just didn’t make any sense at all. “How can the difference be that great?” he asked. “It’s like I’m two different pitchers. How can I be good with no one on and just terrible with men on base?”

He determined that something must be going wrong when he pitches out of the stretch. A pitcher throws out of the stretch with runners on base because it takes less time to release the ball. This makes it harder for runners to steal bases. Bannister is good at it — only two runners have stolen bases successfully off him. But he wonders now if, in order to stop the running game, he lost some of the movement on his pitches.

“I’ve been too hunched over,” he says with some confidence in his voice.

Bannister knows this is the key: Confidence. A pitcher must never lose his confidence, no matter how hard he’s getting hit, no matter how bad the results. He changed some things. He straightened up a little bit out of the stretch, tinkered with his delivery a bit. Then he had a bullpen session, and it felt great. The ball felt like it was exploding out of his hand. Anyway, that’s what he told himself.

“I know sometimes after I pitch a game where I give up a few runs, I will have a quote in the paper that will sound like I think I pitched well,” Bannister says. “People have really gotten on me for that. Believe me, I know when I don’t pitch well. But for me as a pitcher, I have to stay positive. I have to believe that I’m getting better.”

Now, in the hours before game time, he believes that the adjustments he made out of the stretch will turn around his numbers. He believes the two new pitches will get him strikeouts and ground balls. He believes that he will be able to get out hitters again.

He also has more butterflies flapping around in his stomach than he can remember having before a game.

•••

Friday evening. The game.

The first thing Bannister notices while warming up in the bullpen is that he is throwing his new two-seam fastball hard. Really hard. He throws his four-seam fastball 88 or 89 mph, sometimes it touches 90. But his two-seam fastball is rushing it at 91 mph, sometimes even 92.

And it’s alive. That’s the thing: Bannister doesn’t really care about velocity so much. He cares about how much his pitches are moving. His catcher, John Buck, says: “Man, you really are throwing a heavy ball tonight.” This means the ball is really sinking. Banny feels it, too.

The first batter he faces is Tampa Bay’s Akinori Iwamura, a tough hitter from Japan. Banny starts him off with a hard two-seam fastball — it’s 92 mph. Iwamura takes it for a strike. Things are starting off well. After a four-pitch battle, Iwamura hits a ground ball up the middle. Shortstop Mike Aviles is able to smother it but he cannot throw Iwamura out. Banny still feels good. He got a ground ball with his new pitch.

Then, he gets B.J. Upton to hit a ground ball on a curveball. If the Royals had played it just right, they might have gotten a double play on it. Instead, they get only one out, Iwamura to second. These are the breaks of baseball.

Bannister gets Carl Crawford to ground out to second on his new two-seam fastball. Then he throws that fastball to Evan Longoria, but he throws it too high, and Longoria lines a single to right field, scoring Iwamura. Bannister finishes off the inning by getting Carlos Peña to ground out on a nasty two-seam fastball. He has given up a run, but he feels good. He feels like his stuff is working again.

And it goes like that for the whole game. He feels more and more bold as it goes along. He throws his new pitches with conviction. He strikes out Iwamura in the second on his new change-up — that thing just tumbled down and out of sight. In the third inning, he gets two groundouts and forces Longoria to foul out to the catcher. In the fourth he has some trouble, but again his new two-seam fastball gets him out of it with two ground balls.

“I started thinking, ‘Oh, so this is how Brandon Webb feels,’ ” he would say after the game. “It’s no wonder he’s so good. It’s fun to pitch when you get ground balls.”

He has a little more trouble in the fifth — the Rays score a run when Aviles drops a line drive. And by the sixth inning he is spent. He gives up a double and hits a batter and he’s taken out of the game.

The Royals don’t have much offense on this night, and they end up losing the game. It’s another loss for Bannister. Still, afterward, everyone sounds pleased.

“A big step forward,” Royals manager Trey Hillman says.

“That was the old Banny,” Buck says.

“Baby steps,” Banny says to reporters around his locker. And he smiles. He does seem to have pushed off Omaha for another start, anyway.

•••

Aftermath.

After he lets it all sink in, Bannister does feel good. He did not pitch great — he only pitched 5 1/3 innings because the Tampa hitters really made him work — but he pitched a lot better. And a lot of his new stuff seemed effective. And he felt like the adjustments he made while pitching out of the stretch made a difference. It was a good night.

Of course, this crazy game keeps on spinning. Omaha is still a short drive away. Now there are powerful rumors floating around that the Yankees might want to trade for him. Another team supposedly has a lot of interest, too. He does not want to get traded … he likes Kansas City, likes his teammates, wants to be a part of this team’s future. But he also knows baseball is a game of adjustments. You do what you can.

Anyway, a pitcher can’t think about everything all at the same time. Baby steps. Bannister wants to get his slider to bite more. And he’s thinking a lot about his curveball. He’s been breaking down some data. He may be throwing it too fast.

To reach Joe Posnanski, call 816-234-4361 or send e-mail to jposnanski@kcstar.com. For previous columns, go to KansasCity.com