I don't totally disagree with anything either of you are saying but I'd insist on two things: 1) the command has noticeably gotten better over the course of the season, and 2) the slider is the pitch it all hangs on for me. If you look at the metrics on the pitch, I'm sure they are still bad (there was some talk about it a few of his starts ago on the broadcast, when Capps was hammering the table for a more fastball-heavy approach, which just isn't going to work, though I will say I like Capps).
But, he's only really had it in his last two starts, and the way they are trying to bring the package all together is what is having me remain cautiously optimistic about it. I'd be way more pessimistic if we were trying to make him completely live and die off the fastball because he simply cannot get enough whiffs with it in that way.
For all the talk about his stuff, he does still have this annoying tendency where hitters cannot quite square him up a lot of the time, but he cannot put them away. It's simultaneously a sort of positive thing while also being maybe the major achilles heel because those ABs often end with a walk or hard contact, as the numbers and eyes attest. If the slider can be working and in the mix, then I think it converts some of those ABs to Ks and others to weaker contact -- stuff that I think has flashed over these past few starts, again when you set aside the fact that in the end they are still objectively bad starts.
That's the reason why I'm nowhere near pulling the plug on the whole thing right now. Yes, given that we have to watch journeymen, retreads, and roster filler put up a 20% winning percentage in May or whatever, it's much easier to zero in on something that we want to see come together and emphasize how it's not working, but the positive signs are really starting to be there in a more noticeable way, which I don't think was the case at all earlier in the season. The good things seemed much more due to luck and randomness then, whereas in the past few starts I can seem glimpses of everything working at once.
Even the start that looks like it was his best on paper, 5.2 vs the Padres with just 2 H, 0 R, 2 BB, 5 K, isn't really sustainable. There's been a clear pattern in the recent starts that I want to see continue in his next start: in the Cincy start, he cruised through the first time through the order, but then got obliterated while Stallings was seemingly trying to get him to lean more on the offspeed pitches and particularly the slider- then the command of everything went bad and he got chased. In the next two starts he had the pitch mix working the way it needed to, but ran into some issues either in what would have been his last inning (vs. the Giants) or by poorly executing in big spots vs the Braves.
The Rockies are not total pushovers but on the road, they probably represent his biggest chance for everything to come together in one start of 5-6 innings. On paper he's had 4 decent starts, 5 awful ones, and 1 not great one. That's not sustainable but the totals and counting categories do not matter at all, so until he's having 4-5 awful ones in a row, I think you have to keep seeing if he can put all the tools together in one start and then build on it.
