Healthy Gunkel carving up PCL
The void left by Elieser Hernandez and Zac Gallen in the New Orleans Baby Cakes rotation once each cemented themselves in MLB left a gap almost too big to fill. But Joe Gunkel, slated to take the mound tonight, has done his part.Gunkel, who missed 55 days from April 27
The void left by Elieser Hernandez and Zac Gallen in the New Orleans Baby Cakes rotation once each cemented themselves in MLB left a gap almost too big to fill. But Joe Gunkel, slated to take the mound tonight, has done his part.
Gunkel, who missed 55 days from April 27 through June 9 with an injury, has proven to not only be a critical piece of the 'Cakes' rotation as they cling to slim playoff hopes, but one of the more dominant starters in the hitter-friendly Pacific Coast League.
Since returning to the rotation on June 21, Gunkel has a 3.03 ERA in eight games, seven starts. Over that stretch, it trails only Round Rock's Brandon Bielak among pitchers with at least six starts, who has thrown to a 2.31 mark. In his last start, he went only five innings, but sat down eight Nashville hitters by strikeout and allowed only one run.
"I have all the confidence in the world in him," manager Keith Johnson said. "He does a really good job of attacking the strike zone and attacking hitters. I'm very impressed with Gunk. I'm a big fan of his."
Gunkel enters tonight's game with a respectable 3.86 ERA on the season, but the number is deceptively high.
The lanky, 6-foot 5-inch righty has allowed 20 earned runs this season, but more than half of them have come in just two of his 13 games: he allowed the Omaha Storm Chasers to score six earned runs off him on April 14, his last game before going on the injured list, and five to Round Rock in a performance that was a little bad luck away from being another dominant outing. Gunkel allowed a pair of home runs for three runs, which would have been enough to secure a New Orleans win. A trio of seeing-eye singles ultimately resulted in two more runs.
Two little flares to left field and a soft grounder up the middle turned Gunkel's solid outing to a sour one.If you remove those two outlier starts from his statline, his ERA on the season drops to 2.08, taking jaws with it. They are the only two games this season he's allowed more than two runs. The 27-year-old, were it not for an unfortunate injury and a pair of mulligan starts, could have been No. 2 in the league's ERA race, behind Gallen's 1.77.
The same weak contact that burned him against Round Rock has led to his success. It may not have worked for him in that outing, but has taken him to the top in all of his others.Gunkel has only thrown a strikeout per inning in three of his starts, and has had to find other ways to get hitters out. He turned to his fastball.
It's not like he's just throwing it in the zone," Johnson said. "He can hit those corners. He can get that backdoor sinker to right-handed hitters, and the same thing, get it outside so left-handed hitters get soft contact on it. It's one pitch. It's a fastball. But it's two pitches if you can throw it to both sides of the plate."
Gallen and Hernandez left New Orleans with a glaring hole at the top of its rotation. The duo won three of the first five PCL Pitcher of the Week awards handed out this season. On their backs, and that of Hector Noesi's strong first half, the Baby Cakes have led the way in the league in starters ERA for nearly the entirety of the season. In their wake, the team has stumbled but never fallen. They've had to stretch out Mike Kickham for regular starts every five days, and even gave Brian Moran his first career start in eight professional seasons.
The team has trod water at the top. But since Gunkel has stretched out and returned to "pitching shape," as Johnson puts it, it has found some stability and an arm they can be confident in every fifth day.
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