BRADENTON, Fla. -- Chad Kuhl is one of the more compelling storylines in Pirates camp this spring. After missing 2019 recovering from Tommy John surgery, it's unknown if he will get a chance to start again or if he will transition to the bullpen. Obviously he could provide more value as a starter if he is cleared for the role, but after an up and down beginning to his major-league career, one could argue he would be better off coming out of the bullpen, regardless of what his bill of health says.
Kuhl was fine in his first three years in the majors, recording a 4.37 ERA, 4.30 FIP, 95 ERA+ and a 2.3 WAR over 61 starts. All told, that comes out to being a slightly below league average starter, so the fourth or fifth guy in the rotation. There's nothing wrong with that, but with four spots seemingly taken by Chris Archer, Joe Musgrove, Trevor Williams and Mitch Keller, and a couple guys in the mix for the fifth spot already, like Steven Brault and Derek Holland, it does raise the question if he can leapfrog enough people to get a rotation job. He has the stuff, but it hasn't all come together.
And then there is the lefty problem.
Kuhl has a pretty bad track record against lefties. Those southpaws have recorded a career .370 wOBA against him, the sixth worst among starting pitchers who have faced at least 500 lefty batters since 2016. Of the five ahead of him, three are effectively out of baseball (Ubaldo Jimenez, Doug Fister and Chris Tillman). It's not good company to keep.
I also wrote a Mound Visit about Kuhl back in October. In that piece, I wrote about how he has a rare combination of elite velocity and breaking ball spin, something Gerrit Cole and Charlie Morton also had, but Neal Huntington/Clint Hurdle/Ray Searage could not tap into. That doesn't mean Kuhl will break out and become a Cy Young contender like those two, but it does suggest that he can be more than a back of the rotation starter. He has not pitched as well as the sum of his parts would suggest he could.
I'm going to hit similar beats today that I did in that first Kuhl Mound Visit, but when talking to him at Pirate City, working on a piece about his recovery, he started to bring up those same beats. About how he started to change his pitch mix during his final starts preceding the injury. About how he recognized he had great spin but wasn't using it enough. And most importantly, how he could finally retire those darn lefties.
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