More photos » Al Behrman - AP

9 months ago: Cincinnati Reds' Paul Janish pitches the ninth inning of a baseball game against the Milwaukee Brewers, Wednesday, May 6, 2009, in Cincinnati. Janish gave up five runs in the inning as Milwaukee won the game 15-3. (AP Photo/Al Behrman)

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Yesterday, in a nail-biter against the Phillies, Red's shortstop Paul Janish came into pitch one inning of relief.  He pitched, um... well let's just say okay, giving up 4 hits, 2 walks and 6 runs.  He also allowed a grand slam to Jayson Werth.  It was actually the second time he had pitched in the majors, although his first yielded similar results.  In 2 career innings, his ERA is now a nifty 49.5 and his FIP is 16.20. 

Being a Pitchfx junkie, I wanted to take a closer look at his performance as a pitcher so far.  Actually, I found some pretty interesting results.

First let's take a look at Janish's stuff.  So far in his 2 career innings, he has thrown a total of 64 pitches, including 50 fastballs and 14 changeups.  Here is how they looked in flighpath form:

The first thing you'll notice is that he threw pretty damn hard... at least for a guy who's not actually a pitcher.  As you can see, his average fastball was 89.3 MPH, and he topped out at over 91 MPH a couple of times.  That's faster than a lot of actual pitchers in the majors right now. 

Secondly, and I am by no means an expert on this, he appeared to throw a pretty good changeup.  It has a lot of horizontal movement in comparison to the the fastball, and a good ammount of drop to it as well.  It also had a solid speed differential with the fastball, nearly 10 MPH.

Now let's check out his location by pitch type:

Obviously it's hard to judge him based off of those 2 innings, especially considering that they were in blowouts; however, there are a couple pretty obvious observations to be made here:

1) He threw a lot of strikes.  For those counting dots, out of the 64 pitches thrown, 34 were in my little hand drawn box.  Assuming that box is fairly accurate, that's about 57% of his pitches that were in the strike zone.  For reference, league average is around 49% and the league leaders are typically around 60%. 

2) He threw a *lot* of pitches up in the strike zone.

Of course it's nearly impossible to make any conclusions given the sample size, and the fact that he was put in strike throwing situations both times; however, it does appear that he was able to control both of his pitches somewhat well.  

Now let's see what hitters actually did with those pitches:

He got pounded on the pitches that he elevated, but when he was able to keep the ball down, batters didn't do much with it  That at least makes it appear that his stuff was hard to handle when he did locate it well.  The fact that he only got 2 swinging strikes isn't encouraging, but judging by his location chart, I don't think that he was trying to miss to many bats.  

This is fun to look at, but it made me think a little too.  Janish managed just a .257/.341/.383 slash line in his time in the minors.  In a little under 200 at bats in the majors, he is hitting at a .230/.296/.284 clip.  He is 27, and is currently behind Jerry Hairston and the soon to return Alex Gonzalez on the depth chart.  Suffice to say, his future as a major league short stop looks bleak. 

Why not try and convert him to a pitcher?  In two appearances this year, he has shown major league stuff and the ability to throw strikes.  He's already hitting 91 with the fastball; with a little bit a training as a pitcher, he could probably throw even harder.  I'm not sure about his endurance, but if he added another pitch he could have a respectable repotraire for a starter.  

A position player to pitcher conversion this late in a player's career is rarely done, and as far as I know there haven't been any notable guys who have been successful in it; however, given some of the circumstances surrounding Janish, it doesn't seem outlandish thought.