I remember about this time last year spending nearly an entire day in a text-message war about the Giants signing of Barry Zito.  I’ll admit it, I was one of those guys who argued the  signing  wasn’t a bad deal despite the huge money. Sure  Zito had been in decline for several years, but I thought moving over to the NL and having the chance to play for the city in which he’s lived during his entire career would be a plus.

Now here we are in the second year of Zito’s deal and the Giants are looking like a team that could lose 90-100 games.  If they don’t, it’ll be because of their starting pitching, specifically their big three-and-a-half in Zito, Matt Cain and Tim Lincecum, and Noah (Lowry).

Baycityball has taken to PITCHf/x  to see if he can get to the bottom of what went wrong with Zito during 2007. His findings? For one, Zito struggled with his fastball, throwing 42.7% of them for balls and often up in the zone for home runs.

He also suggests that Zito has lost about 5 mph on his fastball over the years. The PITCHf/x data can’t tell us this precisely because it hasn’t been around that long, but scouting reports from when Zito was a rookie say he was throwing his fastball in the 90-92 range. He now tops out at around 86.

But the fastball isn’t Zito’s out pitch. That would be his big beautiful lefty loping curveball. Baycityball has some charts that show that the break on Zito’s curveball, which is as good as ever and might offer some hope for those four remaining years on his contract.

Zito was better during the second half of last year (4.11 ERA 65/31 K/BB) than the first (4.90 66/52 K/BB). I took a peak at Bill James’s projection, which has Zito down for a 12-12 record with a 3.74 ERA. That would good for his best ERA since 2003.