Blame the moniker. You can be steady, you can be constant, but when people call you a rock, they expect you to be immovable. And yet, we all know that no person is actually capable of that, even Luis Castillo.
Castillo began the year on an absolute tear, mowing down four teams with 26 strikeouts, to just four walks and a 3.4% barrel rate. Then he hit a bump. Beginning with his April 22 start against the Cardinals, his next five starts kept a good, if no longer elite, strikeout-to-walk ratio of 32:7, but the barrel rate spiked to 14.