The professor started out the season with giving up a homerun to Thome and it didn't get any better from that point. After 5 games his ERA stood at a woppin' 18.90 (Wang territory). Since then he has not allowed a run and has lowered his ERA to 4.40. I looked around his pitch charts and nothing stood out until looked at a stat at Brooks Baseball called nibbleness
Nibbleness is the arithmetic mean of the distance of each pitch, in inches, from the edge of a normalized strikezone. Lower indicates "more Nibbley".
Here are Farn's fastball nibble scores for the first 5 games and his last 5 games.
| Date | Number of Fastballs | Nibbleness |
| 04/07/09 | 17 | 6.80 |
| 04/10/09 | 4 | 8.73 |
| 04/13/09 | 7 | 6.02 |
| 04/15/09 | 5 | 6.32 |
| 04/19/09 | 1 | 1.88 |
| Total | 34 | 6.65 |
| 05/08/09 | 11 | 4.48 |
| 05/12/09 | 6 | 7.02 |
| 05/14/09 | 4 | 3.20 |
| 05/15/09 | 10 | 4.83 |
| 05/19/09 | 4 | 1.95 |
| Total | 35 | 4.58 |
It seems the Professor has become the student and learned to keep his straight flying fastball out of the heart of the plate by ~2. Let's just hope he doesn't revert back to his old ways.
Update: I had Harry over at Beyond the Boxscore run the nibble rates for the past 2 years is a chart of the information. The numbers are different from the ones above because Harry could figure out the eact equation to get a "normalized strikezone"
| Year | Nibbleness Rating |
| 2007 | 5.00 |
| 2008 | 5.09 |
| 2009 First 5 Games | 5.96 |
| 2009 Rest of Season | 5.21 |
Looks like his first few starts of 2009 were out of his recent norm.
