If only they didn’t swing. That should be the strategy against Francisco Liriano. Lope into the batter’s box, sling bat over shoulder and play statue. Stare at every ball that whizzes by. And chances are, if temptation doesn’t take over, if the almost pheromonal scent of Liriano’s pitches can’t cajole a swing, the exercise will end in a leisurely stroll to first base.

Because in a pitching world whose mission boils down to a two-word statement repeated ad nauseam – “throw strikes” – Liriano serves as the literal and figurative wild child. Nobody in baseball delivers fewer pitches in the strike zone than the Pittsburgh Pirates’ 31-year-old left-hander, and his mastery of effective wildness has grown into wild effectiveness.

View photos Francisco Liriano gets whiffs 31.5 percent of the time a batter offers at a pitch. (Getty) More

In the last 10 years, since baseball started tracking the strike zone through its PITCHf/x system, only one time has a pitcher thrown fewer baseballs in the zone than Liriano’s 36.8 percent this year: Liriano last season, at 35 percent. That’s exactly what it sounds like: nearly two out of every three pitches Liriano throws would be a ball were it not for the lure of his sinker, slider and changeup, the finest three-ingredient combo since peanut butter, jelly and bread.

“He’s got two of the most dynamic off-speed pitches in the game,” Pirates manager Clint Hurdle said. “And he has good enough stuff that he still gets swings even when it’s not close.”

And that, above everything, is the beauty of Francisco Liriano, whose career has run the gamut of wunderkind to Tommy John victim to early-career flameout to rebirth and where he is today, starting Friday for the NL wild card-leading Pirates against Colorado: someone reliable despite a relationship with the strike zone that is anything but.

“He has learned how to pitch,” Pirates pitching coach Ray Searage said. “Every once in a while, he’ll have a flashback where he thinks he can pitch 97. But he’s more disciplined now.”

[Yahoo Daily Fantasy Football: Enter our $1 Million Week 1 contest]

Whatever discipline Liriano may have, it’s the lack of discipline from modern hitters that has allowed him to thrive. As recently as 2004, according to data from Baseball Info Solutions, hitters swung at 16.6 percent of pitches outside the zone. This season, they hack at 31.2 percent. And while the contact rate has jumped significantly, too, the willingness of hitters to expand their zones doesn’t just give pitchers like Liriano the license to keep the ball outside of it. Hitters practically invite them to miss.

It helps, of course, when a pitcher brings the caliber of stuff Liriano hauls with him to the mound. Few in baseball can match it, so they opt for strikes. The average starter throws 45.4 percent of his pitches in the strike zone. Carlos Silva once spent more than 65 percent of the time there, and this season’s league leader, Phil Hughes, is at nearly 55 percent. They shared a common quality: Both got hit. A lot.

Nobody generates more misses on swings than Liriano, who gets whiffs 31.5 percent of the time a batter offers at a pitch. This is, no doubt, because so many of Liriano’s pitches are unhittable, a combination of movement, deception and a philosophy that says pounding the strike zone is totally overrated.

Perhaps it’s just coincidence three of the most analytically inclined teams – the Chicago Cubs, Houston Astros and Pirates – rank first, second and third in pitches outside the zone. Then again, the best pitching staff in baseball, St. Louis, ranks 22nd, and perhaps the scariest in the playoffs, the New York Mets, are 29th. As with Liriano, teams may just play to their pitchers’ strengths and weaknesses. Turning him into Greg Maddux never was a possibility, so the Pirates rehabbed him in other ways.

Story continues