Good evening.

During his superb career as a MLB pitching coach, Dave Duncan has specialized in turnaround projects. The list is long, with too many to mention. But those who have been revived or otherwise reinvented by Duncan include Dave Stewart, Dennis Eckersley, Chris Carpenter, Bob Welch, Darryl Kile, Jeff Suppan, Todd Stottlemyre, Kent Bottenfield, Woody Williams, Andy Benes, Garrett Stephenson and (for two seasons, anyway) Jason Marquis.

But Todd Wellemeyer might be one of Duncan’s most impressive restoration pieces. Other baseball people saw Wellemeyer as a hard-throwing but untamed RH who couldn’t be developed, couldn’t be saved. Wellemeyer broke into the majors in 2003 with the Cubs, and bounced to the Marlins and Royals. When the Cardinals claimed him on waivers from KC on May 15, 2007, Wellemeyer had a big-league record of 6-8 with a 5.65 ERA. And he’d never started a major-league game.

Of course, Duncan looked past those gruesome, hopeless statistics. And in Wellemeyer he inexplicably saw a perfectly fine candidate to do a solid job in a major-league rotation.

In this pitcher, Duncan stepped in with a Get Wellemeyer Soon card for the Cardinal rotation.

(OK, sorry, that last line was really corny; it’s been a long day).

Wellemeyer has been better than solid, actually.

That’s why I call him Hellemeyer — he’s frequently been hell on big-league hitters since hooking up with Dunc.

Since becoming a Cardinals starting pitcher, Wellemeyer in 20 starts is 7-2 with a 3.45 ERA.

Wednesday night at Busch, Hellemeyer iced the torrid Pirates with seven innings of two-hit, one-run, 5k pitching.

Let’s put that into context for a moment.

That 3.45 ERA (minimum 20 starts over the last two seasons) matches Boston’s Josh Beckett and Tampa’s Scott Kazmir. The 3.45 ERA is superior to the ERA posted over that time by Toronto’s A.J. Burnett (3.96), Cleveland’s C.C. Sabathia (3.74), Toronto’s Roy Halladay (3.62), Houston’s Roy Oswalt (3.58), ChicagoCub Carlos Zambrano (3.52), New York Yankee Chien-Ming Wang (3.52), Milwaukee’s Ben Sheets (3.50) and a fellow named Adam Wainwright (3.53).

Hellemeyer also has one of the 10 best strikeout rates in the NL so far this season, fanning roughly 20 percent of the batters who step in against him.

Does Hellemeyer throw too many pitches? Yeah. He averaged 17.2 pitches per inning last season, and has only shaved one pitch off that average (16.2) this year. But that’s not awful, or anything. Just a bit on the laborious side. (I wonder how many 3-2 counts Hellemeyer has had this season. If someone knows that, please post it). And Hellemeyer clearly benefits from that very good Cardinals defense; before Wednesday’s start his FIP (fielding-independent ERA) was 4.04.

And we know that Hellemeyer has prospered in part due to a gush of offense; his run support average is 6.04 . That explains a lot as to why the Cardinals are 14-6 when Hellemeyer starts a game.

They are also 14-6 when Hellemeyer starts a game because he’s been pretty damned good.

When the Cardinals collected Hellemeyer from the rockpile last May — from the Royals, no less — did you have any notion that a year later he’d be an above-average starter who is (at least in terms of broad-brush ERA) outperforming some of the biggest names and biggest paychecks in MLB?

There’s nothing magical here. No new pitches, no gimmicks. Duncan has preached to Hellemeyer about the need to fine-tune his pitching approach. How to set up hitters. How to have a plan. How to concentrate and really sharpen the mind when he needs to make a good pitch to dismiss a threat. (Opponents are batting .200 against him with runners in scoring position this season). And just by putting some thought and actual strategy behind those 93 mph fastballs, Wellemeyer is Hellemeyer.

Hellemeyer must prove he can maintain this, of course.

Twenty starts do not make him Dave Stewart.

But up to this point, Duncan has another scrapheap-to-success story for his scrapbook.

-B