The Mets Come To Town
Unless the Mets and Braves face one another in the NL playoffs, this three game series will complete the head-to-head season. The Braves have already locked up the head-to-head series. Yes, I realize that another faceoff after this weekend is almost vanishingly unlikely, but the Dumb and Dumber Probability Rule is always active, When the Braves left CitiField last week, they trailed the Mets by 11 games for the last Wild Card Spot and they now trail by 9. When you chances of making the playoffs are 2 in 1,000 (double what it was two weeks ago!) you have forfeited almost all of your margin for error. It is still highly unlikely that the Atlanta Braves will make the playoffs. However, the ability to make the Mets’ life hell has never been brighter.
Austin Riley: Farewell to 2025
Riley had season-ending surgery today. When I type “core surgery” into Google, the picture above is what I get. Looks grim. Get better, Austin. A month+ of Nacho Alvarez, Jr. should give us a pretty good idea of who he is. Luke Williams has an oblique injury, so Nacho is pretty much on his own. The Braves also picked up Cal Quantrill from the Marlins in an attempt to have every pitcher pitch at least one game for the Braves this year. The Braves have had 62 players enter games this year. Cal Quantrill and Jake Fraley will presumably make it an even binary 64. This breaks the Braves record. They used 60 players in both 2015 and 2016.
More on Bryce Elder
I confess a certain fascination with Bryce Elder. This is a little like confessing your admiration for a band that all of your friends have long ago told you is beneath contempt. But what do my friends know? They already showed poor judgment by becoming friends with me.
In any case, last week I did a fairly convoluted, data-intensive look at pitcher variance by looking at starter’s proclivities for giving up big innings. I didn’t hate the study, but it was a lot of work and didn’t really have any zippy conclusions. This week, I have a much simpler method to get at the same thing… standard deviation of starters’ Game Scores.
The original Game Score was a toy invented by Bill James to assess the performance of starting pitchers. Tom Tango improved it (though Bill James of course disputes that) and you can see the Bill James version on BRef while the Tom Tango version is on FanGraphs. I’m going to use the Tom Tango version for two reasons: (1) the Tom Tango version punishes homers heavily, and in today’s game homers ought to be punished heavily; and (2) I’ve had some email conversations with Tom Tango, but never with Bill James. (Though if Bill James ever did write me, the embarassing schoolgirl squeal I’d let out could be heard in Atlanta.)
The Tom Tango game score starts with 40 points, adds 2 for every out (with an additional point if it’s a strikeout) subtracts 2 for every hit or walk, subtracts 3 for every run allowed (whether earned or unearned) and subtracts another 6 for every homer allowed. An average start is a round 50. There have been a few starts over 100 and a smattering of starts beow 0. One of the worst starts of all time is Bryce Elder’s start against Philadelphia this year on June 27th. It was a really, really bad -18, which is the 4th-worst start this year by any MLB pitcher. On the other hand, his brilliant start aganst the Giants 20 days earlier had a Game Score of 85, tied for the 45th best start of the year. (Note — there have been over 3,800 starts, so that’s a 98th percentile start.)
And here is Elder’s game-by-game “pattern.”
Having done this for every starter all year, we can now quantify relative inconsistency through the standard deviation of game score, Bryce Elder is not the most inconsistent of all starters who have started 15 games or more — that would be Sonny Gray. But Elder is the 6th most inconsistent regular starter in MLB. His standard deviation of game score is 22.5. What this means is that about a third of his starts will be either higher than 65.3 (really good) or lower than 20.3 (really bad).
Of course, he’s also the 6th worst 15+game starter in average Game Score. I guess if you’re going to pitch that badly, inconsistency is actually a virtue!
I wonder if there’s a stat tracker out there that tallies up “total lost games by projected starters”. This 2025 version of the Braves would have to be way up high on that list, no?
Good point that you want Elder to be inconsistent. If he were consistently giving up 4-5 runs every 6 innings pitched, you would lose nearly all of his starts. Better for him to occasional whirl a gem.
But of a head scratcher, but maybe having 2 good catchers makes a lot of sense:
https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/46049231/sources-os-samuel-basallo-agree-8-year-67m-extension
8 years for 67 million is almost Ozzie-cheap, inflation-adjusted. And Rutschman is now out (probably for the year) with his second oblique and any team that can have two good catchers ought to leap at it. That’s why I’m not nearly as keen as some of you to dump Murphy.
I realize that “you” means “you all” but I am not one of the ones who wants to dump Murphy. I didn’t like the acquisition, but now we have him. If you trade him you have to then go get a DH and a second catcher that isn’t terrible (not the easiest thing btw). I’m not sure that anybody is looking to break the bank for Murphy in a trade. Sure if someone wanted to give us a MLB ready shortstop I would do it, but I doubt that.
Yes, being set at catcher is a good problem to have. I’m not “keen to dump” Murphy but the issue is that our organization generally is gossamer-thin at a lot of other positions, and, outside of free agency, dealing from a position of strength is just about our only way to shore up the org with players better than Cal Quantrill.
So I’m not raring to get rid of him per se, but I am pretty near desperate for the franchise to bring in more manpower, and while free agency can be a good (if expensive) way of getting star talent, it’s not a good way of getting warm bodies. Given the major league club’s attrition rate, we just need a lot more guys.
question:
Is anybody else on here as perplexed as I am on Hayden Harris still sitting in AAA? We have picked up scrap heap pitchers with little chance of success over and over. If all he makes is “a # 3 lefthanded reliever”, where else can we get one of those for next year at major league minimum? I understand his fastball speed is wretched, but he is still throwing it past AAA hitters.
Yeah, it seems like every post about him on Twitter also shares the bewilderment. I can’t imagine what they don’t like to offset how unhittable he’s been all year.
Welp
Placeholder recapped