He did slam the door shut last night. I also want to shout out Jesse Chavez who is the ageless wonder in a Braves uniform. The dude has a 1.21 ERA this year even though he can barely get it to 90mph. Something in the water in Atlanta helps him to pitch for us and only us...
Gotta give credit where it's due. He did a good job
There you go. Iglesias shuts the door as well. And Schwellenbach can avoid exile for another week.
How sweep it is!
Duvall is having some career level struggles. Over at baseball-reference.com for stats, he is hitting at the lowest BABip of his career at only .204, yet his HardH% is the 4th highest of his career. Most of his other numbers are similar to the remainder of his career. Realistically, he is hitting the ball hard and having terrible luck for base hits. The question is, how long can the analytics keep him in the lineup vs. the eyeball test going wow, look at that .173 BA.
Yep. I checked the Braves team BABIP a week or so ago prior to their current surge. At that time it was middle of the road, but their hard hit rate was top 3.
I'm not sure if I'm remembering correctly, but it seems like I heard that MLB went back towards a more "dead" baseball this year. Again, I could just be going crazy, but I feel like I've heard that. Not that the ball is the sole reason for our massive unlucky streak this year, but it could be a contributing factor possibly. Another possibility is that after last year's historic offense, we just became too homerun happy and haven't focused on driving people in and passing the baton to the next guy. Either way, we seem to be finding our groove just a little bit and are very very slowly creeping back on the Phillies.
I’m not sure either. Total HRs for the NL this season are about 5% off last season’s pace, which, at roughly 3000 HRs,,would be about 150 for the league on the season. While probably a statistically significant variation, for 15 teams, that’s about 10 per team. Hardly enough to cause what has happened to the Braves thus far. Not sure that supports a dead ball theory.
I do really like Schwellenbach at the 5th spot. There are going to be ups and downs with him but his stuff is legit.
Schwellenbach earned a reprieve last week. Prior to that he was destined to be sent back to Texas.
Yeah, finding a solid 5th seems to be the plague this year. Good thing is you only need 3 in the playoffs and someone to get you through the order once as a 4th. Fried, Sale, and Lopez are a solid 3 with Morton getting us a 4th. He's too umpire dependent for me to trust him as part of the 3, but he can be lights out in the playoffs so who knows.
