CheeseIsGood's Million Dollar Musings: Friday, July 9th
Happy Friday! We’ve got a big 14-game slate that looks to be slanted towards the hitting side. After the wacky shootout in San Diego last night, I suppose any game can slant towards the hitting side. Half the games open with a total above nine runs, including a couple of obvious top spots right out of the gate in Baltimore and Boston. My initial instinct is that I will end up with a narrow pitching pool while spreading out much farther on the hitting side, but let’s dig in and see what we find.
H3. Friday Night Pitching
We don’t really have any top shelf aces tonight, but I see a top three or four who all have favorable matchups. Snell may or may not get the start tonight, but as we’ll see, he’s getting cut anyway:
Blake Snell vs Rockies – 29.2% K, 13.8% BB, 4.99 ERA, 4.31 SIERA
Taijuan Walker vs Pirates – 25.9% K, 8% BB, 2.44 ERA, 3.95 SIERA
Charlie Morton at Marlins – 27.6% K, 8% BB, 3.91 ERA, 3.62 SIERA
Kenta Maeda vs Tigers – 23% K, 7.6% BB, 5.03 ERA, 4.18 SIERA
There are weather concerns again tonight in New York, but at some point, they are going to have to play some of these games, and for now, I’m assuming Taijuan Walker is in play tonight.
As I’ve been doing recently, I want to look at more recent data to see if there have been any significant changes in any of these skills. And yikes, we have one big one:
Blake Snell last month (4 starts) – 16.7% K, 15.4% BB, 5.51 ERA, 5.88 SIERA
On top of this, it’s not even clear that Snell will make the start tonight, or that he won’t be limited if he does. I’m crossing him off the list.
