CheeseIsGood's Million Dollar Musings: Friday, June 4th
Happy Friday! We’ve got a full juice bar tonight with all 30 teams in action on this 15-game slate. A few aces, some Coors Field, some Red Sox-Yankees, some Ohtani on the mound, really just about anything you could want. On these huge slates, it’s silly to try to delve into every game and every viable play, so I’m going to just narrow things down to a few of my favorites on both the pitching and hitting side.
Friday Night Pitching
The first thing I notice about this slate is that there are there are six pitchers who are clearly ahead of the field in strikeout ability and overall talent. After that, we’ve got a few more good pitchers in matchup that are tough enough to basically take them off the board. This top tier of six strikeout pitchers is as follows:
Max Scherzer at Philadelphia – 36.5% K, 5.4% BB, 2.34 ERA, 2.60 SIERA
Zack Wheeler vs Washington – 31.7% K, 5.5% BB, 2.52 ERA, 2.90 SIERA
Blake Snell vs NY Mets – 32.1% K, 14.2% BB, 5.55 ERA, 3.99 SIERA
Freddy Peralta vs Arizona – 37.2% K, 10.8% BB, 2.38 ERA, 3.05 SIERA
Shohei Ohtani vs Seattle – 32.5% K, 16.9% BB, 2.72 ERA, 4.35 SIERA
Julio Urias at Atlanta – 28.3% K, 3.4% BB, 3.61 ERA, 3.11 SIERA
Even knowing the skills of these pitchers, to look at the strikeouts and walks next to each other is jarring. Scherzer, Wheeler and Urias have elite control to go along with the strikeouts, with Ohtani and Snell way out bounds with their huge walk rates. Peralta is stuck in the middle with more acceptable control, but still not near the level of the other three. Where this slate gets tricky right away is that Snell and Ohtani have the best matchups here, while Scherzer, Wheeler and Urias are in tougher spots. So, skills or matchup?