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PHI −1.5
The best record in baseball — the Dodgers, 63-37 — walked into Philadelphia, and the schedule handed them the one Phillies starter whose whole game is built on the thing they're best at taking away: contact that dies in someone's glove.
Sánchez wears a 2.62 ERA, and it reads like an ace. Look underneath and the picture blurs. His xERA is 3.21. He's a sinker-first lefty — 42% of his pitches — and that sinker is getting hammered, a 56% hard-hit rate on the pitch he throws most. He survives on soft contact and swing-and-miss secondaries, which means the ball ends up in play a lot, and where it lands matters more for him than for almost anyone.
That's the problem tonight. The glove behind him is the worst in the National League — Philadelphia's −35 defensive runs saved dead last in the NL, a −16 in Outs Above Average. A pitcher who lives on balls in play, working in front of a defense that turns balls in play into runs, against the deepest lineup in the sport.
The whiff stuff is real — the changeup misses bats 45% of the time, the slider 44% — so the strikeouts will come. The question isn't the swing-and-miss. It's what happens on the pitches Los Angeles doesn't miss, and whether the leather behind him can catch up to them.
Corey Seager is hitting .182. Brandon Nimmo, now a Ranger, is at .263. Glance at the box scores and Texas's lineup looks stuck in mud. Glance at the batted-ball data and it looks like a coiled spring.
Seager's BABIP is .200 — one of the unluckiest marks in the league — while he's still barreling 15.4% of his contact with a .193 isolated power. His wOBA (.293) trails his xwOBA (.336) by more than 40 points. The average is a mirage; the quality of contact underneath it is loud. Nimmo tells the same story: a .331 wOBA against a .375 xwOBA, 45% hard-hit. Two bats whose results have badly lagged what they're actually doing to the baseball.
And they draw the pitcher least equipped to keep it that way. Erick Fedde's 4.15 ERA looks passable until you find the 5.22 FIP behind it and the 15% strikeout rate underneath that — a contact pitcher who doesn't miss bats, walking into a lineup that's been squaring the ball up better than the standings show. When luck and contact quality point the same direction, the box score usually catches up.
The counterweight is on the other side: deGrom's 3.49 ERA sits almost exactly on his 3.46 xERA — the rare number on tonight's board that isn't lying to anyone.
The Brewers' rookie carries a 1.62 ERA into tonight's start against the Mets, and the fastball still misses bats at a 41% clip. But the story has quietly turned a page. His xERA (2.07) has crept above his ERA, the four-seam and cutter are drawing more contact than they did in June, and league hitters have begun to time the triple-digit heat. The velocity is still the loudest number in any rotation. Whether it's still the most important one is the question the summer is starting to ask.
First pitch at Coors will land near 95°F — dry, thin, a mile above sea level, the exact conditions in which the ball travels like it does nowhere else. The market has noticed. The total opened at 11.5 and has climbed to 12.0, the highest number on the entire board, and it moved up.
Kyle Freeland takes the ball for Colorado carrying a 7.36 ERA. The underlying number is kinder — his FIP sits at 4.75, so the results overstate the damage — but the margin for error at altitude is the thinnest in the sport, and a 95-degree evening does not widen it.
Washington counters with lefty Andrew Alvarez. Both dugouts step into a run environment that needs no help and is getting some anyway.