Yamamoto and Sale Are Both Running Sub-2.65 ERAs Tonight. Neither One Is Winning With His Fastball.
Two of the best arms in the sport take the mound in Atlanta tonight, and the pitch that's supposed to be doing the heavy lifting for either one isn't.
Yamamoto owns a 2.61 ERA and Sale a 2.20 mark — both inside the handful of best in baseball — but their four-seamers are the pitch getting hurt. Yamamoto's fastball gets hit hard 48.1% of the time it's put in play, even though it's his second-most-used pitch at 26.8%; Sale's gets hit hard 45.2% of the time despite being his primary weapon, thrown 41.1% of the time. Both are surviving on everything else instead — Yamamoto's splitter (32.5% whiff rate) and Sale's slider (37.4% whiff, thrown almost 40% of the time) are doing the swing-and-miss work the fastball can't.
Los Angeles arrives at 80-53, just two games clear of Atlanta's 78-55 mark in a tighter NL race than the preseason expected. Truist Park runs a touch hitter-friendly for home runs (1.06 factor), and the total has still come down half a run since opening, from 7 to 6.5, even with two of the sport's most dominant arms on the mound — the market isn't betting on a shootout, fastball command questions or not. When the two best pitches in the building both belong to a slider and a splitter, the fastball becomes the storyline nobody's pricing.