As this is written, there’s no official news on Dinelson Lamet’s status for the NLDS, though the rumor is he’ll be absent from the roster. Mike Clevinger, on the other hand, is rumored to be starting Game 1 today after two pain-free flat grounds and a pain-free bullpen.
These developments are big news for the Padres. But how important are they?
It’s difficult to say. The Padres showed a willingness in the Wild Card Series to lean heavily upon their bullpen, something not unique among postseason teams, but nonetheless difficult to forecast, especially without foreknowledge of how many games the series will go.
When I’m giving myself a read of these series, I use FanGraphs’ Depth Charts projections. Those, which have Clevinger and Lamet throwing seven and ten percent of the Padres’ starting pitching innings, respectively, give the Padres’ starting pitching as a whole a 4.18 FIP in their forecast. Clevinger’s projection is a 3.66 FIP. Lamet’s is 3.37. Clevinger’s mark is lower than that from his regular season (4.15), but it’s higher than his career FIP (3.53). Lamet’s, conversely, is higher than that from his regular season (2.48) but lower than that from his career (3.72).
That’s a lot of numbers, but if you’re looking to assign percent likelihoods to things, it takes numbers. If you make the (big) assumption that starting pitching will account for about 5.8 innings per game, Clevinger starting tonight raises the Padres’ probability of defeating Walker Buehler and the Dodgers from 39.0% to 42.6% (in my calculation—FanGraphs’ uses their data a bit differently). This in turn raises the Padres’ probability of winning the series from 35.2% to 36.5%. That’s it.
On one side of this, it’s a bit surprising to see starting pitching supposedly matter so little, and it highlights a shortcoming of these types of projections, which is that fatigue is not considered. On the other side, though, this is a good reminder of two things:
1. Starting pitching is important, but we may generally overstate that importance.
2. Mike Clevinger is not Max Scherzer.
Will Clevinger actually take the mound tonight? That remains to be seen. Will he dazzle? Possibly. Will he fizzle? Possibly. His impact, in all likelihood, will be greater than two percentage points. But the expected average of what that impact will be is only about that much: less than two percentage points.
On the other side of the National League, the Braves are sizable favorites to beat the Marlins. We’ll see, but Max Fried’s projected to be the best starter, by FIP, of any remaining playoff pitcher not named Gerrit Cole or Tyler Glasnow. In other words, the Braves are starting off about as well as they could ask to, even if the back end of their rotation could make things dicey if Fried doesn’t win this afternoon.
