Editor’s Note: Over a sample size of 455 completed bets (this doesn’t include outstanding futures picks), Joe’s picks published here and back at All Things NIT, our former site, have an average return on investment of 6% when weighted by confidence (1 for low, 2 for medium, 3 for high). This, compared to other picks consistently published online, is pretty good. It would be a decent annual ROI for an investor. But instead it’s coming, on average, on each of these picks.
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Two picks today.
As always:
- Lines come from the Vegas Consensus at the time this is written, or the best approximation I can find of it online.
- Data from FanGraphs, Baseball Reference, Baseball Savant, Spotrac, and ESPN is often used and/or cited.
- The blurbs often aren’t justifications of the picks. Often, they’re instead just notes about something or someone related to the pick. Something that interests me. You are not required to read these. I don’t explain the picks because in general, the rationale behind each pick is the same, so it would be boring to say over and over again that the numbers I use project a good return on investment and I see no red flags significant enough to make me hold off.
Cleveland @ New York (NL)
At first glance, it’s unclear how Marcus Stroman does it. He’s only 5’8”. His fastball rarely tops 93 mph. His strikeout rate and walk rate are each in the league’s poorer half.
Yet Stroman is a top-30 starter pretty much any way you slice it. He’s 14th among qualified starters in ERA. He’s 22nd in FIP. He’s on pace to top 180 innings, which only 31 pitchers did last year.
So how does it happen?
Stroman’s xBA is merely average—better than that of 52% of what Baseball Savant considers “qualified.” But his xSLG is better than 74% of that sample. While his opponents’ .255 average puts him in the lower half of qualified starters, he’s given up the fifth-fewest home runs in that group of 68, and his groundball rate is second only to Dakota Hudson in the sample.
Groundball pitching has gone out of style as of late with baseball’s rise in strikeouts. But Stroman and pitchers like Mike Soroka and Hyun-Jin Ryu are keeping it around.
Pick: New York (NL) to win (-145). Low confidence.
Miami @ Atlanta
The Braves’ pitching staff isn’t great, ranking 21st in fWAR as a whole. And while some of this will be mitigated in the playoffs because they’ll be able to give a greater share of starts to 21-year-old wonder Mike Soroka, the numbers get more troubling when looking at the bullpen, which ranks 28th in fWAR, and has actually been nearly a full win worse than a hypothetical relief corps consisting strictly of replacement-level pitchers.
Atlanta recognized this weakness at the trade deadline, adding Mark Melancon, Shane Greene, and Chris Martin. And while the trio’s combined 7.33 ERA since entering the NL East has been unsightly, they’ve likely been unlucky: their combined FIP is just 2.74, and the sample size is merely 23.1 innings.
Between these three, Luke Jackson, Sean Newcomb, and Jacob Webb, the Braves should have a serviceable bullpen in October, even if not a deep one. But the results aren’t there yet, and the pressure’s mounting, with fingers being pointed (as they so often are when a bullpen struggles) at manager Brian Snitker. The Braves have the pieces. They need to combine them into a functional whole. They have a little more than a month to do that.
Pick: Miami +1.5 (-115). Low confidence.
