It's time that we had a chat about John Lackey who went 6.0 IP, 4 ER, 8 Hits, 1 BBs, 4 Ks last night against the Red Sox and now holds a poor 5.10 ERA and 1.33 WHIP. Thing is, his K/9 and BB/9 are both solid - 9.00 and 2.70 - and his 3.56 xFIP seems very reasonable given a 23.3% HR/FB and horrible 66.2% LOB rate. At the same time, his hard contact is soaring at 36.3% with just 14.3% soft as batters are pulling him nearly 10 points more than last year at 47.3% - another sign that batters are making much better contact and deserve the HR/FB spike. It comes down to his Fastball command, which has found the center of the plate a lot more than it should and has already earned a -5.0 pVal for the season. Yikes. All in all, I think this is a rough stretch for Lackey that he'll sort out and bring those scary numbers down as he tweaks his heater. If someone is selling for cheap, I'm buying.
Let’s see how every other SP did yesterday:
Drop Davies for Folty?
Kinda hard hearing your take on Nova, but you may be right in the long wrong. It’s just he passes the eye test for me everytime I watch him. Such great control.
long run** haha
Triggs or Urias?
Urias