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Weather
It rained hard in northern Indiana last night, which often means trouble for east coast games the next day. But I guess that’s not the case now. Maybe I’ve just complete invented that concept.
The is no orange on the board at all, only a slight chance of rain in the Mets/Braves game. So we’re good to go here.
Game Info
Sacramento
The Rays went from Coors to Seattle to Sacramento, so we’re going to see them near the top of the implied leaderdboard some more this week. They get Jacob Lopez to start. Lopez has come back from the minors pitching much better. Just two homers given up in his last four and 17 strikeouts in the last two.
Let’s look at the pitch mix data over these last four outings:
He has a 14% HR/FB over the last four, which is a bit lower than you’d expect in Sacramento. But with all of the whiffs and strikeouts he’s gotten (32.5% K%), he hasn’t been giving up many balls in play, and only 32% of the balls in play have been in the air.
The kicker here is that we don’t really think Lopez is suddenly a 30% K% guy. And the Rays are really, really tough to strike out. They have a 19.6% K% over their last 850 PAs (I picked a somewhat random date of July 14th). Over that time, they have the third-highest GB% in the league at 46%. The Athletics have the highest at 49%, which is funny. If all they did was hit a bunch of fly balls they’d score a bunch of runs in their home games. But the injuries have taken so much of their thump off the field.
So neither of these teams is currently built to take max advantage of the park. It’s not a comfortable thought of fading the Rays vs. Lopez and the Athletics vs. Peralta in the most hitter-friendly environments on the slate, but when we’re talking about chalk - we have to look for decent reasons to fade it, and I think we have some here.
What if Lopez is kinda good now? And what if the Rays just pound the ball into the ground again?
For Athletics stacks, you’re left with asking like who do you really want to play? It certainly helps that Peralta is a righty. They have Butler and Soderstrom who are capable hitters, but the rest of the lineup is poor.
You’ve got a .343 xwOBA on Soderstrom, and then everybody else is below average. And nobody hits a ton of fly balls.
So I’m making the case to fade TB/ATH in large-field tourneys.
Diamondbacks vs. Gabriel Hughes
Hughes has allowed just a .243 xwOBA in his brief time in the Majors. That’s very good. He gave up five runs in his start last week at home against the Rays, but he struck out seven and only gave up four hits and one dinger. The pitch mix:
So the fastball is unimpressive, but at least it has a 47% GB% and a 54% Strike%. There’s something weird about it. You don’t see high GB% on four-seamers often like this. He throws that pitch a ton (55%), but does a really good job mixing everything up behind it.
The 10.2% SwStr% tells you that he’s going to get a ton of strikeouts, but the 45% GB% and .243 xwOBA shows you that hitters are having trouble doing damage against him.
And now he’s away from Coors, which should help him. The D’Backs are on top with a 5.94 implication, but it’s another spot I’m not thrilled about. The kicker is that the Rockies bullpen is pretty bad an the Diamondbacks are pretty good.
But I repeat myself from above, if we’re stacking the chalk stack hoping to finish in the 1st percentile, we’d better like pretty much everything about the spot. And I could see the D’Backs getting stifled for a handful of innings before they get into the bullpen.