By the end of the year, if the players are exceedingly good at the challenges…. That moves to just adopt it universally. If they are exceedingly bad at the challenges… the players will push to take it out of their hands and just make it universal. I do like that they’ll have a boat-load of data with this experimental “game” of making challenging a skill to see which direction they should move towards.
The Spaghetti was hot enough again. First WIN @Wrigley since 2013 when JD Martinez homered to help victory.
So, yeah, this team isn’t very good, but Spaghetti is going to be an all star! That’s something at least…
I'm thrilled Arrighetti keeps having great starts... but his walk rate is hard to overlook right now. If you keep walking people the bill eventually comes due.
It's nice to have some good fortune for a change. The rest of the pitching staff has done their fair share to rack up that bill by making sure every walk turns into a run.
But you can't look at the walk rate in isolation. He also doesn't give up many hits - so if you're walking people but not giving up hits, maybe the walks don't come due. It's all unlikely to sustain, but we don't know whether the hit rate will go up or the walk rate will go down. I haven't seen much of his pitching but it seems like it might just be that he's going to keep trying to make his pitches, and he's OK walking people but not giving up easy pitches to hit. And then when he needs to get the outs, so far, he's shown very capable. One of the problems with stats like xFIP is that it assumes everyone is a robot. There are pitchers that simply can't make big pitches when they need, and there are pitchers that are the opposite. Those pitchers are going to have totally different results than their xFIP or whatnot.
Wasn't it AJ Burnett that threw a new hitter with an ungodly amount of walks? Not saying Spencer has the stuff he had, but pitchers like this can have long term relative success as a starter, barring health (Burnett was also a much bigger body-type... ended up throwing 2700+ innings... and his only major award was being the lone pittsburgh representative in the all-star game at age 38, his final season).
Of course, "Pitchers know how to pitch and stats are for nerds". It's like a time warp to the Jarred Cosart discussions. Fly balls eventually become occasional home runs and BABIP will self correct to a certain threshold, even if you are an absolute beast of squishy contact. Even with his unsustainably low HR totals, FIP is the most optimistic number for Arrighetti, and it's 3.73. His BB% is currently 14.3, no qualified starter has had a number that high in a long time. That's not to say his results mean nothing, maybe this is just a stepping stone period towards a true star elevation, there is something to be said for maintaining composure and making pitches. However his current glittering numbers are a mirage.
