When it comes to early season standings, my personal advice is to not take them too seriously until Memorial Day at the earliest. That would give baseball enough time to really start getting the kind of sample size they can rely on going forward. That being said, the holidays are just around the corner so it wouldn’t hurt to take a little peek at what’s going on in the standings, yeah I don’t want to over invest but these games have There’s still something in it.
What is especially eye-catching is that they are at the bottom of the AL West Division, and there are three surprises in store. The first is that the Houston Astros are currently underwater, only to stagger out to start the season. For a team as talented and experienced as the Astros, it’s clearly not over yet, but they’ll need to work hard to get back to what they’re used to.
Second, the team currently in last place is the Los Angeles Angels. This isn’t particularly shocking, as the Angels have struggled with two of the best baseball players in the world, one of whom currently plays for the Dodgers, and the other who had surgery a week ago. It’s not particularly shocking since I just received it. Ron Washington has a huge task to turn the ship around, and the journey in that regard has only just begun.
The last thing that is quite shocking is that Oakland Athletics You’re not hopelessly adrift at the bottom! Sure, they’re not that far off than the Angels and are only one bad start away from reaching White Sox territory, but considering how dire things looked for the Athletics entering this season What’s actually impressive is that we’ve already won this much so far. One of the main reasons behind this level of success is that Oakland’s bullpen is elite at the moment.
The Athletics Bullpen currently ranks as one of the top relief corps in all of baseball, according to fWAR. In terms of fWAR the bullpen crew has compiled so far, the team as a whole has an fWAR of 2.1, second only to the Cleveland Guardians. Their career ERA is 95 (3.49 ERA as of the start of the game on May 16th), which is ranked around the middle in baseball, but their FIP-84 (FIP is 3.23) is third in all of baseball. Excellent. This is almost a night and day difference from Oakland’s bullpen being basically terrible for most of 2023.
Aside from the fact that relief pitcher performance as a whole is incredibly volatile and can vary from season to season, the Athletics team’s early bullpen success can be explained in two ways. The first is that they actually did a solid job of picking up complementary pieces to fill out the bullpen, and everyone came together to put together something that is far greater than the sum of its parts thus far. is. TJ McFarland, Austin Adams, Mitch Spence, and Michael Kelly are all new to the Athletics this season, and each has provided positive contributions outside of the pen so far. They mesh well with the young talent the Athletics already have, and while things may have been tough as of late, there’s still hope they can get back on track someday.
It also helps that one of the talented young pitchers emerging within the Athletics organization happens to be the best closer in baseball, which is why there’s so much talk about Oakland’s bullpen in the first place. Like the Kool-Aid Man breaking through every wall, Mason Miller virtually burst onto the major league stage. Miller is the best reliever ever in baseball, but he’s not even close. His ERA is an incredible 27 (0.98 ERA) and FIP is -8 (FIP -0.22). Yes, you read that correctly. His FIP is Minus 8. If you look at his Baseball Savant page, you might be fooled into thinking you’re watching a Kansas City Chiefs home game. Because if you go there, you can see the bright red sea.
baseball savant.mlb.com
If you’re not impressed by these fancy statistics, let’s break it down in the simplest terms possible. He has pitched 13.1 innings since April 9, allowing one hit and two walks since then. Anthony Volpe is currently the only player to hit a base hit against Miller since the 9th of last month, so he has bragging rights.he essentially was not hit For a while now.
Mason Miller’s repertoire is relatively simple. When you’re a left-handed batter and he’s healthy, all you see is a fastball, a slider, and maybe a changeup.The problem for the hitter is that his four-seamer average 161 mph — For comparison, the Cardinals’ Ryan Helsley is currently second in terms of average velocity of his four-seamer, and he is *only* throwing 99.4 mph. Miller reached 104 points on the radar gun at times this season, but it’s difficult for anyone to maintain that rate. As a result, his four-seamer batting average is only .161 (actually higher than the expected batting average of .112), and his whiff rate is 48%, and he’s hit a fair share of batters with it. have been acquired. Pitch alone.
The real concern for opposing hitters is that Miller’s four-seamer probably isn’t even his best pitch. That honor goes to his slide, which was an even lower batting average of .065, an astonishingly low xBA of .050, and a whiff rate of 48 percent. His slider flies at 87 miles per hour, and its movement can fool even the most talented hitters in the big leagues. This video from Pitching Ninja perfectly demonstrates how difficult it is to deal with Miller’s pitches. Hitters will have to be prepared to keep up with 162 mph or adjust themselves in some way to deal with an 88 mph slider. Severe break. Good luck dealing with any of them!
Simply put, Mason Miller is taking the baseball world by storm, which is surprising and incredibly electrifying considering he’s doing it as a reliever. That being said, the reality of modern baseball always looms.He has already missed most of the 2023 season due to injury And the main reason he’s in the bullpen is because the Athletics don’t want a guy that throws 90-100 pitches that hard every five days.Also, for these reasons teeth For the A we are talking about, There are already trade rumors Circle around the rookie flamethrower. For most other organizations, trading a rookie at this level would be out of the question, but since we’re talking about a franchise owned by John Fisher, it’s unlikely that the front office would make this rumor public. The rumors will remain unless they are crushed. themselves.
Still, Mason Miller and the rest of Oakland’s bullpen are off to a very solid start to the season, and Miller himself has been really great in his own right. If you think there’s no reason to pay attention to what the A’s do this year, think again. If he blinked, the ball would leave Miller’s hands and hit the catcher’s mitt.
