Daily Notes (8/10): The Bullpen

Well with no games being played yesterday I can’t really give you a nice box score with the Braves winning can I? Unfortunately, I cannot. Yet another unfortunate thing is the Nationals winning baseball games, which they did again last night.

It’s kind of a low blow when the team you are chasing wins a game when you have a day off but alas, this is the way of things. The Nat’s took it to the always challenging Houston Astros and came away with a 5-0 win. We knew that the Nationals were going up against a cup cake schedule like the Braves but still, it is annoying.

As of this morning the Nationals have a 4.5 game lead on the Braves, and we are going to need to keep playing well against the Mets today if we want to stay in the hunt for a division title.

Is the bullpen good again?

The past couple of series has seen the bullpen perform admirably, and I wanted look a bit deeper into the numbers to see if that is true. Coming into the season the bullpen was supposed to be the one real strength of the Atlanta Braves and along with the starters, the relievers (aside from Craig Kimbrel) have been mediocre at best.

When I checked over at Fangraphs, I was extremely excited.

For the season the Braves bullpen has compiled an ERA/FIP/xFIP line of 3.08/3.35/.3.28 with a K/9 of 9.04 and a BB/9 of 2.84. The HR/9 rate of the pen has been at .86 with a BABIP of .308 and a WHIP of 1.24.

During the last 30 days (a total of 86.1 innings for the relievers) the bullpen has had a line of 1.67/2.26/2.93 with a 9.80 K/9 and 2.50 BB/9. The HR/9 number has gone way down and is at.31 while the BABIP has stayed close to the season average at .301. In this period the bullpen’s WHIP is also down at 1.10.

If we narrow it down even more to the past 14 days (37.2 innings) the numbers look even better. A .024/1.81/2.98 line, 9.32 K/9, 2.39 BB/9, 0.00 HR/9, .261 BABIP, and .90 WHIP. The BABIP likely has something to do with the ridiculously low slash numbers so don’t look too much into the past 14 day split.

The point is the bullpen has been doing well lately and it looks like we can again start to expect a shut down back end of the game. They couldn’t have put it all together at a better time.

Sorry for the shortness of today’s notes but like I mentioned and you probably already know, we didn’t have a game yesterday. I whiled away my time by reading a Storm of Swords, by George R. R. Martin. Yeah, it’s awesome.