Atlanta Braves: Mike Soroka likely to just miss on multiple awards

The Pro-Soroka Story

Detractors on Soroka’s candidacy will point to stats such as Wins Above Replacement or Fielding Independent Pitching (which I believe are of dubious use for pitchers) or even strikeouts to suggest that Soroka isn’t that good.

The pitcher’s job always has been (and always will be) run prevention.  ERA – first and foremost.

Why?  Simply because:

• A full, qualified baseball season is certainly enough of a sample size; and
• There’s more than one way to skin a cat/more than one way to get hitters out.

Strikeouts are to pitchers as homers are to hitters:  excellent performance stats, but hardly the only thing to look for in an all-around player.

Additionally, the Cy Young award is supposed to be a season-long evaluation of performance, and yet it appears the the ‘hot hand’ is going to be the winner this year.  The writers will no doubt be eager to re-vote for the same pitcher who won last season unless there’s a compelling reason to do something different.

True:  Soroka has been a bit less of himself during the Summer than he was when he started the year… but he’s also still thrown brilliantly overall:  even witness the recent 6 inning, 1 hit shutdown of the Nationals in a game that they really needed to win.

In fact, Soroka has 15 starts this season in which he’s yielded either 0 or 1 earned run.  In all of those games, the actual runs given up never exceeded 2.

deGrom actually has 16 of these games (he has 3 more starts, too) and he has two starts giving up 4 earned runs, one of 5 earned, and a pair of 6’s.

Soroka’s worst?  A single 5-spot game plus three 4’s.  That’s key to keeping his team in more games more often.

The pair are still side-by-side with 2.51 and 2.60 ERAs… deGrom’s being slightly lower.  He does now have that edge in the all-important ERA category, though for much of the season, he’d been lagging behind more consistent performers… including Soroka.