By the Numbers: How do the Atlanta Braves fare after 20 games?

The Atlanta Braves bullpen is quite strong, but the starting rotation is nosediving its way toward the bottom of many MLB ranks.

There’s no surprise element here: what you see is what you get.

The starting rotation for the Atlanta Braves, sans The Incredible Max Fried, has looked really bad of late.

And the metrics agree.

The awful season-ending injury to Mike Soroka aside, the patchwork 2-thru-5 of the rotation has, seemingly on a near-nightly basis, either imploded or struggled greatly to even muster a few productive innings.

It is, of course, a product not just of the Soroka injury, but the absence of Cole Hamels, and the unfortunate tailspins experienced by Mike Foltynewicz and Sean Newcomb, each of whom have been shipped to the team’s training site in Gwinnett.

Through it all, the Braves continue to play better-than-competitive baseball thanks to a grade-A tough bullpen that is among the strongest in the game.

Here’s what the numbers say, with team stats provided by Fangraphs.

Earned-run average (ERA)

• Starters’ ERA: 5.57 (27th in MLB)
• Bullpen ERA: 3.05 (7th in MLB)

There’s a clear discrepancy you’ll notice here, as with many other pitching categories. The bullpen is among the best relief units in the game, the starters among the worst.

Fielding independent pitching (FIP)

• Starters’ FIP: 4.72 (18th in MLB)
• Bullpen FIP: 3.61 (10th in MLB)

Both the starters’ and relievers’ FIP are a little closer to the middle-of-the-pack than what the ERAs suggest. The good news here for the starting pitching is that its FIP is nearly a full run lower than the ERA, which indicates (hopefully) better times are ahead.

Strikeouts per nine innings (K/9)

• Starters’ K/9: 7.76 (22nd in MLB)
• Bullpen K/9: 9.60 (15th in MLB)

Neither unit is really racking up the strikeouts from the mound, possibly to be expected given the Atlanta staff’s penchant for getting groundball outs.

Walks per nine innings (BB/9)

• Starters’ BB/9: 4.15 (27th in MLB)
• Bullpen BB/9: 3.39 (12th in MLB)

The bullpen has slipped a bit from where they were in the beginning of the season, and the starters continue to struggle mightily with issuing the free pass.

Home runs allowed per nine innings (HR/9)

• Starters’ HR/9: 1.20 (10th in MLB)
• Bullpen HR/9: 1.02 (14th in MLB)

One thing the starters have actually managed to do well, as a whole, is keep the ball in the ballpark.

Juuust a bit outside…and inside…

The aforementioned troubles that Braves pitchers have had with bases-on-balls is further explained by Fangraphs’ Plate Discipline statistics.

Atlanta Braves pitchers (both starters and relievers) have thrown just 40.6% of pitches in the strike zone, poor enough for 24th in MLB.

This is certainly not a good development for a group of young starting pitchers looking to gain footing at baseball’s highest level.

Soft contact

It’s not all gloom-and-doom for the Atlanta Braves staff, though.

A definite strength for the Atlanta pitching staff is reflected in MLB.com’s Statcast’s measure of hard-hit rate.

Braves pitchers have only seen 33% of all batted-ball events reach the “hard-hit” threshold, good enough for the 5th lowest hard-hit rate in MLB.