Six Pack of Stats: Marlins 6, White Sox 5

FanGraphs

This one will likely make an appearance in this season’s “worst losses of the season” retrospectives. For the second straight day, a pesky Marlins team made a successful late charge at the White Sox bullpen, which seems to have returned to its ways of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory after an excellent start to the month. You want the numbers? Here are the numbers.

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The Starters

Lucas Giolito was brilliant for the second consecutive outing, working around slightly diminished velocity to finish seven strong innings with a grooved fastball to Jorge Soler that wound up in the seats being the only dent on his statline. As has been the case for most of the year, he demonstrated a command of his fastball and slider that we haven’t seen since his run of dominance in 2019. Though Lucas threw more noncompetitive pitches than usual, he simply didn’t make too many mistakes, keeping his fastball up in the zone — and missing above it, rather than over the middle, when he did — and peppering the low and outside edge with his slider without hanging any over the plate. That lets his Bugs Bunny changeup play more or less anywhere in the zone, and especially below it.

Baseball Savant

It took Giolito just 101 pitches to get through those seven innings, and they looked like this:

Baseball Savant

Braxton Garrett didn’t once touch a full 91 mph on the radar gun today, but that didn’t stop him from bamboozling Sox hitters for 5 2⁄3 innings this afternoon, allowing just three hits and striking out a season-high nine. The low velocity didn’t seem to matter, because Sox hitters just had no idea what was coming: Garrett threw five pitches at least eight times, generating elite 40%+ CSW rates on his both his slider and sinker and finishing at 37% overall. Needless to say, the dominance against lefties that the Sox took so much pride in between 2020 and 2021 is as good as ancient history by now.

Here’s the breakdown of Garrett’s work today:

Baseball Savant

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Pressure Play

With two outs in the ninth inning in a one-run game with two runners on, Bryan De La Cruz saw a game-high 5.44 LI. You probably already know what happened next.

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Pressure Cooker

For the second straight day, one of the prize acquisitions of Rick Hahn’s 2021-22 offseason finds themself in the pressure cooker, and for the second straight day, he folded more spectacularly than a chair in a WWE ring. Today, the victim was Kendall Graveman, the winning number was 3.08 pLI, and the damage was two earned runs.

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Top Play

You see the gigantic cliff at the end of the win probability chart up there? That’s the aforementioned BDLC double, which comes with a numerical final of .696 WPA.

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Top Performer

As you can imagine, BDLC also paced both teams in WPA, at .690.

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Smackdown

Hardest hit: If you had told me that this space would be occupied by the same player on both Saturday and Sunday, I would have gone through a lot of names before settling on Jean Segura. But with a 110.6 mph laser of a home run off of Graveman, that’s exactly what he did.

Weakest contact: Joey Wendle’s 50.1 mph squib pop-up against Giolito in the sixth was the softest contact of the game.

Luckiest hit: Luis Robert Jr.’s double off of Garrett in the first inning had just a .070 xBA, largely because, as you can see in this chart here, it only hit the ground because right fielder Garrett Hampson, an infielder by trade, initially broke in before being forced to turn his back to chase the ball:

Baseball Savant

Toughest out: The 106 mph line drive that Andrew Vaughn smoked straight at Jean Segura had a .670 xBA. Vaughn has been killing balls all weekend, with a handful of outs to show for it.

Longest hit: Garrett Cooper’s blast to dead center against Keynan Middleton to inch closer was the longest of the day, landing a projected 427 feet from home plate.

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Magic Number: 17.5%

At a total of $31.66 million, roughly 17.5% of the team’s 2023 payroll is dedicated to the trio of Liam Hendriks, Kendall Graveman, and Joe Kelly. This is NOT an argument against them — spending money on good players is good, and those are mostly fair deals from a performance standpoint — but a comment on the still-incredible fact that, knowing full well the constraints imposed on his spending, Rick Hahn chose to dedicate roughly a quarter of his payroll on the bullpen when it’s been the only part of the roster that they’ve been able to consistently develop internally during his tenure. Just mind-blowing stuff.

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Glossary

CSW called strikes plus whiffs
Hard-hit is any ball off the bat at 95 mph or more
LI measures pressure per play
pLI measures total pressure faced in-game
Whiff a swing-and-miss
WPA win probability added measures contributions to the win
xBA expected batting average

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