FanPost

The Braves vs. Bad Pitching: an exercise in selective memory



When the season ended I had said I was going to look at how the Braves fared against bad and/or inexperienced pitching in 2010. It seemed like all an opposing team had to do to beat us was throw out a bum middle reliever for a spot start or promote a guy from AAA for one game. Our players seemed to just quit against poorer opponents.

But is that actually what happened?

Of the starting pitchers the 2010 Braves faced, I narrowed the list down to pitchers who had a 4.30 FIP or higher (MLB average was 4.08) or who had fewer than 10 starts all season (not counting Strasburg, for obvious reasons).

This came down to 46 pitchers, and includes mid-level pitchers like Jorge de la Rosa, awful pitchers like Todd Wellemeyer, and spot-starters like Brian Burres.

The total ERA of these pitchers vs the 2010 Braves was -- 4.48.

There was virtually no split, meaning the Braves performed as well against bad lefties as righties. Though the futile and embarrassing games against Jamie Moyer are very memorable, how many of us remembered that we also scored 10 runs in one game vs. lefty Manny Parra? Or that, while Andrew Miller and Brian Burres both held down this team in one game each, we actually knocked them around in the other game they started?

I haven't checked the numbers other teams have put up, but I would not imagine them to be terribly different. A 4.48 ERA would be worse than average, which makes sense given that these are worse than average pitchers.

As usual, the numbers can show us what our selective memories tend to forget. I for one started this project expecting to see the Braves struggling against bad pitchers, but realized there were a lot of games where the offense did just as it was expected to.

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