I have a stat! I have a stat!
I’ve been keeping a
sheet of the Nationals starters and the opposing starters for every series. It occurred to me that the Nationals seem to have gone up against a lot of very good starters or, at least, a lot of starters with low ERAs. So rather than speculating, I decided to actually find out. Thanks to baseball-reference, Excel and C#, I did.
First I wanted to see what the ERA (the barometer I used because I know the formula) for the opposing starters against each MLB team. For the Nationals, that would be Dillon Gee vs. the Nationals, Bartolo Colon vs. the Nationals, Zack Wheeler vs. the Nationals, the first three opposing starters of the Nationals this season…up until yesterday’s game against Alfredo Simon and I did that every team. What did I discover?
I discovered that the Nats’ opposing starters do indeed have a very low ERA in games started against the Nationals. It’s the second lowest in baseball at 2.79. This should surprise no one who’s watch the Nationals at-bats. In addition to this, I needed to see what those opposing starters ERA were against everyone else they started, excluding each team. So, for the Nationals that would be every start Dillon Gee made excluding the Nationals, every start Bartolo Colon made excluding the Nationals starts. Same with Zack Wheeler and every other opposing starter up to Alfredo Simon, yesterday. As it turns out, it appears to be true that the Nationals have had a lot of good opposing starters as the ERA for them in starts excluding the Nationals is also the second lowest in baseball at 3.33. So the opposing starters aren’t as dominant in their non-Nationals starts but, relatively, they’re still really good.
The team with the lowest opposing starters ERA is the Padres at 2.60. Not surprising as the Padres are terrible offensively. The team with the highest opposing starters ERA is the Rockies at 5.86. Yes, the Rockies are brutal to opposing starting pitchers. The highest opposing starter ERA in the AL is the A’s at 5.40. The Rockies opposing starter ERA is the highest in baseball despite the fact that one or two of those at-bats per game is the Rockies starting pitcher.
The team with the lowest opposing starters ERA excluding the team is the Pirates at 3.29. There’s less range for this stat because you’re excluding one start from many opposing starter starts. Stephen Strasburg, for example, has had 10 starts. For this particular stat, his impact on any one of those opponents is almost the same. Excluding any one opponent from the list leaves totals that are almost the same, regardless of which opponent you exclude because there would be 9 starts left to include. And there will be even less of impact as the season goes on. Excluding one start from 20 starts will leave 19 left as opposed to the nine left now. Anyway, the highest opposing starter ERA excluding that team belongs to the Royals at 4.30. The highest opposing starter ERA excluding that team in the NL is the Giants at 3.80. If you wanted to be a little hesitant about jumping on the Rockies bandwagon, you could look at these stats. As mentioned previously, the Rockies have the highest opposing starter ERA at 5.86 but those same opposing starters excluding starts against the Rockies is 13th in the NL. Those opposing starters are reamed by the Rockies but they’re not that good against everyone else either. Perhaps the Rockies have been going up against more than their fair share of #4s and #5s.
The Braves, what about the Braves??? Well, their opposing starters have the third lowest ERA right behind the Nationals against them at 2.91. Since their offense isn’t world beaters either, this is not shocking. Their opposing starter ERA excluding Braves starts is 10th in the NL so they’re slightly better against worse starters than the Nationals.
