Sean Manaea, Oakland Athletics - The Red Sox destroyed Manaea on Tuesday scoring eight runs in just 2.2 innings, running his season total up to 16 earned runs over his first 12.2 innings on the year. While his overall stat line is a mess, Manaea is getting batters to chase a lot of pitches with a small sample size chase rate of just under 30% which ranks in the top 30 among qualified pitchers (if he qualified). The issue though is that hitters are just making so much contact against him on pitches that they aren't chasing. His 96% zone contact rate would rank as the highest in all of baseball and his 45% chase whiff rate is among the likes of Jose Fernandez and Clayton Kershaw. He's going to keep getting pummeled if he can't find ways to miss bats on pitches that are still in the zone as he won't be able to rely solely on batters chasing pitches out of the zone.
Trevor Bauer, Cleveland Indians - Bauer dominated the Astros Tuesday over seven shutout innings striking out a season high seven batters while walking three and allowing three hits. He turned in nearly identical starts in his first two starts allowing four runs in 5.2 and 4.0 innings, but took advantage of a struggling Astros team. Bauer was a sleeper/breakout pick by many before getting placed in the bullpen as the season starter and has filled in nicely for Carlos Carrasco. Bauer isn't getting batters to chase many pitches so far with a 21% chase rate but he has a career high 83% contact rate on pitches in the zone which is a top 30 mark in all of baseball if he qualified for innings. His strikeout numbers are up this year by almost a for strikeout per nine, but those numbers are skewed by a couple of one inning, two strikeout performances out of the pen. He still remains a solid upside streaming option.
Lorenzo Cain, Kansas City Royals - Lorenzo Cain abused the Yankees pitching staff for three homers and even brought his wRC+ up almost 30 points to get him over the 100 mark for the season. Two of the homers came off of Tanaka while the third came off of Andrew Miller who hadn't allowed a single run all season. Cain's season has gotten off to a shaky start and the first place I went to look was BABIP to see if he was simply unlucky this year, but at .337 he's actually slightly above his career average. If you keep scrolling down his Fangraphs page though you see that his hard contact rate is down almost 10% and Statcast has his average exit velocity is 89 MPH but his average LD/FB exit velocity is a bit below that. What does this mean? His hardest hit balls a grounders which can really quick zap any bit of power that you have, which is evidence of the one double and two homers he had coming into Tuesday's game.
Drew Smyly, Tampa Bay Rays - Smyly struggled for the first time since his first start against Toronto allowing six runs in five innings against the Mariners and his five strikeouts were also the lowest since that same start. Smyly continues to show outstanding command and this was his first start of the season where he didn't allow a single walk. The only thing I'd like to see is Smyly improve his HR/9 as he's currently at about 1.5, but that may actually end up being a positive for him as he is allowing 50% of his batted balls to be fly balls. He's continued to miss more and more bats as his swinging strike rate has made significant gains in three straight seasons. He may not end up winning more than 10 games this year on this Rays team, but he's still going to provide excellent numbers across the board.
Masahiro Tanaka, New York Yankees - Coming off of his best start of the season, Tanaka was shelled by the Royals Tuesday allowing six runs in seven innings along with three homers. The six runs were the first time all season he'd allowed more than two runs in a single start, the four strikeouts tied a season low that came in his first start of the season where he threw just 5.2 innings. Tanaka's strikeout rate being down a bit from last season is actually kind of odd as all his peripherals show that he should be racking up more strikeouts than he has been. Across the board his contact rates are down and his swinging strike rate is up 2% from last season and he has four pitches that rate as above average on Fangraphs Pitch F/X charts.
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