Tonight we face Alex Cobb who is neither as good at baseball nor as evil as Ty Cobb so we got that going for us. Cobb is in his second season and has been pretty OK. His numbers last year and this year indicate he is getting better and will be a good pitcher down the road but is someone the Mets need to beat now. He is the worst Rays pitcher we are going to see and we can't afford to lose this game with Price and Hellickson coming up. Cobb has a 4.13/3.93 ERA/xFIP. He strike out rate is low at just 6 per 9 and his walk rate is high at 3 per 9. If the Mets can't get to him, we are going to be in trouble.
Next up is David Price who is awesome as usual with an ERA/xFIP of 2.40/3.39. He also has a k/9 of 8.01. Really the only thing that David Price does poorly is give up walks with a career bb/9 of 3.12. Price has never pitched against the Mets before.
After Price is Jeremy Hellickson who was AL rookie of the year. Hellickson is having a good year but one that is marred a bit when looked at with advanced stats. His ERA is 2.65 but his FIP/xFIP is 4.73/4.64 showing a player who has gotten lucky with some defense and isn't quite as good as he appears. He is the owner of an abysmal K/BB ratio of 1.79. One of the reasons I love writing this blog is that I often teach myself things just doing the research, for instance I am way less worried about Hellickson now than i was when I started writing.
On the offensive side Longo is still out and the star of the team has been Matt Joyce who is currently hitting .282/.396/.542 with 11 home runs. The Rays also feature one of my favorite non Mets Ben Zobrist who was having a terrible year but has improved a lot in the last two weeks, he has 8 homers, 6 stolen bases and an above average .345 OBP. Offensively the Rays are a team where we worry about everyone, they have a number of good role players that can come up with a big hit at any time.
As a team the Rays are 35-25. They have scored 260 runs and allowed 233.
I think the mets have a good chance to take the series and possibly the sweep. Of course, they must play better defense than they have recently.
ReplyDeleteCobb is a pitcher that the mets should be able to beat up(although i thought the same thing with hughes and was wrong). Dickey is pitching on wed and hopefully santana should bounce back so a sweep isn't out of the question. Plus, the mets don't have to face longoria :)