MLB Playoffs

[e16bball]

13 hours ago, MarCakes21 said:

What out there says Ray is the much better pitcher?  This year?  Historics? 

Sewald has a 2.67 ERA this year to Ray with a 3.71.  Ray had a great outlier year last year, and one top notch season before that but other than that, he's a 1.5-2.5 win player.

I just figured it was pretty well understood that pitchers who can be solid starters are typically better than even good-very good relievers. After all, failed starters become relievers — failed relievers become plumbers. 

If we really want to dive into the comparison, Sewald had a nice breakout 2021 season at age 31, working his way into a closer committee by year’s end. Ray, however, won the Cy Young in 2021, so I think we’d have to give the edge to him in that recent history. 

As it was for most of us, 2020 was a lost year for both of these gents. Both were awful, call it a wash.

Delving back deeper into their history, Sewald first cracked into the bigs in 2017 and pitched parts of 3 seasons with the Mets. To his credit, his peripherals looked better than his results, but the final line for those 3 seasons was as follows: 1-14, 5.16 ERA, 77 ERA+, -0.8 rWAR in 141.1 innings. As you pointed out, Ray wasn’t always a CY candidate in his career either, and he certainly outpitched his peripherals, but his final line for those 3 seasons was as follows: 33-15, 3.72 ERA, 120 ERA+, 7.7 rWAR in 460.0 innings. He also grabbed an All-Star nod in 2017. Big edge to Ray in the deeper history area. 

Which really just leaves us with 2022. In 64 innings, Sewald posted a shiny 2.67 ERA with a 3.88 FIP. If you’re wondering how one manages to out-pitch their FIP by nearly 1.25 runs, I think you’d probably start with the .158 BABIP he managed. The lowest any pitcher in baseball (50+ IP) has posted since at least 2000, with Carlos Marmol checking in as the second-lowest at .169. He was excellent at managing contact, but…that’s really quite an extraordinary figure. It was .254, by comparison, in his (likely much better) 2021 campaign. 

Ray had a 3.71 ERA with a 4.17 FIP. Pretty ho hum season, especially at his salary and coming off the CY. But, in his last 20 starts coming into the postseason, he’d put up a combined 2.97 ERA with a 3.81 FIP, so he had pretty clearly righted the ship. 

In the end, I think past history clearly favors Ray (by a pretty huge margin), so you’d really have to hang your hat on this season. I think the BABIP and FIP are too suggestive of great good fortune to see the 2.67 ERA as indicative of true talent for Sewald based on his performance, and even then, Ray had put up several months of comparable performance.

And Ray did all of it as a starter, which is the other key. Pitching well in one-inning stints is different (and, I think, demonstrably easier to do) than having to go through the lineup several times, as Ray had to do as a starter. There are probably some relievers who are so dominant in their short stints that even a very good starter wouldn’t be as good as them in a one-inning outing — but I think those guys are few and far between, and I don’t think Paul Sewald is one of them.

[eddie83]

Manny is 2-2 with a HR and RBI double.