The Fly Balls That Stayed In the Park

Atlanta has pitched 147 innings this season with the game in the balance — 588 hitters faced in the situations FanGraphs files as high leverage — and allowed 11 home runs in them. That is 7.3 percent of the fly balls hit against it, third-lowest among the 30 clubs, behind only Boston and Seattle, as the splits read Tuesday morning. Drop a rung, into the innings where the game is merely in progress, and the same staff allows home runs on about 12 percent of its fly balls — roughly the share everybody else does.

Two numbers that usually agree show it cleanest. In those high-leverage innings the Braves' FIP — built from the home runs, walks and strikeouts that actually happened — is eighth in baseball at 3.66. Their xFIP, which throws the home runs out and substitutes the league's rate on the same fly balls, is 17th at 4.24. Nine places separate the two. The nine places are the home runs that did not happen.

Ivan, at Battery Power, spent Monday afternoon on this and put it more plainly than I will: "The secret to the Braves’ success? It’s apparently not giving up homers in high leverage." The audit underneath it survives a Tuesday-morning read. Atlanta is 21st in the majors in position-player fWAR at 16.8, ninth in pitching at 15.8, and 14th in team expected wOBA at .316. Its BaseRuns record — what the season's raw events would produce in a neutral order — is 85-71, ninth-best in baseball and seven wins short of the one in the standings. Only Milwaukee at 98-58, Los Angeles at 96-60 and Tampa Bay at 95-60 have won more games than Atlanta's 92.

It is not only a pitching story, and it is not a Braves invention. FanGraphs' Clutch statistic, which measures how much better a club plays as the leverage rises than it does overall, has Atlanta fourth of 30 on both sides, 2.77 hitting and 4.49 pitching. Philadelphia, third among the National League wild cards on Tuesday morning's sort at 86-70, with two clubs at 87-69 above it and nothing settled, is running nine wins clear of its own BaseRuns line — further clear than Atlanta is.

Three outlets have now graded this same Atlanta team, and no two of them found the same season. ESPN counted the walks, and I split that rank by hitter on Saturday. CBS counted the power and the depth, and Dex graded the case heading by heading. Ivan counted the wins above replacement. Battery Power published both of its own readings on the Monday after the East was clinched — Demetrius Bell at noon on a resilient team, Ivan three and a half hours later on a strange one.

If the suppression belongs to anybody, it belongs to five arms. Of the 17 Atlanta pitchers with at least 20 innings, exactly five carry a FIP- ten or more points below their xFIP-: Chris Sale at 55 against 68 over 157 innings, 6.5 percent of his fly balls leaving; Didier Fuentes at 58 against 70; Dylan Lee at 52 against 78, on 3.9 percent, a split I have owed a look since mid-month; Victor Mederos at 71 against 110, one home run in 32 innings; and Robert Suarez at 59 against 81, on the 60-day injured list, the arm I argued in August this October needed most. The next pitcher on the club is eight points away. Four of the five are available.

Martín Pérez is the same shape turned around: 72, 104 and 107 in ERA-, FIP- and xFIP- as FanGraphs had him Tuesday morning, 142 innings of results ahead of process. Ivan printed that line Monday as 74/105/111; league and park constants move overnight, which is a useful reminder that none of these numbers is carved. In July I walked this rotation month by month and wrote that when the results look significantly better than the process, the results are borrowing against a future correction. The staff's season row still reads 86 in ERA- against 98 in FIP-. The correction has had 156 games to arrive.

Which leaves the question the next week asks. Ivan ends where an honest audit has to: "Will the weirdness continue? I have no idea." Neither do I, and it is not modesty. MLB's postseason schedule, still marked tentative, opens the round on Tuesday, September 29, a week from today. A best-of-three holds a couple of dozen innings at the outside, a sliver of the 147 that made this split a fact. Over 156 games the split is a record of what happened. Over three it is neither a skill nor a piece of luck, because three games cannot tell those apart. Baseball plays 162 before it asks the short question for exactly that reason, and the short question does not care what the long one settled.