James Paxton & Co: 2017 Seattle Mariners

ugh paxton to DL with 'forearm strain'

sorry for thread title jinx

outscored 41-5 in last 5 gms

zunino's last 6 games - 11/24 5 hr 13 rbi

(previous 41 games - 28/128 4 hr 17 rbi)

Just as he seemed to be on his way to returning next month, Smyly getting Tommy John surgery, out 12-15 months.

Jeff Sullivan:

I’m borrowing liberally from Baseball Savant. I’m drawn to its expected-wOBA metric, based on batted-ball speed and direction. Although it’s a number that could undergo further study, for purposes of validation, it makes intuitive sense. Why not explore? So that’s what I did, looking at 2017 starting pitchers. I searched for expected wOBA on batted balls for starters, setting a minimum of 250 tracked at-bats. James Paxton shows up at .305. His just happens to be the lowest number in the list.

Paxton, in other words, currently ranks No. 1. He’s allowed what you’d expect to be the least-damaging batted balls. In reality, this can be a noisy stat — correlations appear to be weak. So I looked at 2016 as well, to try to increase the sample size. Paxton, a year ago, ranked in the 78th percentile among starters. So, worse, but still good. Combining 2016 and 2017 together, Paxton ranks in the 96th percentile....

http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/lets-all-agree-that-james-paxton-is-one-of-the-best-pitchers-around/