Harris had like the third best DRA of any reliever in baseball entering last night's game. Quit looking at single season ERA for relievers.
ERA is not only stat Harris struggles in. Astros have 8 relievers with better xwOBA's. xwOBA and DRA are pretty close in correlation to year +1 results and xwOBA is superior in current year correlation to wOBA. I have a hard time believing Harris is anything close to as bad as xwOBA says, but Harris on the other hand is not the third best reliever in baseball.
His xwOBA for the season is .297, which although it's far weaker than his DRA/FIP/xFIP/SIERA, is still better than league-average wOBA against for relievers. I don't care too much about current year correlation to wOBA as that is looking at correlation to past performance, which doesn't say anything about how he will perform moving forward. I don't think Harris is the third best reliever in baseball, but I think it would be fair to say he's been one of the top 20 relievers based off of his advanced stats.
Harris is 139th among relievers (150 pitches minimum) in xwOBA. DRA/FIP/xFIP/SIERA are on on the same tree of stats weighting Ks and BBs heavily with the big difference being how quality of contact is estimated (DRA, SIERA best at trying to estimate quality of contact). The fact that DRA/FIP/xFIP/SIERA all are comparable is to be expected as Harris is good at getting Ks and preventing walks. Considering xwOBA does not heavily weight Ks and BBs, and it is equal to DRA in next year predictive power, its next year predictive power based on quality of contact is far superior to the DRA/FIP/xFIP/SIERA. Harris is probably a good pitcher because he get Ks and BBs, but he is probably not Top 20 as DRA/FIP/xFIP/SIERA all overrate his contact management.
it's probably the forest whitley effect... JV probably stood next to him recently and caught his drug addiction and is now hooked on the pot. sad times. RIP astros.
White is more well rounded hitter. Takes pitches, works counts. Draws walks. Yuli just swings at ****ing everything.
This year though is a significant outlier for Harris in contact management compared to 2016 and 2017, where his xwOBA was in the .250-.260 range. His average exit velocity is actually a little lower than those prior seasons. Hard contact% is also down from last season. It seems a high LD% is probably driving his elevated xwOBA this season and LD% for pitchers takes over 600 BIP to become meaningful.
Lovin' this lineup! Gurriel is strictly a corner IF, hopefully with Correa back the days of him at 2nd base are behind us. Happy to say I feel much better about Marwin and Jake's bats, hopefully they keep this up. Also happy to see White get a start. And good riddance to Davis and his lousy at bats. Now let's win this ballgame!
If you ever listen to the 10th inning show, you've heard Miss Carol. Matt Thomas picked her up so she could finally attend an Astros game.
Hey now, just coming here to post this!! So great to put a face with that terrific voice!!! EDIT; pics keep coming!