Atlanta Braves' pitching splits might well be a factor for playoff roster spots

Home or Away? That’s a big question coming into this season’s final 9 games, and it could be a bigger factor in the week thereafter.

For the purposes of this effort, we are simply going to assume that the Atlanta Braves will be your NL East champions. If somehow that fails to be the case, you can forget this topic ever came up, but at least we can consider the implications until then.

The Braves have robust road record this year at 45-30, yet a pedestrian home mark of 40-38. We’ve talked about this several times, including Kyle’s take just a couple of days ago.

Also a couple of days ago, Fred wondered who we could trust from the rotation to deliver a credible start… and who we couldn’t.

Today, we’ll strictly look at home/road pitching splits and how this might dictate a course of action for the 1st round.

The Schedule… helps

Let’s dig into the pitching, then, but let’s also start off by looking at the assumed schedule coming up (note how that word ‘assume’ continues to rise). If the current rotation continues as scheduled – it won’t – then here’s the starting assignments:

9/21: TEHERAN (Philly)
9/22: FOLTYNEWICZ (Philly)
9/23: SANCHEZ (Philly)
9/25: NEWCOMB (Mets)
9/26: TOUSSAINT (Mets)
9/27: GAUSMAN (Mets)
9/28: TEHERAN (Philly)
9/29: FOLTY (Philly)
9/30: SANCHEZ (Philly)

Okay, that’s the regular season. The Playoff schedule begins like this:

10/2: Wild Card game
10/4: NLDS Game 1 (both games)
10/5: NLDS Game 2
10/6: Off Day/Travel Day
10/7: NLDS Game 3
10/8: NLDS Game 4 if necessary
10/9: Off Day/Travel Day
10/10: NLDS Game 5 if necessary

I’ll stop here. So the Braves – regardless of their opponent and regardless of the city they start in – will have days off on October 1st through 3rd, then again on the 6th and possibly the 9th.

The standings currently sit like this:

Cubs ahead of Atlanta by 4½ – they almost certainly will have the top seed.
Atlanta tied with Dodgers for 2nd seeding.
- The Dodgers own the tie-breaker, thanks to a 5-2 season series margin
- If it happens that the Rockies end up winning the division, the Braves also lose that tie-breaker.

Expectations:

Based on schedules and current leads, I am expecting the following:
- A very-close-race for the second Wild Card position with Cardinals and Rockies fighting for the right to play in Milwaukee
- Wild Card winner plays the Cubs
- Braves travel to Los Angeles to play the Dodgers

Back to the Pitching

Clinching the division before the last series will be important so that the top 3 in the rotation – Gausman, Folty, and Sanchez – won’t necessarily have to be go deep into meaningful games for their last starts.

This will also (clearly) allow for additional rest, which could be an even larger factor than anything else I’m about to get into.

Among the Braves’ starters, here are their ranked ERA stats AT HOME:

2.81 – Gausman
2.89 – Fried (just sayin’…not that he’ll get the nod)
3.10 – Sanchez
3.25 – Folty (his last outing vs. St. Louis made this look bad, but he also yielded 4 to the Cubs on August 30)
3.84 – Teheran
4.67 – Toussaint
5.12 – Newcomb

Now here’s the road chart:

2.52 – Folty
2.78 – Gausman
2.92 – Sanchez
3.00 – Newcomb
3.18 – Toussaint
4.13 – Teheran

Well, that pretty much dictates it, right? Start Mike Foltynewicz and Kevin Gausman out in LA?

If you want a ‘hot backup’ option in case of emergency, it would seem that any of the rest could assist (even Teheran: the Dodgers haven’t seen him this year, though clearly there’s been ‘good Teheran’ and ‘bad Teheran’ without much in between).

WHO’S THE GAME 1 GUY? While you might figure on Folty getting the Game 1 nod, that might not be the case, given a number of factors:

The current pitching order (see above – Gausman is ahead of Foltynewicz)
The game schedule (Gausman would be full regular rest; delaying him further might put him out of his routine). Switching these players could actually mess up either or both of them.
When facing the Dodgers earlier in the year (in Atlanta), Folty got banged up a bit: 4 earned runs in 5 innings. Gausman has not seen them.
Hey – Gausman has been terrific since arriving in the South, so why not?

Home Cooking

Once returning to Atlanta Anibal Sanchez making the most sense for Game 3 once the games come to Atlanta.

If the optional games happen, Game 4 could be a ‘bullpen game’ by piggybacking multiple starters together. Game 5 would then be the Game 1 starter again on full rest.

Turning things around

Let’s suppose that the Braves somehow end up ahead of LA and get that 2nd seed – along with home field rights for the NLDS.

In that case, you might actually feel a bit better using Gausman and Folty at home. The road ERA’s of the rest of the staff are roughly equal-or-better than their home marks… at least that’s the case with Newcomb and Toussaint.

Teheran might need to be relegated to long relief at home for the first two games in this scenario, so it’s unclear whether (or how) he might be employed.

A Very Quick Look at the bullpen

At home, the relief corps… all of them… have recorded a 3.95 ERA (with 306 walks in 722 innings).

On the road, the numbers are a bit better: 3.61 ERA, though with a slightly higher rate on the walks (289 in 657.2 innings). The opponents are hitting .225 as opposed to a .232 rate at home.

The bullpen is tough to gauge overall since (a) a ton of arms have been involved throughout the year that we won’t see in October; and (b) it doesn’t account for recent performance. So we’ll leave the rest of that topic alone for now.

With the rotation, the sample sizes aren’t terrific, so there could still be some ‘going with the gut’ moves made here – regardless of what the numbers seem to indicate, but if you’ve got to play the Dodgers, then going on the road probably isn’t such a terrible idea.

Of more concern: the fact that the Dodgers will come riding into a series high confidence and the knowledge that Atlanta had significant trouble against them in the regular season.

Next. How we got this far. dark

But this is a new ‘mini-season’, and the rest opportunities that the Braves will have could also serve to be a terrific boon for this club… on both sides of the ball.

Home/Braves News

Atlanta Braves’ pitching splits might well be a factor for playoff roster spots

By Alan Carpenter | Sep 21, 2018