Rays lead team pitching metrics on Statcast

The Rays and Dodgers pitching staffs are ahead of the pack in Statcast’s team performance metrics

Like most baseball stat sites, Statcast offers a leaderboard to track individual and team performances. And in the pitching statistics tracked by Statcast, the Rays are performing very well.

The Rays as a team are allowing the lowest wOBA in baseball at .279, and the lowest wOBA on Contact (wOBACON) at .339, with the Dodgers coming in second.

Statcast also offers their metric Barrels, which seeks to calculate when a batter has best hit the ball. The Rays lead baseball in suppressing those solid hits, with a 6.0% barrel rate on batted balls. The Dodgers, again, come in second at 6.2%.

Where the Dodgers do lead the Rays is in Hard Hit % allowed (31.7% vs 32.0%), and Exit Velocity allowed (86.4 mph vs 86.5 mph).

Simply put, these two pitching staffs are dominating baseball. The Rays have used 18 pitchers thus far in the season, and only four have ERA at 4.00 or higher. The Dodgers have had 19 players pitch and that same total is five. Whether players have many appearances or few, they are generally succeeding.

How close are these two pitching staffs in overall performance? Here’s a few other stats of note:

• The Dodgers lead the NL in team ERA (3.40), while the Rays are second in the AL (3.75)
• The Dodgers lead the NL in FIP (3.60), while the Rays are fourth in the AL (3.82)
• The Dodgers are second in the NL in AVG (.226), while the Rays are second in the AL (.227)
• The Dodgers lead the NL in K% (25.7%), while the Rays rank fifth in the AL (23.7%)
• The Dodgers lead the NL in BB% (6.9%), while the Rays rank ninth in the AL (8.4%)

So the Rays are not exactly like the Dodgers when it comes to more traditional metrics, but when it comes to batted balls, the Rays are doing pretty well.