On July 20, the Cardinals dropped a game to the Cubs despite going into the ninth inning with a 6–1 lead. Based on Greg Stoll’s win expectancy calculator, when the home team is winning by five runs in the top of the ninth, that’s a victory 99.7% of the time. The Cardinals acted accordingly, bringing in veteran journeyman Luis Garcia for his 2021 debut. This was mop-up duty … until it was not.
Garcia struck out Patrick Wisdom to start the inning, but he was able to reach first base on a dropped third strike. Nico Hoerner followed Wisdom with a single, and Jake Marisnick walked. The odds were still in the Cardinals’ favor; the win expectancy calculator gives the home team in this spot (up five, no outs and the bases loaded) a 97.2% chance of pulling it out. Nevertheless, manager Mike Shildt felt the heat enough to bring in his closer, Alex Reyes. But things did not go as planned. Reyes went walk, strikeout, walk, single, double; a 6–1 lead had turned into a 7–6 deficit in the blink of an eye.
The double did the most damage, but the walks are a theme with Reyes. The surface-level numbers are fantastic; dig one step deeper, and things look a little concerning. On the season, he has posted a 29.3% strikeout rate but also a 19.2% walk rate, leading to a 1.38 WHIP (league average is 1.29) and a 1.53 K/BB ratio that’s about 41% worse than the average pitcher. Reyes’ FIP is 3.68 despite the issues with walks, a testament to his strikeout prowess (led by a slider, curveball, and changeup that generate whiff rates of 46.4%, 57.9%, and 40.0%, respectively, per Baseball Savant) and his ability to induce groundballs with his bowling-ball sinker.
Still though, that walk rate is an issue, but what I want to do here is assuage some of the concerns and help reinforce a point made by Baseball Prospectus’ Jonathan Judge on Twitter just last week: that often a walk or hit-by-pitch is the next best outcome after a strikeout (compared to a ball in play). He noted that while Reyes is toeing the proverbial walk rate line, he has the tools to make that extreme profile work, especially with his ability to generate groundballs with his sinker.
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