Baltimore Orioles: How Good is Brad Brach This Year?

Baltimore Orioles relief pitcher Brad Brach has been having a stellar season so far in 2016. Just how good is it in relation to the rest of the American League?

If Brach is not in a class by himself, it does not take long to call roll. It is a very small class indeed, and Brach has Zach Britton as a classmate.

Brach has pitched quite a few innings already this year, but we knew this was going to happen on a team with a shaky rotation that often does not take the Orioles deep into a contest. He is well able to handle this load and this role, making him an extraordinarily valuable player for the Birds.

After pitching the eighth inning last night, Brach is now up to 41.2 innings for this season, well on pace to blow away the 79.1 he threw as a career high just last year. His ERA is now at an incredibly low 1.08 and WHIP at 0.816.

There is actually no other player in the league with as many innings pitched who has numbers as low as these stats. A handful of relief pitchers (with over 30 innings pitched) come close, including Britton, Andrew Miller of the Yankees, Will Harris of the Astros, Kelvin Herrera of the Royals, and Alex Colome of the Rays. Here is a graph of this entire group …

That is some good company and some rare air. It could be argued Brad is the best of the group, having the capacity to go beyond a single inning.

Brach has pitched in 33 games this year, giving up a single earned run in five of those appearances.

Over this three seasons now with Baltimore, Brach has a combined record of 17-5 on a 2.50 ERA in 140 games with 181 innings pitched. Good stuff.

As we have done here at The Baltimore Wire over this season, we are tracking the pace of Orioles home runs and strikeouts, since many people believed the O’s would set records with each. They are close in home run totals and have a real shot at team and all-time records. Strikeouts are on a record pace for the Orioles as a franchise, but far from the all-time record. The O’s are first in the AL in homers (113) and fifth in total strikeouts (613).

While looking at the Orioles’ offensive rankings in the American League, a few other categories stick out. It is great to note that the O’s are actually third in OBP. After years of wanting improvement in this vital statistic, it is good to see this advance.

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But a striking statistic is to see that the Orioles are dead last in sacrifice bunts with only two of them in 2016. That really is amazing. But it stands in the historical tradition of the O’s dating back to Earl Weaver, and with a power team such as Baltimore has, there are not going to be a lot of sacrifices. But this might be even a small number for Earl.

Here is a quote from a Society for American Baseball Research article on Weaver and his distaste for bunts …

"It is well known that Earl Weaver hated the sacrifice bunt as wasting a precious out: “There are only three outs an inning, and they should be treasured. Give one away and you’re making everything harder for yourself.” It is not that Weaver thought that bunting was never appropriate—“I’ve got nothing against the bunt—in its place”—but that its place was limited to where it gave his team a chance to win a game in the late innings."

I am good with the Orioles shunning the bunt in all but the most needful situations. Some folks love small-ball and think it defines a team as having fine skills. It is neither a wrong way to go nor a best way to proceed, but frankly I’d rather see the manufactured runs come three at a time with balls over the fence.