The Indians wrap up a three game series with the Tampa Bay Rays this afternoon with a first pitch scheduled for 12:10 pm. It’s getaway day for both teams as Tampa heads home to host the Yankees and the Indians head to the Lone Star State for a three game series beginning Friday.
Josh Tomlin (2-4, 5.87) takes the hill today against Tampa in the rubber match. Tomlin has been his usual pinpoint self this season as he’s setting a new low with his walk rate at 0.9 walks per nine (4 BB’s in 38.1 IP). For his career, Tomlin has walked 111 batters and allowed 123 home runs in 725.2 innings.
After getting pounded in his first two starts of the season, Tomlin has settled back into his usual steady standards. He has a 3.38 ERA and 1.06 WHIP in his last five starts and has been very stingy in his last two starts against KC and Minnesota (1.20 ERA and 0.67 WHIP in 15 IP).
Looking through Tomlin’s advanced stats on Fangraphs this morning, one quirk jumps out: Tomlin’s ground ball rate has flipped. For his career, Tomlin allowed ground balls and fly balls at nearly an even clip – a 1.03 GB/FB rate and 936 ground balls for 912 fly balls. This season he’s gotten twice as many ground balls to fly balls (64 GB/32 GB). This could be a small sample size fluctation or perhaps a new approach by Tomlin.
We’ll see how he approaches a groundball oriented club this afternoon (the Rays have hit 43% of outs on the ground vs. 36.7% in the air). The Rays also lead all of baseball in strikeout rate by a large margin, striking out 27% of the time. The next closest is Milwaukee at 24.8%. Cleveland batters strikeout at the fifth lowest rate in the Majors at 19.8%.
Taking the mound for Tampa today will be Alex Cobb (3-3, 3.65). Cobb, of course, is the gentleman who shut out the Indians into the 7th inning of Tampa’s eventual 4-0 win in Cleveland in the 2013 Wild Card Game. He missed most of 2015 and 2016 with arm injuries, but has returned to help stabilize the Tampa Bay rotation this season.
Line-ups are below and include Bradley Zimmer in just his second Major League game:
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[…] By Ray Danner […]