Week 10, another net win rant!

 Josh is on a Euro Trip right now, drinking Lemoncello and champagne, leaving team BJ to…

Brian who is definitely on top of his game with baby Finn at this side; but that baby looks just fine. 

The book isn’t quite closed on some week 10 items, so we’ll save the stats for a midweek update, but I had time to write a blog tonight and a topic on my mind, so here we go.

Remember Net Wins? Of course you do. The oft-discussed but yet-to-be replaced stat that rounds out our pitching categories. No need to re-hash old discussions (yes its flawed, yes it might marginally help inhibit streaming, no we don’t have a better 6^th and Starting-Pitching-focused pitching category), but we have a lot of data now.

I don’t have the Python skills to do this with a formula, so just eyeballing it: over the last two years, here are the luckiest and unluckiest Net Win weeks:

Year	ERA	Net Win	Expected Net Win Based on ERA*	Delta
2022	4.33	+8	-0.5	8.5
2023	4.97	+5	-1	6
2023	2.21	-1	3.5	4.5
2023	5.43	-8	-2	2
2022	4.07	-9	0	9

*based on the trendline of ERA vs Net Win scatterplot trendline (if you want to see the trendline of expected ERA vs NW, let me know)

That 4.97 and +5? That was BJ this week….sorry Ketih. All this to say: there’s gonna be ebbs and flows with Net Win luck. We saw last season that the “best” way to enhance your Net Win chances is to own pitchers on good teams, but even then the correlation isn’t that strong. It’s a fluky stat. We deal with it.

Matchup recaps? Oh yeah. (Remember, being written on Sunday Night as the final game is finishing)

Dean flopped this week and Michael was able to take advantage to get a big win. Dean entered the week averaging a 0.284 AVG which was best in the league by 0.020 points, a huge number. Michael was 7^th in the league with a 0.251 AVG. Well, Dean hit .224 this week and Michael was there to take advantage. Unfortunately Luis Arraez can’t do it all himself. Michael’s pitching K run of dominance continued.

Carl and Arthur played to a tie. These two teams brought the offense this week; Carl’s pitching was pretty good too. Arthur had 15 SBs on the week, the high water mark for the league this year. Arthur has regained a lot of strength this month, he’s back to being a competitor. Carl keeps the train rolling, likely maintaining his status atop the league, year to date.

BJ had 15 home runs this week, but it wasn’t enough to beat Keith who had a sub-3 ERA over 92 innings. Keith is a force to be reckoned with this year, watch out. After an incredibly hot pitching start to the year, BJ’s staff has really fallen off; putting up a near 5.00 ERA this week…but hey, got that 5 Net Wins.

Cory beat Dave with 15 home runs of his own. Both teams had a very impressive .285 AVG, but Cory’s pitching was less painful than Dave’s with Cory only having a 4.37 ERA to Dave’s 5.60, no bueno. Dave has struggled to find his footing this year, I expect the angry player-drops to begin soon. Meanwhile Cory started the year hot but has settled into the middle of the pack since. He’ll be ready to make a run.

Paul held off Max who put up 18 innings on Sunday to get over the 30 Innings Pitched threshold. Paul’s offense was decent in this one with 11 HRs that was well above league average for the week. On the pitching side though? Paul was challenging the worst net win total of the year (Dean, -8 NW, week 7) after he had -7 NW by Friday. He held there though. For Max? He showed some life with a 3.43 ERA and 7 home runs.

Do we like Sunday night blogs? It was fun to get time to write again but it was weird not having the year-to-date stats and charts to get updated stats with how teams were/are trending.