He’s striking out exactly half of all batters he faces, and while his walk numbers are slightly up, there’s nothing to be concerned with there as the increased walks are due to more deception with his sinker and moving around the zone more. Meanwhile, his Exit Velocity sits at 84.6 the best number of his career and in the top 5th percentile of the league. While his Barrel% is not back to his elite pre-2019 numbers, he has improved it massively this season, dropping it by 3.6 percentage points to 6.5. That has allowed Díaz to get away with more mistakes in the zone with his four-seamer and slider. His sinker isn’t elite like his four-seamer or slider, but what the sinker has done is mixed things up in opposing hitters heads about what pitch is coming next. In 2020 Díaz made one key change to his approach, he started throwing his sinker more. All of this pointed to someone who was no longer beating hitters, rather he was getting beat on his best offerings. At the same time, his Hard Hit% and Exit Velocity skyrocketed to 45.7 and 90.1 respectively. His Barrel% jumped all the way to 10.1, which was in the bottom 8th percentile of the league. He wasn’t attacking the zone so much as he was leaving pitches up in the fattest parts of the plate. Last year Díaz found his pitches sitting in the zone. Hitters typically knew what was coming, but knowing doesn’t matter much when you can’t hit the pitches anyway. He was throwing a 99+mph fastball mixed with a 90mph slider. Up until 2019 hitters couldn’t do anything with his pitches. Díaz’s approach has always been to live in the zone and challenge hitters to do something with his offerings. It’s not that hard to see where Díaz has improved in 2020. That DRA loves the Mets closer so much in 2020 is ample evidence that he took a down 2019 and rebounded just like the elite pitcher he’s always been. The metrics don’t have any issues with a pitcher like Díaz, they eat his sort up and spin very accurate tales of his triumphs and tragedies. Díaz is your prototypical pitcher a hard thrower with a nasty slider who attacks hitters and lives or dies based on his ability to maintain control in and out of the zone. Hendricks is a different type of pitcher though, the sort of control and soft contact pitcher who exists to confuse evaluation metrics. Like any metric it can be wrong, Kyle Hendricks has made a career out of outperforming every pitching metric in existence. Unlike ERA, FIP, ERA+, and others it tells a more complete story of a pitcher’s performance. Most would be surprised to look at Baseball Prospectus’ DRA leaderboards and see Edwin Díaz in the top spot.ĭRA is easily my favorite pitching metric. As the Mets fell out of legitimate contention one of those reasons had to be that Díaz was still coming up empty as a big city stopper. I’d wager that much of baseball took the same approach with the Mets closer. After that blown save I didn’t pay much attention to Díaz. Twitter was instantly alive with the typical New York Mets fans crying about the overpaid and underperforming flamethrower. Early in the 2020 Major League Baseball season Edwin Díaz blew a save.

Edwin diaz