Cal Quantrill debuts for Atlanta, facing the Mets

The Braves’ newest starter makes his first appearance for Atlanta against the division rival Mets

Summarized by AI ⓘ

What is the story about?

I’m not really sure what to hope for the Braves at this point as far as wins and losses, but they sure are gonna play some baseball to close out this season.

Cal Quantrill is certainly a pitcher for the Braves. He’s basically the definition of a career innings-eater and has at best been a solidly above replacement level pitcher in his career, but has pretty consistently cleared that replacement level bar. He’s quite unimpressive in terms of swing and miss, but he does pretty well to avoid walks, which

is his saving grace. Other than that, he pretty much lets batters make contact and has a fairly normal contact profile. He has a true six pitch mix, with a four-seamer, sinker, cutter, slider, curveball, and splitter, which helps maintain a little unpredictability. There probably isn’t much of a reason to expect anything more than above replacement level pitching from Cal, but he probably won’t be catastrophic.

For the Mets, they will go with a similarly unimpressive pitcher, in the 32 year old veteran Clay Holmes. Holmes is in the midst of his first real season as a starter at the age of 32, which is a little weird for a guy in his eighth MLB season. He’s doing a reasonably good job of being a back-end starter for the Mets. He strikes out a few more batters than Quantrill, but still not especially many, and does much better to induce ground balls, but gives back much of that ground ball value with walks. He’s tracking to accrue a similar amount of fWAR this season as he did on average as a reliever for each of the last four seasons. I guess that’s pretty good value for a guy if he can be the fifth starter on a good team and then convert back into an elite reliever for the playoffs. He pitches primarily off of a sinker and sweeper, with changeups, cutters, sliders, and four-seamers mixed in.

This is quite an uninspiring pitching matchup, so it will likely come down to which offense can capitalize on the hittable pitching.