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Not Qualifying For The ERA Title Has Prevented Alex Wood From Getting The Recognition He Deserves

Arizona Diamondbacks v Los Angeles Dodgers

Last week, we hit on how great Clayton Kershaw’s been this year, per usual, but everybody already knew that. What the casual baseball fan might not be privy to is that Kershaw’s teammate, Alex Wood, has been phenomenal in his own right. Why might someone who doesn’t pay close attention to the National League not know that? It’s more than likely because Wood doesn’t qualify for the ERA title. Yet. But if he did, he’d have the lowest ERA in the majors at 1.67 after throwing seven shutout innings last night against the team who holds the second best record in the National League behind the Dodgers, the Arizona Diamondbacks.

Well, you might be asking yourself, “Why doesn’t Wood qualify for the ERA title if he’s been so good this year?” There are a couple reasons for that, actually. The first being that Wood missed almost two weeks at the beginning of June with a shoulder injury, and two of his first three appearances of the season were relief appearances. To qualify for the ERA title, you have to pitch as many innings as your team has played games. The Dodgers have played 86 games coming into today, and Wood has logged 80.2 innings thus far.

However, among pitchers who have at least 80 innings under their belt this year, Wood is first in the majors in ERA, tied with Kershaw for second best WHIP (0.89) behind Max Scherzer, trails only Scherzer again for the lowest opponents batting average (.174), leads the majors in opponents OPS (.476), is fifth in strikeouts per nine innings (10.82), and I know records don’t mean much anymore, but he’s a perfect 10-0, although one win came in one of his relief appearances. The guy’s been fantastic.

If there’s a knock on him at all, it’s that he needs to go deeper into starts. Even if you remove those two relief appearances, in his 13 starts this year, he’s averaging 5.2 innings per start. That’s a big scale tipper when you start to include Wood’s name next to guys like Kershaw and Scherzer, who are both averaging an even 7 innings per start this year to lead the majors.

When you scroll down to the other starters who are averaging 5.2 innings per start this season, you start seeing names like Andrew Cashner, John Lackey, Michael Pineda, and other meh to okay starters. In fairness, there are some good ones in there, too, who have averaged 5.2 innings per start this year, like Lance McCullers and Chase Anderson who’s having a really good year for the Brewers. The purpose of this blog was to shine some light on how awesome Wood has been this year, but if he’s going to enter the Cy Young conversation, he’s going to have to start piling up those seven-inning performances like he did against the Dbacks. In 13 starts, that was just his third time pitching at least seven innings in 2017.

The perfect comparison to this would be last year’s Cy Young voting. The Cubs’ Kyle Hendricks won the ERA title last year, and finished third in the Cy Young voting because Scherzer finished the season with almost 40 more innings than him. That very same scenario could unfold again this year. Only this time, Wood will be playing the role of Hendricks, and Scherzer will be playing the role of Scherzer.