Great stuff, David

I've wondered about that for a long time, so this will be interesting to follow. As followup, it would be interesting to see what types of hitters make up the successful teams: selective hitters with high on base percentages who make the opponent throw strikes? or agressive hitters with power who make them the pitcher pay for the few mistakes they make?

Last year, it seemed like the White Sox pitching ate up the Red Sox because the Red Sox were trying to be patient and get ahead in the count. The White Sox staff threw strikes and turned it around by consistently putting the hitters in a hole.

This *is* an interesting stat. What do we know about its predictive ability? It'd be interesting to study successful playoff teams and see what their records were, or to compare records vs. good pitchers vs. overall records.

This explains how the Mets lost 2 out of 3 to the Dodgers in Shea this weekend.

To Dodger rookies making their first major league starts, no less.

Wondering how statistically significant this is given the sample size. thanks for your thoughts.

They are likely not significant at all. It's just a clue in the puzzle.

I'm a Dodger fan, but Adam, sorry, the Dodgers only took 2 out of 4. Given that the knock against the Dodgers is that they can't beat good teams, I'm very happy with the split.

Thanks, Adam. Cool stuff.

Although the Mets' 3.7 runs is lower than their usual 5.3, that's not the whole problem. If the Mets starters facing off against these aces put up their usual 4 runs per game, the Mets would be about 14-16 in those 30 games.

But they're actually 11-19, meaning either that the Mets aces aren't pitching well in thse pitcher's duels, or the Mets haven't matched their rotations to reflect this season's performances.

I'm always worried about facing good starters. This does nothing to change that one way or the other.

If you look at potential playoff teams in the NL, the Mets should, in theory, have little to worry about as SD is the only team with more than one top pitcher, and the Mets swept SD last time out. The Mets' bigger problem is that they frequently have trouble with pitchers they haven't seen before, as evidenced by the losses to LA. This could bode very badly for them if they reach the WS.

Well, the sample size may be small, but we have lots of past information to look over. For every past season, you could run these numbers and see if there is a trend for the postseason winners to have performed well against good pitchers in the regular season.

Each year by itself is a relatively small sample size, but taken in aggregate it should be relatively easy to determine if there is much merit to this method of study.

Yeah, the small sample size is going to do a number on this stat. For example, the Tigers (4 starters in the Top 40) obliterated the Twins early in the season, but it's hard to say which is the better team right.

Also, are these games in which the starting pitcher received a decision or just games that were started by one of the Top 40?

It's the record of the starting pitchers in all the games started against the club. The record is turned around so it's a won loss record for the team. I didn't figure out the overall record for the team in these games.