Baseball Savant isn’t a tell-all for how the game should be going, but they do have some valuable tools for evaluating expected outcomes in MLB games. For those who may be a bit confused, any stat with an “x” in front of it stands for expected. It takes other factors that you can read about into account and spits out a number that can indicate if a player has been lucky or unlucky. So far, two notable players for the Braves have gotten the short end of the stick in 2022 — Marcell Ozuna and Kenley Jansen.
I’m not surprised Ronald’s xBA is lower than his true BA and his xSLG is higher than his true SLG. I expect that to regress to the mean pretty soon.
— SportsTalkATL Jake (@cantguardjake) June 10, 2022
I do think Ozuna will turn things around and regress closer to his true self just based on the law of large numbers. xSLG would indicate that Ozuna is hitting a lot of balls hard but is either hitting them into the shift, directly at someone, or a combination of other factors. Adam Duvall and Ozzie Albies have been slightly worse than expected, but not enough to call them unlucky to the degree of Ozuna.
Kenley Jansen has had some tough moments, but his ERA sits at a 3.51 with his xERA at 2.21. That’s not that strange for a closer this early in the season, especially with fairly limited action. He has been a bit unlucky, but he has nothing close to the sample size of an Ozuna, Duvall, or Albies.
Photo: David J. Griffin/Icon Sportswire
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