Stat Breakdowns of the Day

1. For Jose Reyes’ career, he is batting .353 and slugging .547 when putting the first pitch in play, .336 and .491 on an 0-1 pitch, and .302 and .450 on a 1-1 pitch, and .353 and .545 on a 2-1 pitch, and .287 and .418 overall after falling behind 0-1, but just .259 and .393 after getting ahead 1-0.
Most players have huge splits based on the count, and many hit well on the first pitch, but Reyes is extremely rare for hitting better when the first pitch is a strike than when it’s a ball. Of course, his OBPs are much better when he’s ahead in the count, and like nearly all hitters he hits poorly (in absolute terms) with two strikes on him, but it is perhaps a sign of some benefit to Reyes’ overall aggressiveness as a hitter that getting one strike up on him doesn’t get you far (the same trend can be seen in his 2007 stats but less dramatically, perhaps reflecting his maturation to a more conventional hitter).
Anyone who has watched him over the last six weeks or so knows that Reyes has been swinging at some bad balls again, but when he is on, he does have tremendous plate coverage.
2. If Josh Beckett’s season ended today, he’d be the third pitcher in baseball history to win 20 games while throwing fewer than 200 innings, the other two being Pedro Martinez in 2002 and Bob Grim in 1954. Note that Pedro and Jamie Moyer are the only guys to appear twice on the list of 20-game winners throwing 220 innings or fewer. Unsurprisingly, 13 of the 20 guys on the list are from the past ten seasons.