Joc Pederson launched homers number 10 and 11 Tuesday as he continues to be a true three outcome player with 25% of his base hits leaving the yard. An issue compared to last season though is that Pederson isn't walking as often as he did last season with his walk rate dropping right around 4-5%. Some positives for his though are both his ISO and slugging percentage are up by 50 and 70 points respectively which we can attribute to his ground ball rate dropping and his soft contact dropping by a pretty significant 6%. While his hard hit rate is down, his "medium" contact rat is up by almost 10% which means while he's not hitting quite as many balls with the velocity he did last year, he is hitting balls more steadily than last year which has helped his BABIP climb up into the .270s.
Julio Teheran struggled early on in Tuesday's start but settled down to allow three runs, all via a Jay Bruce first inning homer, over eight innings while punching out eight batters. After posting K/9 rates of 7.57 and 7.67 in 2014-15 he's now taken a huge just up to 8.60 per nine which is a career high for the righthander. The problem for Teheran is that he's been homer prone over his last few starts allowing eight homers over his last five starts after not allowing a single homer over the 26.2 innings before this latest five game stretch. His FIP reflects those homer issues because while he's sporting a very usable 2.93 ERA, his FIP is concerning at 4.05 and his xFIP is 3.92. Julio has been a solid option this year mainly because of his ERA and WHIP numbers despite the wins totals, but there are some concerning numbers in his stat line.
Trevor Story launched his 17th homer of the season and while his homer pace has slowed down drastically, he's still tied his with Manny Machado for the league lead at the positon. The strikeouts are still very troubling at 33% thought, but that is an improvement from the near 40% that he had when I last wrote about Story. When he does make contact, Story does a ridiculous amount of damage to pitches. If his batted ball profile stays similar to what it is right now at 45.9% FB%, 40.1% Pull%, and 43.8% Hard Hit%, there's no reason to think he can't get to thirty homers especially playing in Coors Field.
Jung Ho Kang launched his ninth homer of the seasons Tuesday in just his 31 game played. Right now he's posting video game numbers across the board with a .333 ISO, .294/.362/.627 triple slash with a 165 wRC+. We can still call it a relatively small sample size with his batted ball profile but his hard hit rate is up by 12% early on and his HR/FB rate is up by 7%. He's also hitting an absurd amount of fly balls compared to last season as he's up by 15% compared to 2015. Kang's on pace to easily eclipse all of his numbers from his rookie season.
Jameson Tallion notched his first win of his career by shutting out the Mets over eight innings while striking out five. Tallion allowed just two hits and walked one other while getting a near 80% ground ball rate in the outing. Tallion's major league career is off to a nice start with two straight quality starts and he's definitely going to get at least one more start with Gerritt Cole being placed on the 15 DL Tuesday afternoon. His strikeouts numbers are not matching his minor league numbers quite yet but his command has translated well so far as he has just three walks in the first 14 innings of his career.
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