Bryce Harper played both ends of the double-header on Tuesday and he only got one hit, but it left the yard for his seventh homer of the season. That gives Harper two homers for the month already, after hitting just two homers all of July and he didn't hit a single homer in the month of June. It's an extremely small sample but Harper's slugging percentage is up significantly this month at .656 with his previous high being just .483 in the first month of the year. His average is slowly climbing, hitting over .320 over the last two months, and he's now just shy of the .300 mark for the year. Swing and miss was a big issue to start the year hovering just shy of 40%, but month by month he's lowered his whiffs and in July he was just over 30% and then early in August he's just under 30%. He's slowly but surely coming online and starting to look like his normal self for Philly.
Grayson Rodriguez turned in another solid start, tossing six innings and allowing two runs against the Astros. Since 7/22, he's allowed just seven runs over his last 23.2 innings and he has 20 strikeouts in that span. Walks are still the one issue he hasn't quite improved on in this second major league stint, walking two or more batters in every start besides one since 5/04. Rodriguez's hard-hit data looks bad in terms of his season long data, but it's improved a lot in this latest callup with 33%, 41%, 16.7% in the three starts prior to this one. To start the year his hard-hit data was routinely over 60% in his starts. That decline in hard-hit rate combined with the drop in strikeouts makes me thing that he's evolving as a pitcher and worrying more about getting productive outs rather than trying to just overwhelm batters with his raw stuff.
Ke'Bryan Hayes homered Tuesday while going 2-for-3 at the plate with a walk. Hayes has been in a rough patch since coming of f the IL with a .167/.200/.389 slash line which is tough after he posted a .337/.337/.518 slash in the month of June prior to going on the IL. It's been yet another tough season for Hayes sitting with a .247/.284/.393 slash line with some slightly improved batted ball data. He's still hitting the ball hard with pretty good consistency and he's hitting the ball in the air more this season which is something he's been needing to do through his career. His fly-ball rate has jumped to 25%, up an enormous 8% compared to last season but there really hasn't been much of a production boost behind it like we'd hope it would.
Touki Toussiant struck out nine batters in five innings for the White Sox Tuesday, but he also allowed six hits and walked five batters en route to allowing four runs. All in all, allowing 11 baserunners in five innings and only having four score is almost an impressive outing, despite being nerve-wracking at the same time. This is back-to-back games for Touki with nine strikeouts, which is considering his season high was five in multiple starts. Walks are a huge issue for him though has since the beginning of July, and he now has four or more walks in five of his starts.
Tanner Bibee dominated the Blue Jays over seven innings, shutting them out and recording six strikeouts along the way. Bibee ran into some trouble in the month of April, but he's been incredible in the since the calendar rolled to July with a 1.78 ERA last month and a 1.50 ERA through two starts in August. In addition to limiting runs, his strikeout have been great with at least six punchouts in four of his last five starts. His ERA is down under 3.00 now for the year and he's also closing in on a strikeout per inning with this strong run as well. Bibee had a tough month of June posting a 5.04 ERA but he's righted the ship and now turned in another month+ of great starts.
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