Mets360 - Rick Porcello and facing the same team after a bad outing

by Brian Joura 

RickPorcello takes the mound tonight versus the Braves, squaring off against the same team that took him behind the woodshed in his first start with the Mets. This gives us a chance to test out a theory of mine. My theory is that whenever a player faces a team that he just pitched against recently, that if he had a particularly good or bad outing against them the first time, he’ll do the opposite in the second go round.

It’s a theory because I’ve never actually looked at the results. So, let’s do that now. First, we’ll have to define some terms. What’s a particularly good or bad start? Let’s use the Bill James Game Score number to determine this, as found on Baseball-Reference. James considers several factors and throws them into equation where an average Game Score is 50. So, let’s consider a particularly good start as one with a Game Score of 60 or higher and a particularly bad Game Score as one with a 40 or worse.

Porcello had a Game Score of 14 for his outing against Atlanta on July 26.

What do we consider recently? For our purposes today, let’s use a definition of two starts in three games within a period of two weeks. So, if a guy faced a club and then went on the injured list for several months and then faced the same club again when he was activated, that won’t count. This actually happened with Noah Syndergaard back in 2017.

Before looking at the data, let me preface this by saying that there weren’t as many of these as expected. Partly this is because you typically only have the opportunities to do this in division games. It’s not like a Mets pitcher frequently faces the Dodgers twice in three starts. And the other is that a lot of starts end up with a Game Score in the 40s or 50s, eliminating them from our consideration. Steven Matz faced the Phillies last year in back-to-back starts late in the season but his first outing against them had a Game Score of 48, so it didn’t make our cut. Here’s our lists, beginning with the particularly good starts:

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