Five in Twenty-Four

Every time Martin Perez has finished a sixth inning this season, he has allowed one earned run or none. Five times in 24 starts. The fifth was Thursday afternoon at Truist Park, in front of 31,664 people, and Atlanta won 3-1.

Twenty-one outs on 90 pitches. Four hits, two walks, four strikeouts, no runs. Three of the hits came in the first, and with the bases loaded and one out Chandler Simpson grounded to Matt Olson, who threw home to Drake Baldwin, whose throw back to first beat Simpson to the bag. Tampa Bay — 87-59, the best record in the American League — managed one hit over the next six innings.

Wednesday night I printed the Perez row of the quality-start table at 4 in 23, having written that morning that September sorts six starters on length rather than ERA, and that the Division Series grid wants four of them. Reynaldo Lopez then produced fourteen outs, and the mechanism looked tidy. Thursday it produced the other kind of answer.

The table, every row recounted from the game logs rather than adjusted by one. Sale: 18 in 25. Elder: 15 in 26, and on the fifteen-day list. Holmes: 9 in 27. Mahle: 5 in the six he has made for Atlanta. Perez: 5 in 24. Lopez: 1 in 12. Smith-Shawver: 0 in 5. One row moved.

Perez is 35. One start is one start, and this one has a twin — seven scoreless against Washington on August 1 — so Thursday matched his longest outing of the year rather than setting it. His ERA went from 3.25 to 3.08. Wednesday I wrote that a 3.25 ERA and four quality starts in 23 "are both true, and they describe different skills," and that October only buys the second. Move both numbers and the sentence stands.

What the log says about him is stranger than either number. Nineteen of his 24 starts ended at seventeen outs or fewer, nine of them at exactly fifteen. On the five occasions he has gotten past the seventeenth out, he has never allowed more than one earned run. He is not a pitcher who gets hit in the sixth. He is a pitcher who rarely arrives there, and a round with no spare days does not ask whether a starter can survive the sixth. It asks whether he will be in it.

Five in 24 is 20.8 percent; Holmes is at 33. The mechanism is real, it is running, and for this pitcher it returns seven scoreless innings five days after eleven outs and four runs at Philadelphia. That is the messy answer. Take Elder out of the table, as the injured list has, and the fourth-best row belongs to Perez, because 5 in 24 sits above 1 in 12 and 0 in 5. That is not the same as Perez being an October starter. It is a table running short of better rows.

The offense, once. Nick Martinez allowed two hits in six and a third innings on 68 pitches without a walk, and picked Ha-Seong Kim off first in the sixth. Then, with one out in the eighth and Kevin Kelly pitching: Ozzie Albies pinch-hit and tripled to center, his first of the year; Austin Riley singled him home; Mike Yastrzemski pinch-hit and hit a ground-rule double down the right-field line; and Kim, who came to the park hitting .110, singled to center for two. Atlanta have scored 0, 1, 2 and 3 in their last four games.

The bench decided the game because Lane Thomas was not in it. He is headed to the fifteen-day injured list with a right intercostal injury, sustained in the cage before the game, per manager Walt Weiss by way of the Associated Press. Brewer Hicklen started in left in his place, and it was Hicklen that Yastrzemski hit for.

This morning I printed the division lead at 3.0 and the bye gap at 4.0, and both were right at eight o'clock. Atlanta's game ended a little after two, Philadelphia lost 2-1 to Houston, Los Angeles did not play, and by dinner the lead read 4.0 and the gap 3.5, with Los Angeles holding a game in hand and fifteen to play. The magic number is 11 by MLB's count, 12 by the arithmetic that ignores a tiebreaker Atlanta already hold. The argument does not move. The numbers moved toward it.

Philadelphia arrive Friday night, Aaron Nola against Chris Sale. What I did not allow for on Wednesday is that a mechanism can return the same name twice in a week and mean two different things by it. Perez has now supplied both readings. Somebody has to choose between them by October 3, and the table will not do it for them. Neither, after one afternoon, will I.