While Rasmussen is still expected to be very effective this season by SIERA, there are reasons to believe that he may not finish with a sub-3.00 ERA. Rasmussen currently owns the 12th-lowest BABIP in baseball (.248) and the 24th-highest strand rate. Moving forward, more balls in play may drop in for hits \u2014 which could lead to more earned runs.<\/p>\n
Rasmussen also sports the 16th-highest zone contact rate (87.2%), meaning that even though he\u2019s able to prevent free passes, he\u2019s not fooling many hitters by living around the zone.<\/p>\n
Despite generating less whiff on average, Rasmussen still does well with limiting hard contact. He\u2019s in the top 18% of pitchers in average exit velocity against, likely due to his effective six-pitch arsenal. Four of Rasmussen\u2019s offerings grade as above average, per Stuff+, and he ranks sixth in all of baseball in Pitching+, which combines the effectiveness of his pitches with his ability to locate them.<\/p>\n
While Rasmussen\u2019s ERA may slightly regress due to poorer luck on batted balls moving forward, there\u2019s little question that he will continue to be an impactful starter. <\/p>\n
2026 Stats: 50 IP, 2.52 ERA, 1.04 WHIP, 15.3% K-BB%, 3.82 SIERA<\/p>\n
Nobody really knew what to expect from McClanahan this year. The 2022 AL Cy Young award winner had been out since August of 2023, due to elbow and tricep injuries.<\/p>\n
Despite losing 1.4 mph of fastball velocity since his last big-league season, McClanahan has adapted and managed to be effective. He\u2019s throwing a fastball rated 15% worse than average by Stuff+, but his arsenal grades as eight percent better than average. That puts McClanahan\u2019s pitch-mix in the top 15 of all starters with at least 50 IP, in terms of stuff.<\/p>\n
A big reason for McClanahan\u2019s success has been the effectiveness of his changeup, which Stuff+ grades as one of baseball\u2019s best. Opposing batters are posting just a .356 OPS and a .017 ISO against the pitch, good for a 15 wRC+.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"While Rasmussen is still expected to be very effective this season by SIERA, there are reasons to believe…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":287719,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[135,137,136],"class_list":["post-287718","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tampa","tag-tampa","tag-tampa-headlines","tag-tampa-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/287718","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=287718"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/287718\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/287719"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=287718"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=287718"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=287718"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}