How good has Rays pitching and defense been this season?
Buckle up for this one: The Tampa Bay Rays have had the best run prevention performance since the 1909 Cubs.
Really.
Comparing baseball stats across seasons or decades generally requires mental gymnastics. It’s not clear whether an elite relief pitcher would best Babe Ruth when the two may has well have played different sports.
But what we can compare is performance against league average in a given season. That’s where statistics like ERA- come in, which I’ll let the FanGraphs library fully describe:
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ERA Minus, FIP Minus, and xFIP Minus are the pitching version of OPS+ and wRC+ and are a simple way to tell how well a player performed in relation to league average.