Mark Simon, ESPN Staff 8y

No one can hit Blue Jays starter Marco Estrada

The pitcher with the lowest opponents’ batting average in the majors won Wednesday, and we’re not talking about Max Scherzer.

The leader in that stat is Toronto Blue Jays starter Marco Estrada, who held the Houston Astros to four hits in seven innings in a 3-1 victory.

Opposing hitters are batting .180 against him, even better than last season, when opponents hit .203, the lowest against any starter in the American League.

It’s now a two-year run for Estrada in which he has outperformed his strikeout, walk and home runs allowed totals. Last season, he posted a 3.13 ERA when his FIP (Fielding Independent Pitching -- an ERA estimator based on those three stats) was 4.40. This season, his ERA is 2.92 and his FIP is 3.81.

Estrada excels because he gets a lot of weakly hit popups. His 27 percent hard-hit rate ranks 10th lowest in baseball. The Blue Jays turn 77 percent of the balls hit in the air against Estrada into outs. That’s the highest rate in the majors and one that dropped slightly; he recorded outs on 10 of 14 balls hit in the air (71 percent) on Wednesday.

Though Estrada doesn’t get ground balls often, when he does, they are vacuumed up by the Blue Jays’ infield. Estrada gets outs on 79 percent of the ground balls and bunts hit against him, a rate that ranks 12th lowest in the majors. He got outs on all five grounders that the Astros hit Wednesday.

Estrada has three pitches against which he holds opponents to a sub-.200 batting average -- his fastball, his changeup and his cutter.

On Wednesday, he dominated with the changeup. Astros hitters went 1-for-13 with six strikeouts against it. He threw it 38 percent of the time, his highest usage rate this season.

Astros hitters swung at 24 of the 37 changeups he threw (a 65 percent swing rate) that ranked third highest for him this season. The Astros missed on 10 of those 24 swings. His 42 percent miss rate was right in line with his season average, but because he threw so many changeups, the 10 misses matched his second most in a start this season.

Estrada also benefited from the work of catcher Russell Martin. His 3.17 called strikes above average was his third-highest total in a start this season. Martin helped Estrada with two called strikes on pitches that had a strike probability below 25 percent. That marked the fourth time this season Estrada has gotten multiple such called strikes (which we refer to as "framed strikes") in a game.

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