NL East’s hot and cold players
Fried enters 2023 with strong momentum, while Corbin is running on fumes
You’d be hard-pressed to find two starting pitchers who were separated by a larger performance gap in 2022 than Max Fried and Patrick Corbin.
Fried enjoyed his fourth straight season of success for the Atlanta Braves. He went 52-20 with a 3.06 ERA during the span from 2019 through 2022, capping that streak with last year’s record of 14-7 and 2.48. Fried finished second in the voting for the National League’s 2022 Cy Young Award.
Corbin made 31 starts for the Washington Nationals last season, actually surpassing Fried’s total of 30 appearances, though he fell woefully short in every other category. Corbin went 6-19 for the year — his 19 defeats were the most for any big-league pitcher — and his ERA ballooned to 6.31.
Here’s another way to view the enormous disparity between the two pitchers.
Fried finished 2022 with an overall base value (OBV) of 105. That means he yielded 105 fewer bases than the typical pitcher would have surrendered under the same workload (185.1 innings). No other player in the National League’s Eastern Division — pitcher or hitter — posted an OBV greater than 99.
Corbin, on the other hand, was the only major leaguer to reach triple digits on the negative side in OBV last year. He allowed 100 more bases than the average pitcher would have given up in identical circumstances.
Scroll below for lists of the 10 NL East players who finished 2022 with the best overall base values (presumably imbuing them with strong momentum for the coming season) and the 10 who posted the worst OBVs (seemingly saddling them with heavy burdens in the year ahead).
You can find similar lists for the American League’s three divisions through these links: AL East, AL Central, and AL West. (The NL Central and West will be discussed in the coming two weeks.)
And you can get team-by-team breakdowns of OBV in the newly published Baseball’s Best (and Worst) 2023 Yearbook.
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Best OBV in NL East (2022)
Fried was joined by two other Braves in the division’s top 10.
Third baseman Austin Riley hit 38 homers and drove in 93 runs for Atlanta, amassing an OBV of 99. (That means, of course, that he reached 99 more bases than the typical batter would have attained.) And rookie starting pitcher Spencer Strider had an overall base value of 83.
The Philadelphia Phillies also placed three players among the NL East’s 10 best in 2022: pitcher Aaron Nola, left fielder Kyle Schwarber, and catcher J.T. Realmuto. The other slots were spread among the New York Mets (two), Miami Marlins (one), and Nationals (one).
Perhaps the most impressive performance was that of Juan Soto, who piled up an OBV of 87 in just four months before the Nationals traded him to the San Diego Padres. Soto is the only member of the NL East’s top 10 who won’t remain in the division in 2023:
1. Max Fried, Braves, 105
2. Austin Riley, Braves, 99
3. Pete Alonso, Mets, 97
4. Sandy Alcantara, Marlins, 92
5. Aaron Nola, Phillies, 90
6. Kyle Schwarber, Phillies, 87
6. Juan Soto, Nationals, 87
8. Spencer Strider, Braves, 83
9. Max Scherzer, Mets, 75
10. J.T. Realmuto, Phillies, 70
Baseball’s Best (and Worst) 2023 Yearbook
A complete rundown of 2022 stats — and a look ahead at the season to come
Worst OBV in NL East (2022)
Corbin easily outdistanced the field to lead this unhappy list, which is split evenly between five members of the Nationals and five of the Marlins.
The two runners-up, Josiah Gray and Erick Fedde, joined Corbin in the Nationals’ starting rotation last year. Gray went 7-10 with a 5.02 ERA and an overall base value of minus-72. He remains on Washington’s roster for 2023, but Fedde was non-tendered after going 6-13, 5.81, with a minus-70 OBV.
Two other players in the bottom 10 will leave the division in 2023. Washington cut ties with third baseman Maikel Franco, and Miami traded shortstop Miguel Rojas to the Los Angeles Dodgers.
The Marlins also got rid of pitcher Elieser Hernandez, though he remains in the NL East, having been dealt to the Mets.
1. Patrick Corbin, Nationals, -100
2. Josiah Gray, Nationals, -72
3. Erick Fedde, Nationals, -70
4. Maikel Franco, Nationals, -58
5. Elieser Hernandez, Marlins, -56
6. Miguel Rojas, Marlins, -53
7. Avisail Garcia, Marlins, -52
8. Jacob Stallings, Marlins, -51
9. Trevor Rogers, Marlins, -48
9. Joan Adon, Nationals, -48
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