Posted Saturday at 11:20 AM EST. 

7:10 PM EST. Josh Tomlin is one of those rare finesse right-handers that attempts to keep hitters off balance the entire game. It often works. Tomlin also brings his elite control, as evidenced by his 12 walks in 114 innings this season. To score on Tomlin, the A’s are going to have to string together some hits or take Tomlin deep. Should Tomlin give up some runs, it isn’t likely to matter because the Indians figure to tee off on Dillon Overton and that’s what this wager is based on.

There is a relatively new metric in baseball which measures the speed of balls being hit out of the park. Another term being used is “exit velocity”. Along with that metric are other metrics that include average distance of balls in play, average speed of balls in play, average speed of grounders and average speed of line-drives. It’s actually a very significant metric because it reveals the pitchers that get squared up on often. There are a bunch of relievers that are near or at the top of the list of pitchers that are getting squared up on often but we’re not interested in relievers. Some of the names of the starters that are getting whacked are Kyle Lohse, Paul Clemens, Erik Johnson, Joe Kelly, Phil Hughes, Adam Morgan, John Danks and Justin Nicolino among others. What those pitchers have in common is that they are either used to riding buses or have been cut, traded or benched more than once.

At the top of the list of starters getting rocked is Dillon Overton. His average distance of balls in play is 270 feet. That is the highest mark among starters and it's a remarkable number.  All of Dillon’s other metrics in this “new-found” group of metrics are weak and this is precisely the park and team that figures to expose that in a big way. Dillon’s groundball/fly-ball split is 22%/55%. His hr/f rate is 19%. He has a WHIP of 1.93 so when someone goes deep on him, there is very likely going to be men on base. Dillon is in because Rich Hill is out. He’s pitched all of his games thus far at pitcher’s parks with two games at home and one on the road at the Big A in Anaheim. After those three starts, his ERA is 8.40 with an oppBA of .358. He’ll now make his first start at a hitter’s park and we can’t imagine for a second that it’s going to turn out well for this batting practice machine.  

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