What with the phenomenon of starting pitchers "giving ground" performance-wise (see the previous post, being written later...), we really may see the first year in baseball history where the CG total fails to break into triple figures.
Last year there were 40 CGs going into July, and we wound up with 60 more to wind up with exactly 100 for the season. As we've noted before, there is a tendency for CGs to increase in frequency in the second half of the year, so while the current projection when extrapolated without adjustment suggests around 80 CGs, we expect that number to somewhere between 92-96.
June produced only 12 CGs, as opposed to 20 in May. Parallel with the Indians' late June streak, their starting pitchers were not only pitching extremely well (bucking that trend we reported on earlier, being written later--what can we say: blogs are backwards...) but they were going deep into games like nobody's business (4 CGs for the month, and three in four days).
What else can we say? These CG pitchers this year are really smokin' in terms of hit prevention. Ten out of the eleven most recent CGs have been "1S" games according to QMAX.
