The Blue Jays have acquired young righty Bryan Baker from the Rockies, according to Robert Murray of The Athletic (via Twitter). Baker represents the player to be named later from the pre-deadline deal that sent reliever Seunghwan Oh to Colorado, Jon Heyman of Fancred tweets.
That swap has already paid dividends for the Rox, who have received 8 2/3 innings of 2.08 ERA ball from Oh. On the other side, the Jays had already welcomed youngsters Chad Spanberger and Forrest Wall into their system under the pact.
Baker becomes the third and final piece of the trade. Now 23, he came to the professional ranks as an 11th-round pick in the 2016 draft. Baker has worked as a reliever for the past two seasons, so it seems likely he’ll be developed as a potential future bullpen asset.
Though he showed quite well in 2017, Baker has had some struggles this season. He has allowed a palatable tally of 19 earned runs through 45 innings, and compiled a healthy 11.6 K/9, but has seen a whopping 17 unearned runs cross the plate as well. There are obviously a variety contributing factors to that, but one of them is surely the fact that he’s exhibiting newfound command issues (6.8 BB/9).
How would command issues lead to that many unearned runs? It’s still earned even if he walks them on/in.
Wild pitches
Still earned runs. They have to be passed balls to be unearned.
Lots of people on base when the errors are made.
Probably due to extra base runners with the amount of walks, so when errors occur with the extra base runners more unearned runs.
That’s a crazy ER/UER ratio! That’s 3.4 Unearned runs per 9!
Weirdly the rest of the pitching staff doesn’t seem to have the same luck…next closest is 1.8 UERA.
All those extra outs are really going to skew some numbers. Longer innings = more batters to walk = inflated bb/9