Stat Of the Day And Pitchers Hitting

From FanGraphs: In 25 plate appearances, Jamie Moyer has more walks (6) than some regular positional players. In fact, Moyer’s .348 on-base percentage is impressive when his .067 batting average is taken into account. As you can guess, Moyer leads all pitchers with at least 20 plate appearances in bases on balls. Bengie Molina, Cristian Guzman, Miguel Tejada, Marlon Byrd, and Jeff Francour are within two walks of Moyer’s range.

Yeah...that's pretty bad not only on the part of the pitchers who are walking Moyer, but the guys who are behind him in the walk column. As FanGraphs concludes:

Congratulations guys, a 40-something-year old pitcher is doing a better job at drawing a walk than you are.

Maybe having your pitchers drawing walks is the key to success, according to this FanGraphs chart. Currently the Phillies have the highest BB% followed by the Brewers and the Dodgers. All three of those teams are in first place. But more so, it's about having a high BB/K ratio which those three teams lead the NL in (in the same exact order). The Nationals are on par with the Dodgers in BB%, but have a 44.1% K rate compared to 40.3% for the Dodgers, 37.4% for the Brew Crew and 36.3% for the Phillies. The Mets lead in that category with 24.5% due to Livan Hernandez and Mike Pelfrey being the two hardest pitchers to K. But the Mets pitchers also have an ISO of .000 which means that they have exactly ZERO extra base hits from their pitchers so far--the only NL team to boast that fact.

That means that the American League Tampa Bay Rays have more extra base hits at home from their pitchers (a little DH glitch that day) than the Mets have had in 52 games in National League parks...yet the Mets are leading the Wild Card race. Go figure.