A statistical look at Zach Britton's amazing start to this season

Sometimes the stat sheet doesn't tell the whole story. For O's reliever Zach Britton right now, it tells a lot. He is pitching well, he is pitching often, and he is pitching with great sink on his low to mid 90s two-seamer. Britton is 3-0 with an ERA of 0.89 in 15 games. He has already pitched 20 1/3 innings to lead all O's relievers. No one else has thrown more than the 12 2/3 frames pitched by Tommy Hunter and Ryan Webb. Britton has faced 79 batters this year and no other O's reliever had faced more than 56. Britton's sinker has been devastating. So much so that, among all major league pitchers that have worked 20 or more innings this year, no one comes close to his ground-to-air out ratio. Here are the MLB leaders (min, 20 IP): 11.75 - Zach Britton, Orioles 4.44 - Jake Petricka, Chicago White Sox 3.38 - Burke Badenhop, Boston 3.13 - Justin Masterson, Cleveland Britton has gotten 83.9 percent of his outs via a groundball, that is an amazingly high amount. The next highest is Badenhop at 67.7 percent. Britton gets 7.1 percent of his outs with a ball hit in the air and nine percent via a strikeout. Britton has pitched on back-to-back days four times this season including the last two days at Tampa Bay. He has actually now pitched three games in a row, but he got an off day when the entire team was off on Monday. I would expect we won't see him tonight. Right now he has yielded a batting average against of just .155 overall, which works out to .129 against left-handed hitters and .175 against right-handed batters. He's pitching often, he's pitching well, he's getting an amazing amount of ground ball outs. Britton is having a great start to his season, and when he blew a fastball past Evan Longoria last night, it was just the latest example of how good he's been this year.