Pick No. 7: Troy Melton has been about to regress for 13 straight starts
The call: Detroit takes Saturday afternoon at Comerica. Confidence: low.
Troy Melton has a 1.46 ERA in 13 starts, and the reason everybody gives for not believing it is his batting average on balls in play. It's .196. Of the 145 pitchers with 70 innings and 10 starts this season, nobody else is under .218, and the median is .286.
BABIP is the number you look at when a pitcher's results are better than his strikeouts and walks say they should be, because what happens to a ball once it's in play is mostly out of the pitcher's hands. It's the standard tell for a season that's going to come apart.
So here's the thing I keep waiting for and it hasn't happened.
Thirteen starts, and it has never gone anywhere
That's his season BABIP recalculated after every start he's made. From his 3rd start onward it has lived between .155 and .197. Not once has it poked above .200. The median starter's line is up there at .286 and the line just never travels toward it.
| After start | Innings | Season ERA | Season BABIP |
|---|---|---|---|
| May 24, Baltimore | 5.2 | 1.59 | .125 |
| May 29, Chicago | 12.2 | 1.42 | .190 |
| Jun 3, Tampa Bay | 20.2 | 1.74 | .175 |
| Jun 9, Minnesota | 25.2 | 2.81 | .197 |
| Jun 20, Chicago | 31.2 | 2.56 | .169 |
| Jun 25, Houston | 37.2 | 2.39 | .157 |
| Jul 1, Yankees | 44.0 | 2.05 | .155 |
| Jul 8, Athletics | 49.1 | 1.82 | .172 |
| Jul 17, Angels | 55.0 | 1.80 | .188 |
| Jul 23, Kansas City | 60.0 | 1.95 | .197 |
| Jul 28, Baltimore | 67.0 | 1.75 | .195 |
| Aug 4, Seattle | 74.0 | 1.58 | .191 |
| Aug 9, San Francisco | 80.0 | 1.46 | .196 |
I've been on the wrong side of this. A week ago I wrote that the 1.58 was a mirage and that somewhere between it and league average was the real Melton. He threw 6 shutout innings the next night and the ERA went down. That's 1 start and it proves nothing, and I want to be careful not to swing the other way off it.
The case that it's still a mirage is not the BABIP anymore
It's the strikeouts. Melton has 69 in 80 innings, which is fine and is not special, and 24 walks. Run his home runs, walks, hit batters and strikeouts through fielding independent pitching, using this season's own league totals to set the constant rather than a remembered one, and you get 3.62.
| Innings | ERA | FIP | Gap | HR | BB | HBP | K | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Troy Melton | 80.0 | 1.46 | 3.62 | +2.16 | 8 | 24 | 2 | 69 |
| Anthony Kay | 116.0 | 3.96 | 4.79 | +0.83 | 15 | 43 | 21 | 94 |
A gap of 2.16 is enormous. League ERA is 4.16, so FIP is calling him roughly an average major league starter having the best year in baseball on contact.
The honest wrinkle, and I didn't expect it when I ran the numbers: Saturday's opposing starter is doing the same thing. Anthony Kay's ERA is 3.96 and his FIP is 4.79. Both of these guys are outrunning their peripherals. Melton is just doing it by two and a half times as much.
Kay has hit 21 batters and second place has hit 14
Same population as the chart above, the 145 starters with real workloads. Kay leads all of them in hit batsmen by 7. He's also walked 43 in 116 innings, which is 3.3 per 9, and his WHIP is 1.34 against Melton's 0.90.
He is not, however, bad. 3.96 is a perfectly useful season and he's made 22 starts for a first place team. He faced Detroit once, on May 30 in Chicago, went 5 innings and gave up 1 run, and the White Sox won 7-1.
Why I like Detroit
Melton has faced this exact team twice and it went well both times. May 29 in Chicago, 7 innings, 1 earned run. June 20 at Comerica, 6 innings, 1 earned run. That's 13 innings and 2 runs against a lineup he'll see for a 3rd time Saturday, which cuts both ways and I'll get to that.
Detroit is home, and the home team had won all 6 games in this season series until Friday night. And the shape of the 2 teams since June 1 is still not the shape the standings say: Detroit 38-24 at plus 125 runs, Chicago 31-31 at plus
- Chicago's lead is a 32-27 start that Detroit has spent the summer eating into.
What scares me
Detroit does not hit lefties. .701 against left handers, .738 against right handers, and Kay throws left handed. Chicago is dead even at .730 and .728, so this is a Detroit specific thing, not a league wide one.
That gets worse when you look at who's missing. Riley Greene, Kerry Carpenter, Matt Vierling and James Outman are all on the injured list, and Friday's outfield was Max Clark, Javier Baez and Ben Malgeri with 2 rookies in it. A lineup that already struggles against lefties is short its regulars against a lefty.
The third time is real. Melton has now faced Chicago twice. Hitters get better the more they see a pitcher, and a guy whose whole season is built on soft contact is exactly the profile that suffers when a lineup has seen the shapes before.
And the thing under all of it. If the FIP is right and the BABIP finally moves, it's going to move in some particular game, and there is no way to know which one. Thirteen starts of it not happening is not a guarantee about the 14th. It just means I've stopped treating the correction as something I can schedule.
Tigers win. Low. Better pitcher, at home, off a loss, against a lefty who walks people and hits people. What I can't tell you is whether Detroit scores enough off him with the lineup they've currently got.
Sources: MLB Stats API, pulled 2026-08-15, for the probables, both pitchers' season lines and full game logs, the 145 qualifying starters and their BABIP and hit batsmen, league pitching totals for the FIP constant, both clubs' hitting splits by opposing hand, the season series and the Detroit transactions feed. Chart and every number in it come from one run of scripts/melton_mirage.py.
Not betting advice. Just calls, made in public and kept in public.
Got a Detroit number you want looked at? Email projectunmuted@proton.me and it gets looked at properly. A stat somebody quoted that smells wrong, a thing you have always assumed about one of these 4 teams and have never seen checked. Every question that arrives is listed with its answer, including the ones where the answer is no.