Monday: Commentator Query: The Enigmatic CJ Wilson

During Saturday night's victory over the Twins, Dave Barnett (switching to the TV side of the broadcast in the absence of Josh Lewin) said:

"[CJ] Wilson's gotten stronger as the season has progressed."

There are several ways to interpret this statement, and I'm mostly just using Barnett's comment as an excuse to show off CJ's impressive numbers this year, rather than point out a flaw in something he said. Thus, a disclaimer is in order: make no mistake about it, CJ has been absolutely outstanding this season; his 2.90 ERA in 59.0 innings speaks to that.

However, his ERA hasn't exactly improved (on a month to month basis) since his stellar month of May, as this month by month look displays (though his season ERA, until this month, has been steadily decreasing since his forgettable month of April, which may give the illusion that he's been improving his monthly ERAs):

Month -- ERA -- Innings

April -- 6.52 -- 9.2
May -- 0.00 -- 11.0
June -- 2.38 -- 11.1
July -- 2.51 -- 14.1
August -- 3.55 -- 12.2

Perhaps Barnett meant to convey CJ's consistency this year, which is inarguable. He may have also been referring to CJ's dominance of opposing hitters (in other words, since ERA is such a fickle stat for relief pitchers, it may not be as reliable as we had hoped). If this is what Barnett meant, he was correct, as this post-April month by month look at CJ's strikeouts per inning shows:

Month -- strikeouts/inning

May -- .36
June -- 1.24
July -- 1.26
August -- 1.66

Wow. In case you need some reference for that, Nolan Ryan's career strikeouts/inning ratio was 1.06 . . .