highly skewed due to your arbitrary start and end points And his first six starts stats that NPC posted are highly skewed by Smoltz's ridiculously good first two starts. My point was that some people were freaking out that Smoltz had two great starts right after going to the Cardinals and started spouting all of that pixie dust BS but since then he's been average at best. His two starts against the Brewers (4 ER in 6 IP and 3 ER in 5 IP) were below average, though his WHIP and K's were solid. He had solid starts against the Cubs and Houston before getting lit up by Cincinnati. So in his last five starts, two were good, two were below average and one was bad. That's probably slightly below average overall. His ERA in those starts is a run worse than the NL starters average but the WHIP is right at the average. why are you using era and writing off whip and k/bb? he has been good in 5 of his 7 starts Who says I'm writing off WHIP and K/BB. His ERA being a run worse than average in those five starts is bad but his WHIP was average. I said he was slightly below average. He's also given up 12 XBH out of his 29 in that run (41 percent), while the league average is 33 percent and for starters it's 34.5 percent. That's below average. That, combined with his not walking a lot of people tells me he's throwing a lot of strikes but it's hit or miss in terms of how good his pitches are. But like I said, you completely missed the main point of my post. i don't think so. you posted a split that implied smoltz was great in his first 2 starts and then average his next 5. i think your post was misleading, unless you're going to judge a pitcher by era (and you shouldn't). he was bad in his last start, but in the previous 4 starts he had a 1.13 whip, a 22/3 k/bb (23 ip) and a .681 OPS. i don't see how you can possibly say that's below average. nonprofitcow's split was much more telling. oh and before someone says something again, i'm not even fighting. relax.