It seems as if the media and fans alike have deemed pitcher Brayan Bello’s performance on Wednesday night at Fenway Park against the Toronto Blue Jays as his “arrival” to the big leagues after his box score finally matched the eye test.
The truth is, Bello has been putting up promising performances all along, he just doesn’t have the game-level stats to prove it.
The top pitching prospect in the system (No. 3 overall according to MLB Pipeline) allowed two earned runs on six hits, and a walk with a career-high seven strikeouts over the course of a career-high five innings to bring his season ERA down to a still wildly inflated 7.36 through six games.
That said, the rookie is one of the most unlucky pitchers in Major League Baseball through 22 innings of work and likely will see his numbers come back down to the mean as his sample size increases.
Bello’s aforementioned 7.36 ERA is nothing to write home about but he features a 3.25 expected ERA, a more reliable mark to trust given his lack of workload and sub-optimal defense behind him. Another metric to follow is his batting average allowed of a humbling .362, which is almost twice as high as his expected batting average of .220.
There’s a lot of soft contact resulting in damage against Bello due to a rotating cast of defenders impacting his ability to turn in high-level production with his elite ground ball rate (67.6% of balls put in play).
While this specific instance didn’t appear to hinder the flame-throwing right-hander, the Red Sox were so banged up on Wednesday that Bobby Dalbec was forced to play shortstop. Bello will be much better off if he can log some starts with shortstop Xander Bogaerts, second baseman Trevor Story and center fielder Kiké Hernández up the middle.
Fans got to see Bello’s electric fastball velocity and movement Wednesday paired with a changeup that fooled some of the premier hitters in the high-powered Blue Jays lineup. With time, his game-level stats should drop toward the expected as his potential and production align in Boston. Once that happens, he’ll become a frontline starter, maybe even an ace.
