I thought this was a sort of interesting pitching matchup. To me they are quite different pitchers. But they both appear to be the ace of their staff. I tried fangraphs for a comparison, but Lohse didn't seem to be in the system to compare to Hamels. First time I've been to their site, pretty cool.

Anyway, here's a short summary of Hamels' '08 performance as per baseballreference.com:

To start out with the obvious, the guy is 9-6 in 22 games pitching in over 154 innings of work.  He's dished out 122 hits this season, 21 of them being home runs (or about 17% of those hits). 56 runs have been charged to him over the season, and he'll strike you out about 3 and a half times before he'll walk you. His Walks + HIts Per inning pitched is 1.043, which is second in the NL (behind our friend Dan Haren). Eek!

Lohse, on the other hand, is quite the different story. He has a much better win-loss record at 9-3 (win percentage wise) and has pitched one more game. Despite his innings eater rep (he's going a steady 6 innings per start), he has pitched 15 innings less than Hamels. Guess Hamels is hungrier for innings. Lohse has given up 145 hits, but he is quite staunch on the long ball, only letting 8% of those hits fly outta the yard (I'm sure Busch III is helping out though).  Lohse has given up just one more earned run than Cole, so they are about equal there (Hamels ERA is around 3.3, Lohse about 3.7 as one would imagine). Kyle's strikeout to walk ratio is 2.25 to 1, so nowhere near as illustrious as Cole's. Lohse WHIP is 1.27, so he's clearly outclassed in that department.

Here's the interesting part: their WPA is 1.21 vs. 1.24. Now that's pretty close, considering most of Hamels' stats are league elite, and Lohse is just above average. Should be a good game (if our bullpen is handled correctly and performs better than they have been lately). I think that seeing that Lohse isn't exactly going deep into a lot of games shows that the bullpen is probably overtaxed, as he's our most durable starter last time I checked. In fact, for the last month or two, he's been our only true starter (sorry Pineiro, you gotta do better than that). Since our offense seems to be quite the unpredictable beast, let's hope this is a great and triumphant Battle of the Aces! (probably the last time we'll call Lohse that for, well, hopefully ever).