 |  |
| Pineiro | Jurrjens |
| 3-0, 4.12 | 2-1, 1.42 |
God help us, Joel Pineiro was recently described as an ace in a USA Today teaser. Such is the value of the pitcher's win. The results have been better so far, but the peripherals aren't exactly scintillating; neither his five strikeouts and six walks nor his relatively tame transformation into a groundball pitcher—a 1.26 GB/FB ratio, as compared to 0.92 last year—portend great things, and he probably won't continue to allow home runs on just four percent of fly balls.
Luckily, Jair (as in Zaire, I think) Jurrjens (as in Jurrjens) hasn't exactly pitched to that 1.42 ERA himself. Jurrjens had a fine rookie season last year, and he's certainly established himself as a sustainably good starter, but his continued ability to take the home run completely out of the equation—just 11 in his 214 innings with the Braves—is more or less a larger sample version of Pineiro's current dilemma.