Jerry Manuel shuffled the Mets’ pitching rotation this week, at least partly because Mike Pelfrey has pitched better at night than during the day.
Looking at Pelfrey’s career splits, it’s true, kind of. Pelfrey is 10-13 with a 5.30 ERA during the day and 28-24 with a 4.12 ERA at night.
Of course, Pelfrey has yielded almost identical OPSes during the day and night — .775 and .769, respectively. His strikeout rate is ever-so-slightly higher during the day, as is his BABIP. The whole thing smacks of completely meaningless randomness, and if I had to bet on it, I’d guess that moving forward, Pelfrey proves equally effective at any hour of the day.
Unless — UNLESS! — he’s a vampire. Look, we can sit around rifling through spreadsheets all we want and explain how little hiccups like this one show up in splits all the time, even across relatively big samples. But that would discount the possibility that Pelfrey sucks during the day because he is crippled by the sun’s powerful rays.
I mean, just look at him:
Tedquarters 
Now to find out the reason he keeps leaving Feliciano in to face righties…
You prob didnt here it since you were at the ballpark but in the WFAN pregame Jerry mentioned the catching situation had some part of it the decision.
He said he wants to give Tholes 3 out of the five pitchers, mainly to get blanco working with Pelf again, since they worked well when Pelf was rolling early in the year, and also have Blanco catch Johan. So he decided to break up the Santana/Pelf comb so it wasnt Blanco going day after night game and going forward it wont be Blanco 2 days in a row all the time.
These types of posts are amazing. Cole Hamels must love Pelf then.