The visitors from an unincorporated community in Atlanta’s northern suburbs gave Bailey Ober a real beating Monday night. Mother Nature provided plenty of fireworks and noise, but before that happened, the Atlanta batters did their part. The Twins starter might not have pitched past the second inning even in perfect weather; he allowed a whopping nine runs in those two innings.

When Ober experiences games like this, Twins fans are pretty quick to wax philosophical about it and say he’s a bit vulnerable to it. The Royals seem to understand Ober, and have put him in trouble twice earlier this season. He’s generally a very reliable starting pitcher, but close Twins observers almost unanimously agree that he’s unusually vulnerable to a blow-up start, considering how good he is overall.

The thing is: no, he is not.

While Ober’s miscues may be a bit worse than others, it’s important to recognize that the difference between nine runs in two innings and six runs in three is practically zero. As a starting pitcher, if you allow five or more runs in the first 12 outs, you’re putting your team behind for that contest. Ober’s particularly flashy miscues aren’t fun to watch, but they’re no more costly than other, less flashy miscues. So I created two statistical categories:

• Strong starts: Unlike Quality Starts, a somewhat old-fashioned metric that counts as “quality” any outing with at least six innings pitched and no more than three earned runs allowed, Strong Starts reflect the changing priorities of teams playing in MLB in the 2020s. A Strong Start is any outing in which a pitcher lasts at least until the sixth inning and allows no more than two runs – earned or not.
• Magnifications: The opposite of a strong start, and much rarer, a blowup is any start in which a pitcher allows at least five runs in the first four innings. Teams that score at least that many innings win 86.3% of their games, so when a starter allows that many runs in that short amount of time, it’s as good as giving up the game.

Ober, as you might expect, excels at getting strong starts. Among the 77 pitchers with at least 60 regular season starts in MLB since the start of the 2022 season, he ranks 12th in strong start rate at 59.7%. This group of frequently used starters gets off to a strong start on average 51.9 percent of the time.

At the same time, that same group has a blowup in 17.6 percent of their appearances, on average. Ober, however, is at 13.9%, the 13th-lowest in the group. In other words, he’s right where you’d expect him to be, given his overall quality and tendency to get off to strong starts. Here’s a scatter plot showing the strong-start and blowup rates of all 77 of those pitchers, with the qualified pitchers highlighted with the Twins.

Although Ober is more likely to allow eight runs than Joe Ryan or Pablo López, he is no more likely to put his team in overwhelmingly unfavorable position. In fact, he is less likely. At the same time, he is more likely than the others to give his team a particularly good chance to win. The only pitchers in this group of 77 who surpass Ober in both strong start rate and blowup rate are Blake Snell, Michael Wacha and Max Fried.

In other words, don’t worry about Ober’s bizarre missteps. As long as he doesn’t have an isolated incident of ineffectiveness more than every few months, he should be considered a legitimate top-tier starter, if not quite as good as some true aces. He’s as consistently solid as almost any starter in baseball, and the cruelty of his worst losses doesn’t make them any more damaging than the less dramatic failures of other pitchers.