Mets' Dillon Gee leads baseball in pace of play

It's been a great month for Mets starting pitchers. Bartolo Colon, Jacob deGrom, and Jon Niese all have ERAs under 3.00. Matt Harvey is undefeated after spending an entire season off the mound. But one member of the starting rotation has surely begun to feel left out; after three starts, Dillon Gee is 0-1 with a 5.60 ERA.

FanGraphs' Carson Cistulli has discovered a silver lining for the fifth man in the Mets' rotation. When it comes to Cistulli's aptly named NERD score, which measures a player's "aesthetic appeal or watchability," Gee scores a healthy 9 out of 10. This is due in part to Gee's better-than-expected FIP, but what sets him apart is that he also leads all pitchers in pace of play.

Gee scored well above the second-place pitcher, Max Scherzer, in a metric that determines a pitcher's overall pace of play by looking at his average time between pitches and his percentage of strikes thrown. So far this year, Gee has thrown strikes 72.4 percent of the time while averaging just 16.4 seconds between pitches. Scherzer, meanwhile, has a 71.4 percent strike rate, and has taken a comparatively glacial 19.2 seconds between each pitch.

Dillon Gee may not be having the best April, but at least his outings haven't evoked memories of the Steve Trachsel era.