Change of Pace

We did this a few times last year, and it seems to have fairly decent predictive qualities for future success.

We are looking at which pitchers have the largest discrepancy between their fastball and change-up average velocities.

Best and Worst, with Stats

It started this morning. Checking out a few things on leaderboards, I noticed that Jamie Moyer, a personal favorite, had an unsightly 1.75 WHIP. Yet, his BB/9 was a better than average 3.14. Naturally, his H/9 was going to be bad. How bad? The worst among ERA qualifiers: 12.6 H/9 ip. Checking to see what score lead the category in this young season, I saw Gio Gonzalez leads the league with a 5.3 H/9.

I'm taking this opportunity to look for other Best and Worst from certain stats that will hopefully raise an eyebrow or two. I'm not just going to say so-and-so has the highest whatever and so-and-so has the lowest. Let's look for something surprising, or as Neal Page would say, mildly amusing.

Without further ado, we present our first ever Best and Worst:

All stats through May 24, 2012 and exclude non-qualifiers...

State of the Disabled List

Jason Martinez, of the remarkably comprehensive website MLBdepthcharts.com, tweeted a keen observation on Sunday:

According to my calculations, there are 166 players on the DL. #Padres lead league with 14. #Rangers have none. 43 players on DL in AL East.
— Jason Martinez (@mlbdepthcharts) May 21, 2012

For brevity's sake, let's cut the small talk and take a closer look at how the DL is affecting each team. With the help of Jason's website and Cot's Contracts, we present our findings of teams most affected to least affected, by dollars.

Thoughts from the Air

A view from the cockpit.

It's Saturday morning, and I'm flying from New York to Chicago, with aspirations to see the Dodgers at Wrigley this afternoon.

Thinking back on recent days around baseball, developments have been a mix of good and bad.