The quality of Yu Darvish’s stuff is glaringly obvious. His fastball sits between 91-95 MPH and has serious run, while he throws a pair of breaking balls that dive differently and works in an 89 MPH cutter with late action. And, he’s got a wide enough variety of options to give hitters a lot of different looks.

As you can see, there are no distinct clumps there. He’s thrown curveballs at 66 MPH, curveballs at 80 MPH, and pretty much everything in between. His slider has been between 80 and 86, and then his three fastballs give him the ability to go anywhere between 88 and 95. This is the repertoire of a guy who should miss a lot of bats.

And yet, after three starts, Darvish just isn’t fooling anyone. 333 pitches into his big league career, and opposing batters have made contact on 81.6% of the pitches he’s thrown. Major League average for a starting pitcher in 2012 is 81.7%. For comparison, the other pitchers with contact rates between 81.0-81.9% include Doug Fister, Felix Doubront, Jake Arrieta, R.A. Dickey, Ervin Santana, Mark Buehrle, Jamie Moyer, Jaime Garcia, Ryan Vogelsong, Jonathan Sanchez, Ian Kennedy, and Freddy Garcia.

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When the Twins signed 30-year-old right-hander Jared Burton to a minor league contract this winter, it was little more than a blip on the offseason radar. He managed to rack up 1.3 WAR in 161 relief innings for a Reds from 2007-2009 after being taken from the Athletics in the Rule 5 Draft, but hyperthyroidism and shoulder surgery limited him to just eight big league innings in 2010 and 2011. Relievers get hurt and drop off the baseball radar, it’s what they do.

Burton appears to have avoided that fate, at least for the time being. He had a strong Spring Training and made Minnesota’s bullpen with an assist to Scott Baker’s elbow injury. Through five innings across six appearances, he’s struck out six batters and walked zero. He did surrender two solo homers in his first game, so it’s going to take some time for him to work off that 5.40 ERA and 6.32 FIP. Burton has allowed just one baserunner (a single) since that first game.

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Friday marks the 100th anniversary of the first baseball game played at Fenway Park. The Boston Red Sox christened their new stadium on April 20, 1912 in a game against the New York Yankees. Those two teams will commemorate that first Fenway Park game by playing on Friday in throwback uniforms evocative of the time.  The game will start at 3:00 in the afternoon, just like that first game 100 years ago.

The Red Sox won the World Series in their inaugural season in Fenway Park, beating the New York Giants four games to three. But the Red Sox failed to makes the playoffs in any significant anniversary year. They missed the playoffs in the years of the 25th, 50th and 75th anniversaries, recording a winning record only in the 25th anniversary year. That year (1937) they went 80-72 but finished fifth out of eight American League teams. They also missed the playoffs in the years of the 20th, 40th, 60th and 80th anniversaries. In all but one of those seasons, they had a losing record. Only in the 60th anniversary year of Fenway Park did the Red Sox have a winning record, going 85-70 in 1972 and finishing second in the American League East.

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UPDATE: Toronto’s Drew Hutchison (the fourth-best prospect in the organization entering the season, according to Marc Hulet) will make his major-league debut against Kansas City (Luis Mendoza, 9.2 IP, 136 xFIP-) on Saturday at 19:10 ET. Hulet recently previewed Hutchison’s forthcoming start in more depth. Here’s what the right-hander did so far this year at three Double-A starts: 16.2 IP, 6.48 K/9, 1.62 BB/9, 0.54 HR/9, 3.08 FIP.

Below are brief previews for select weekend games — each including the preferred television feed of FanGraphs readers, per the results of our offseason crowdsourcing project.

Note: all stats are current as of Thursday.

Other note: for the benefit of those whose viewing options are limited, each day contains a preview for that day’s featured MLB.TV Free Game.

Friday, April 20th
Minnesota at Tampa Bay | 19:10 ET
Matt Moore makes his third start of the season. To the surprise of many — including the handsome author — he currently possesses the highest xFIP (6.09) of the league’s 105 qualified starters, with the fourth-lowest ground-ball rate (27.5%) and fifth-highest walk rate (15.5%) of that same sample… He faces Minnesota’s Liam Hendriks. The right-hander was pretty excellent in his season debut on April 15th. Line: 6.0 IP, 23 TBF, 4 K, 0 BB, 7 GB on 19 batted-balls (36.8% GB), 3.22 xFIP… After finishing last season with the league’s third-worst team wRC+ (84), the Twins are average through their first 12 games, having posted a collective 103 wRC+ (better than Detroit’s 102 wRC+, for example). Leaders: Josh Willingham, 225 wRC+ (.379 BABIP) and 0.7 WAR; Denard Span, 138 wRC+ (.400 BABIP) and 0.4 WAR; and Justin Morneau, 153 wRC+ (.286 BABIP) and 0.4 WAR… Tampa Bay features one of the league’s better center-field camera angles, although the pleasure provided by said camera is mitigated by the shadowy interior of Tropicana Field.

Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: Tampa Bay.

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A number of big-league position players were once pitchers. Blessed with strong arms, they excelled on the mound, as well as at the plate, against amateur competition. Only a few would be able to return to the hill with any chance of success against professional hitters. Rangers first baseman Mitch Moreland is among them.

In high school, Moreland logged a record of 25-2 and in his senior year he had a 0.53 ERA with 112 strikeouts in 55 innings. Continuing as a two-way player at Mississippi State, he made 25 appearances out of the bullpen, logging a pair of saves and going 5-0, 3.31 with 45 strikeouts in 33 innings. One year after being taken in the 17th round of the 2007 draft, he had a brief flirtation with returning to the mound.

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David Laurila: What is your background as a pitcher?

Mitch Moreland: Pitching is kind of how I got my recognition as a player. It seems like everybody recruited me as a pitcher. I only had about three schools that wanted me to hit.

I didn’t have a whole lot of professional scouts looking at me coming out of high school. I went to college as a two-way guy, at Mississippi State, and I did pitch a little there. I ended up throwing about 40 innings. When draft time came, I thought I was going to get drafted as a pitcher, but I ended up getting drafted as a hitter, by Texas.

Texas actually brought me into instrux, in 2008, to pitch. Read the rest of this entry »

A few weeks ago, the Dodgers became the most expensive sports franchise in the history of the world. Just today, they celebrate their 122nd anniversary in the National League. And it’s a storied history. On this date in 1890, the Brooklyn Bridegrooms made their debut in the National League by playing the Boston Beaneaters (the future Braves). Boston won the game 15-9, but the Brooklyns had the last laugh, winning the pennant by three games over Cap Anson’s Chicago Colts (later known as the Cubs) and 12 games ahead of the fifth-place Beaneaters. Their first National League season yielded their first National League pennant and the first of 19 20 overall for the franchise. That’s the second-highest total in National League history, behind tied with the Giants’ 20. (The Cardinals are in third place with 18.)

The Bridegrooms were playing in their second league and under their third name: the franchise had begun in 1884 as the Brooklyn Atlantics of the American Association. Then they played three years as the Grays, eleven as the Bridegrooms or just Grooms, and then thirteen as the “Superbas,” a nickname coined to describe the superteam that resulted from a mixture of the best Bridegrooms and the best players from Ned Hanlon’s legendary 1890’s Baltimore Orioles — they finished in first place their first two years under that name, 1899 and 1900. The name “Dodgers,” a contraction of “Trolley Dodgers,” was first used in 1911-1912, but the team then spent 18 years as the Robins before the present name stuck for good.
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We already talked about Cliff Lee and Matt Cain’s pitcher’s duel for the ages last night, but that wasn’t even the most remarkable thing that took place last night. Over in Anaheim, Bartolo Colon was doing something that we might not see done again in our lifetime.

In the fifth inning of last night’s game, Colon threw a first pitch ball to Maicer Izturis. He wouldn’t throw another pitch that was called a ball until he faced Bobby Abreu in the eighth inning. Between Izturis and Abreu, he faced 11 batters and didn’t throw a single ball to any of them. His all-strikes, all-the-time approach lasted a remarkable 38 pitches. You can see all 38 of them in this video compiled by MLB.com.

How unlikely is that? Well, we can estimate the chances of an event occurring 38 times in a row using a mathematical tool called binomial distribution. Essentially, binomial distribution takes the probability of an event occurring and then extrapolates how often you’d expect that event to happen a certain number of times given a number of opportunities. In this case, the probability of Bartolo Colon throwing a strike on any given pitch is roughly 67% percent. In other words, out of every three pitches Colon throws, we’d expect two strikes and one ball.

Last night, we got 38 consecutive strikes without a ball. Binomial distribution tells us that the odds of that occurring, given what we know about Colon’s career strike percentage, is about 0.000000246. In other words, you’d expect to find one string of 38 consecutive strikes if you had a population of approximately 4.1 million strings of pitches thrown by Bartolo Colon. One in 4.1 million.

Yeah. What Lee and Cain did was downright ordinary compared to what Colon did.

Update: As pointed out in the comments, I should have clarified that the binomial distribution assumes independence of events, where the results of one test do not affect the probability of the next test. It is not clear that balls and strikes are independent from the previous pitch, as batters are more likely to chase pitches out of the zone when they are behind in the count. Of course, pitchers are also less likely to groove one down the middle when they’re ahead in the count, so these effects may cancel out to some degree, but it’s not clear that the probability of balls and strikes on each of those 38 pitches was indeed .67. So, consider this more of a rough estimate based on one model’s assumptions, which may or may not hold precisely true in an MLB game scenario.

The Arizona Diamondbacks have gone fishing for a replacement for injured outfielder Chris Young. The organization purchased the contract of prospect A.J. Pollock from triple-A.

Prior to the 2012 season the outfielder ranked as the 13th best player in the minor league system, which has one of the strongest collection of prospects in the game. He was the club’s first round pick (17th overall) out of Notre Dame in 2009.

Pollock, 24, has faced some adversity in his career and missed the entire 2010 season after elbow surgery but he has rebounded admirably. The right-handed hitter came back last year and hit more than .300 in double-A with 41 doubles and 36 steals (43 attempts). Moved up to triple-A in 2012 he was hitting .340 with six doubles in the 12 games prior to his promotion. The knock on the outfielder is that he lacks the range for centerfield but doesn’t possess the power that teams typically covet with their corner outfielders. His ceiling currently sits at platoon or fourth outfielder.

With Jason Kubel and Gerardo Parra swinging from the left side, Pollock could be a nice complement (along with Justin Upton) from the right side. The time frame is currently unknown for Young’s return from a torn ligament in his shoulder but Pollock should have a significant opportunity to prove the scouting reports wrong.

Look for him to provide the Diamondbacks offence with a decent average with a good number of doubles and some steals mixed in. Despite the fact that he’s a rookie, Pollock is a better top-of-the-order option than either Willie Bloomquist or Aaron Hill (although Pollock could stand to be a little more patient).

Last night, Cliff Lee and Matt Cain put on a pitching duel for the ages. Cain threw shutout nine innings on just 91 pitches before Bruce Bochy pinch-hit for him, while Lee managed to go 10 scoreless innings and still only throw 102 pitches on the night. They combined to allow just 10 baserunners in 19 innings pitched, and after Brett Pill’s leadoff double in the fifth, they put down 24 consecutive batters between them.

You just don’t get two dominating performances in the same game all that often. In fact, you could make a case that this was the best pair of performances in a single game in the last 10 years.

The last time two pitchers faced off and both threw nine inning shutouts was last May, when Jason Vargas and Zach Britton squared off in Baltimore. Both were extremely effective and efficient, but neither of them pitched into the 10th inning, and they only combined for nine strikeouts on the night – plus, even with the offensive struggles SF and PHI have had this year, neither of them can match the 2011 Mariners for futility at the plate, so Britton’s performance is slightly diminished due to the quality of his opponent.

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