Last night, the Tigers and Mariners squared off in a mid-week contest in front of 14,981 fans in Seattle, in a game that didn’t begin until 10:00 pm on the east coast. The Tigers are a good baseball team, and are expected to win the AL Central by a significant margin. The Mariners are a less good baseball team, and aren’t expected to be in the playoff race when the year ends. At the end of the year, there’s a pretty good chance that the outcome of this game isn’t going to have determined anything. It will get lost in the shuffle of history as just another regular season game. But, oh man, this game was not just another game. This game was amazing. Let us count the ways.

(Be warned, for there are some GIFs after the jump).

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With the 35th pick in the 2012 draft, the New York Mets selected Kevin Plawecki out of Purdue University. In a draft where the organization was questioned for drafting low ceiling talents, the now 22-year old catcher was assumed to be an overdraft — Fueled by his ranking as the 68th best prospect pre-draft per Baseball America.

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A.J. Burnett made some history Wednesday night when he recorded his 2,000th career regular-season strikeout. Of course, he also has 31 career postseason strikeouts, and I don’t know why those don’t matter — but they don’t matter, and this isn’t even the main point of this piece. Burnett nearly made some more impressive history Wednesday when he carried a no-hitter into the seventh inning against the Cardinals. Carlos Beltran knocked a two-out double, and Burnett was removed before the eighth. But even without the history and the complete game, Burnett turned in a hell of an effort and the Pirates improved to .500. Now all the team needs to do is hold this for another five-and-a-half months.

But this post isn’t about Burnett. It’s about is Russell Martin. While that’s a bit of a stretch, Martin was at least catching Burnett on Wednesday, and I needed some sort of topical introduction. When the Pirates signed Martin as a free agent, they presumably considered both his defensive and his offensive skills. In the early going, his offense has been entirely absent, but at least a part of his skillset shows up in the numbers.

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Table of Contents
Here’s the table of contents for today’s edition of the Daily Notes.

1. Featured Game: Miami at Cincinnati, 19:10 ET
2. Today’s MLB.TV Free Game
3. Today’s Game Odds, Translated into Winning Percentages

Featured Game: Miami at Cincinnati, 19:10 ET
Regarding This Game, Its Significance
The significance of this game — or part of its significance, at least — is how it represents the first ever major-league start for Cincinnati left-hander Tony Cingrani.

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The ranking might change day-by-day, Jarrod Parker said, but he agreed: “Overall I would say the fastball and changeup are my two better pitches.” And that changeup is special — he threw it more than any secondary pitch last year, it was his best-rated pitch, and a big part of why he had the 21st-best swinging strike rate among qualified starters. It wasn’t always that way, though. Coming out of high school, Parker was a fastball/curve guy. So what happened?

“I got hurt and didn’t want to throw as many breaking pitches, so I started working on a changeup.”

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Ben and Sam discuss Brett Gardner’s new approach at the plate, and how hitters adjust to pitchers.

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Used to be one of the principal complaints — nay, the principal complaint — about Austin Jackson was that he struck out too much. He had all the tools, but the strikeouts were limiting his upside. Similarly, used to be one of the principal complaints about Torii Hunter was that he struck out too much. It was the same conversation, years and years earlier, and now both Jackson and Hunter are teammates. Funny thing about that.

Paul Swydan just posted about Austin Jackson’s dramatic strikeout reduction. Jackson’s strikeouts are down this season more than you would believe, and that’s given even more life to the top of the Tigers’ order. But I became independently interested in Jackson while conducting my FanGraphs chat on Tuesday, wherein I was asked plenty of times whether or not I’m buying Jackson’s early success and change. We’re always looking to make something of the early numbers, because they’re the only numbers we have and we want for them to be meaningful. Most of the early numbers are bad and stupid, but we know that certain stats stabilize faster than others, and Jackson’s stable stats are eye-popping, if you’re familiar with the previous versions of Austin Jackson.

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Daily updated Steamer Projections are now available in the player pages and the projections pages. These come in both the Rest of Season (RoS) and Updated variety. RoS is the projection for only the remainder of the season, while Updated is the forecast for the player’s final season line, including his performance to date.

One thing to note about the daily updated Steamer projections is that a full new projection for each player is calculated each day of the season, the same way the pre-season calculations are calculated, just including this year’s data.

Much thanks goes out to Jared Cross, Dash Davidson, and Peter Rosenbloom for putting these together.

Austin Jackson has a fairly well-documented history of frequent strikeouts. But every day, Jackson seems to be creating a new history. That’s because he’s decided to stop striking out.

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