After a dominant spring, many hoped Julio Teheran had turned a corner. His disappointing 2012 campaign was attributed to a variety of mechanical changes, but offseason reports suggested Teheran had corrected those flaws. His tour of the Grapefruit League appeared to validate winter reports, as he struck out 35 batters in 26 innings and posted 1.04 ERA. While Teheran’s spring was cause for optimism, his first start of the regular season didn’t go so well, and the performance suggests there’s still more work to be done.

Last season, we discussed Teheran’s inconsistencies. Entering 2012, Teheran was ranked FanGraphs’ fifth best prospect in baseball, but he struggled to live up to the hype. To pinpoint the cause of his problems, I watched a random start from the 2011 season. On July 26 against the Durham Bulls, Teheran’s fastball velocity sat 93-95 MPH and frequently neared triple digits. His curveball, while erratic, showed promise. It featured a tight 11-5 break and, when thrown well, caused the Triple-A Rays to flail. His changeup was his best offering. After he established his fastball, hitters were helpless against his low to mid 80s changeup. His three pitch arsenal was electric and justified Marc Hulet’s ranking. Here are a couple of GIFs of Teheran pitching against the Mets in September of 2011, so you can see the movement for yourself.

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Last night, Jered Weaver took the hill for his second start of the season. It didn’t go very well, as he gave up five runs in five innings and walked twice as many guys as he struck out. But, the game was in Texas and the wind was blowing out, so there were some environmental factors in play, and Weaver’s hardly the only ace who got lit up yesterday. It was a day when David Price, Stephen Strasburg, R.A. Dickey, Johnny Cueto, Chris Sale, Justin Verlander, Matt Cain, Cole Hamels, and Yu Darvish also pitched, and yet the league average ERA for the day was 5.11. A lot of good pitchers got torched yesterday.

But, Weaver’s story is different. Good pitchers are going to have bad starts, and it’s usually not a reason for concern. Weaver’s performance, though, should be cause for alarm in Anaheim, because… well, here’s a graph.

Last night, Jered Weaver’s fastball sat at 85 MPH, the slowest average velocity he’s had during the PITCHF/x era. In fact, since the start of 2008, Weaver has only had an average fastball velocity below 86.0 mph three times; his final start of 2012 and his first two starts of 2013.

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

1. A Brief Note on SCOUT, Like What It Is
2. SCOUT Leaderboards: The Season’s First Week
3. Today’s Notable Games (Including MLB.TV Free Game)
4. Today’s Game Odds, Translated into Winning Percentages

A Brief Note on SCOUT, Like What It Is
Below, in this edition of the Notes, are the first SCOUT leaderboards of the 2013 regular season.

“What is a SCOUT leaderboard?” a reasonable person might ask. The author is plagiarizing himself at length when he says that, for hitters (for whom it’s denoted as SCOUT+), it’s this: a metric that combines regressed home-run, walk, and strikeout rates in a FIP-like equation to produce a result not unlike wRC+, where 100 is league average (in this case, for all MLB hitters so far) and above 100 is above average. xHR%, xBB%, and xK% stand for expected home run, walk, and strikeout rate, respectively.

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Here at FanGraphs, we don’t do a lot of posts where the point is simply to direct you to another article elsewhere on the web. However, that’s exactly what this post is going to do.

Alex Scherzer was one of us. He loved baseball, he got a degree in economics, and he tried to use advanced metrics to help his brother become the best pitcher he could possibly be. On June 21 of last year, Alex Scherzer took his own life.

FanGraphs senior editor Robert Sanchez wrote about it for ESPN The Magazine. They also published it on ESPN.com over the weekend. It’s worth reading. Don’t miss this one.

At night, in moments of anxiousness or hopefulness, Max Scherzer still reaches for his cell phone, wanting to talk to Alex. He’ll find himself in a hotel room, tired after another stunning start for the Detroit Tigers, and wonder what Alex thought of the outing. Or he’ll be at his condominium in Arizona, watching cable news, and think of a question only Alex could answer. All these months later, he can still see his little brother. Tall, handsome, with that goofy smile.

Alex, too, would reach for the phone whenever he had something to tell Max. He’d peck out a message, if only to let his brother know he was thinking about him. Back in September 2011, Max had struggled through a few starts. After one outing, in which he gave up several bloop hits, Max wondered what he’d done to deserve such bad luck. Alex typed a brief message: “If there’s anything I’ve taught you, it’s that #1 [s—] happens, #2 the non-scientific meaning is that you’ve now banked your juju for the playoffs.”

Max hasn’t deleted that text or the hundreds of others from Alex. He’ll never remove his brother’s number from his call list. In that phone are their lives together, moments precious now because they can never be recaptured. Publicly Max rarely discusses Alex. The 28-year-old says so little about his brother that his parents, Brad and Jan, worry about him, and how he’s coping. Max simply tells them that he wants to focus on his starts, knowing that a solid outing will give his parents a brief reprieve from their grief.

But at night he doesn’t stay so mentally vigilant, and if only for a second, when he needs the comfort, he tricks himself into thinking Alex is there, has a phone in his hands, is ready to talk one more time.

Read the entire story on ESPN.

The voice is instantly recognizable. So is the easygoing style and depth of knowledge that makes him one of the best play-by-play announcers in baseball. No one calls a game quite like Jon Miller.

Miller is best known as having been the voice of ESPN’s Sunday Night Baseball from 1990 to 2010. Paired with the polarizing Joe Morgan, he developed a reputation as a great storyteller with a genuine love for the game and a deep appreciation for its history. He has also been a part of history. Miller has called numerous World Series and League Championship Series, as well as Barry Bonds’ record-breaking 756th home run. A member of the San Francisco Giants broadcast team since 1997, Miller was honored with the Ford C. Frick Award in 2010.

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Miller on Broadcasting the Numbers:“[Broadcast partner] Dave Flemming and I talk about advanced stats all the time. I recall UZR coming up for us in 2010 when we saw Andres Torres playing a great center field. I remember thinking, ‘Torres covers so much ground.’ Then I read this note saying he was number one, in all of Major League Baseball, in Ultimate Zone Rating. I figured that would be of interest to any Giants fan, so I used it on the air. I said it was a method of determining how much ground a guy covers.

“Back in the 1980s, when Bill James’ Baseball Abstracts first came out, I would pore through that stuff. It was fascinating to me. Runs Created were interesting.

“In 1984, Eddie Murray and Cal Ripken had great years on a team that didn’t hit at all. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben and Sam talk about why the Marlins have put service-time considerations aside in Jose Fernandez’s case, then discuss Jose Bautista’s comments about umpires.

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

1. An Invitation to Curse the Author
2. Today’s Notable Games (Including MLB.TV Free Game)
3. Today’s Game Odds, Translated into Winning Percentages

An Invitation to Curse the Author
As the reader will note while inspecting the table below of Sunday’s scheduled games and probable pitchers, today offers what can only be called — or can only be called, at least, by someone affecting the airs of a 19th century flaneur — a “panoply of delights.”

The delights are so ubiquitous, in fact, that the task (for the author) of selecting merely two or three so-called “notable” games has proven quite a chore. A very reasonable person could make a very reasonable case that the author’s choices are the work of a lunatic — or, at the very least, the work of someone typing with one hand while preparing and busily consuming mimosas with the other. I make no apologies, of course*: my biases (for starting pitchers making a debut or something close to a debut) are clear.

*With regard to the present exercise, that is. I make apologies for a number of other things. Most other things, really.

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

1. Featured Game: Cleveland at Tampa Bay, 19:10 ET
2. Today’s Notable Games (Including MLB.TV Free Game)
3. Today’s Game Odds, Translated into Winning Percentages

Featured Game: Cleveland at Tampa Bay, 19:10 ET
On Who’s Starting This Game
One of the players starting this game is right-hander Trevor Bauer for Cleveland, who (a) was traded from the Diamondbacks to the Indians this offseason in a three-team deal and (b) is known for having idiosyncratic thoughts on pitching mechanics and (c) is known for having idiosyncratic other thoughts, as well.

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Hi everybody and welcome to the second part of the first part of a new recurring Friday series. The series began with the week’s wildest pitches, and now we move on to the wildest swings because batters need to be ridiculed for their humiliating failures too. So often, we celebrate these players for being extraordinarily talented, for regularly doing things of which we’re not even capable. Consider this your weekly reminder that ballplayers are humans and sometimes, if only for fleeting instants, humans suck. Consider this also your weekly reminder that, the overwhelming majority of the time, ballplayers are terrific.

As with the wildest pitches, identifying the wildest swings is done using PITCHf/x and basic math. I confirm everything by going to the video, and I’m not going to include checked swings, because I’m looking for full, ill-advised commitments. I’m probably also not going to include swings during hit-and-run attempts, since the hitter generally feels like he has to swing at everything so the decision is practically out of his hands. I don’t want swings attempted because the hitter feels like he has to swing. I want swings attempted because the hitter thought the swing would be productive. Each week, there will be featured a top-five list. Each week, starting RIGHT NOW.

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