With all due respect to the Dillon Gee–John Gast match-up in St. Louis tonight, there’s one marquee pitching match-up on the schedule for tonight’s games: Felix Hernandez vs CC Sabathia in New York. Neither pitcher throws as hard as they used to, but they’ve both managed to adapt to life without their fastest fastball, and both remain among the best starting pitchers on earth.

Sabathia, in particular, is lethal against left-handed hitters. Witness his strikeout rate by batter handedness, in graph form.

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The 2013 season is still in its infancy but two organizations have already faced more than their fair share of struggles in their minor league systems. The Texas Rangers entered the year with one of the better systems in baseball, while the Toronto Blue Jays fell somewhere in the middle after nearly gutting the system in what may amount to a misguided attempt to rebuild the big league team in one off-season.

Just 20 years old, shortstop Jurickson Profar has already spent time in the majors and he opened the 2013 season in triple-A. The Curacao native, who entered the year as the club’s No. 1 prospect, struggled out of the gate but he’s hardly embarrassed himself. It’s a different story for second overall prospect Mike Olt and his struggles have been well documented. He hit just .139 with 32 strikeouts in 20 games before hitting the disabled list with vision problems. He has excellent defensive skills at third base but lacks a spot at the big league level so his bat is going to have to pick up if he’s going to shift to a corner outfield spot of first base.

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Drafting 15th in 2012, the Indians selected Texas A&M right fielder Tyler Naquin. A collegiate standout, Naquin earned the Big 12 Player of the Year Award before Cleveland selected him and shifted him from right field — where he started 115 games as a freshman and sophomore — to center field. As Marc Hulet noted last month, Naquin’s ability to play his new position will determine his success.

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The first round of the Major League draft is just a little over three weeks away, and the Houston Astros will select first for the second consecutive year. Right now, the consensus belief is that there are two college pitchers — Mark Appel of Stanford and Jonathan Gray of Oklahoma — who are a step ahead of the rest, though University of San Diego third baseman Kris Bryant is putting on quite the power display and could be an option if the Astros preferred to build around bats rather than arms. However, the decision for the Astros may not be made simply on talent alone.

Last year was the first draft under the new bonus structure, which assigns a fixed amount of dollars to each team based on where they pick in the draft, with some pretty severe penalties for exceeding those limits. Now, if a team is interested in paying over the slot value for a pick, they’ll have to borrow the money for that overpayment from another pick, making the draft as much a game of cost management as it is talent acquisition.

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Senator John McCain introduced a bill in the Senate last week which aims to ban local TV blackouts for sporting events played in publicly-financed stadiums. But don’t get too excited baseball fans. The bill is aimed NFL blackout rules, for the most part. MLB blackouts due to the crazy MLB blackout map won’t change under this proposed legislation. The Fox Game of the Week blackouts on Saturdays may be covered, but those will disappear in 2014 anyway under the new Fox/MLB national TV contract.

Dubbed the Television Consumer Fairness Act of 2013, McCain’s bill proposed legislation has three goals:
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Table of Contents
Here’s the table of contents for today’s edition of the Daily Notes.

1. Most Improved Hitters So Far, Per ZiPS
2. Today’s Notable Games (Including MLB.TV Free Game)
3. Today’s Complete Schedule

Most Improved Hitters So Far, Per ZiPS
As the reader will know, we carry a tidy collection of projection systems here at the site — of which two now, Steamer and ZiPS, are updated daily with constantly changing rest-of-season and overall total projections. Together, the two systems provide important data for our new Standings tool. Another use is to see which players’ season performances to date have most altered their rest-of-season projections.

This week, in the Notes, we’re considering those hitters and pitchers whose projections have most improved. Yesterday, we looked at the most improved hitters according to Steamer — where “most improved” was defined as “greatest increase in wOBA projection.” Below are the most improved hitters, except now according to ZiPS.

Note: because the final preseason edition of ZiPS is released relatively early, there are a number of players originally projected with one team but now playing with, and being projected for, another. The change in teams also means a change in park effects, and therefore a change in raw wOBA. As such, I omitted from my search any player who might be subject to this effect. That stated, Mike Carp (97 wRC+ preseason, 110 wRC+ rest-of-season) and Vernon Wells (97 wRC+ preseason, 107 wRC+ rest-of-season) deserve recognition.

5. Evan Longoria, 3B, Tampa Bay
ZiPS (Pre): 538 PA, .263/.355/.486 (.289 BABIP), .358 wOBA, 132 wRC+
ZiPS (RoS): 431 PA, .276/.365/.508 (.306 BABIP), .373 wOBA, 140 wRC+
Notes: Speaking anecdotally, at least, ZiPS appears to be more aggressive than Steamer in terms of integrating recent performances into its rest-of-season projections. By way of example, the player (Josh Donaldson) occupying the fifth spot on the Steamer version of this list from yesterday has been assigned only a 10-point improvement in his rest-of-season wOBA projection and four-point improvement in wRC+. Longoria, meanwhile, has posted 15- and eight-point improvements, respectively.

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So, Yu Darvish is off to a pretty good start to 2013. Through eight starts this season, the Ranger’s right-hander currently sports the following statistics:

Darvish currently ranks first (or tied for first) among qualified starters in K% and SwgStr%, and he has posted the 6th best adjusted FIP in the league (56 FIP-). After a blazing start, his ERA- has dropped to 20th and his HR/FB now ranks 84th, but overall it’s clear Darvish has been a beast in 2013.

After watching this wonderful footage from Darvish’s dismantling of the Angels last night I was struck by how slow is curveball actually is.

Our own Carson Cistulli isolated his four slow curves from that night — check out the final bender to Mike Trout, resulting in a strikeout in the 6th inning. And, yes, that was 61 mph.

I wondered whether the differential between Darvish’s fastball and curveball was the largest in the league. And, so, to the data I went.

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Ben and Sam talk about how a player’s willingness to crash into walls affects their expectations for him, then discuss whether Albert Pujols can improve if he keeps playing.

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Knuckleballers aren’t like other pitchers, or so the saying goes. Their pitches flutter like butterflies, they pitch at less than max effort, they don’t depend on velocity, and they can pitch into their fifties. All of these things seem true, and yet the more we know about knuckleballers the more they might actually be more like all the other pitchers out there. So when 38-year-old R.A. Dickey has lost some oomph on his seminal pitch, maybe it means something, just like it usually does for other pitchers.

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