It might be surprising, but there’s one thing Joey Votto isn’t good at. Well, to be more precise, there’s one thing that Joey Votto doesn’t think he’s good at. He’s done a lot of work, and it looks like he’s good at it. When it comes to defense, though, he credits the work and not any natural ability. And then last year happened, so maybe he’s not so good at it, after all.

That’s Votto’s rolling UZR per 150 games since 2008. UZR requires a large sample to become reliable, so any single year of data needs to be regressed heavily. But there appears to be a trend here. In any case, I’m apparently not the first to notice a downturn in Votto’s defensive ability last year, nor to mention it to him. “It’s hard to ignore when people ask you on a consistent basis about it,” he grimaced when I asked.

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It’s that time again! Last year, I wrote this post on March 9. This year, it’s going up on March 7. I suppose that means this post is consistent. Let’s get into talking about schedule strength.

I think I say it every time, but with baseball, people tend not to care about this very much. Or at least, they do care about it, but they care about it far less than they care about almost everything else. There’s a general assumption that baseball schedules are more or less even, and the truth is that they really are. You can get overwhelmed when you think about a 162-game slate, as opposed to a football schedule that’s one-tenth as long. You’d think it allows for more regression. There can be real differences at the extremes, however. Last week, I spent a little time examining projected division strength. Might as well go the one step further.

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It’s easy to think of what could have been. Bullpen depth is all the rage these days among contenders, so Jeffrey Loria tried to get in on the action by making an aggressive pursuit of Kenley Jansen. A last-minute change of heart ultimately took Jansen back to Los Angeles, so the Marlins were left without a shutdown closer. And then there was last summer’s misguided trade for Andrew Cashner that robbed the Marlins of — among other players — Carter Capps. Capps is healthy now, still throwing the way he threw, and there’s nobody else quite like him. Jansen and Capps — those are two sexy names. The Marlins have neither.

So I’m not here to say the Marlins have done everything right. I’m not here to say they have baseball’s best bullpen. You don’t draw big bold headlines by signing Brad Ziegler and Junichi Tazawa. Yet, wouldn’t you know it, but the team has sort of succeeded in accomplishing its goal. Although by name value alone the Marlins relievers are something less than a super-group, there’s an awful lot to like here; all that will matter is performance, and this unit ought to perform.

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Episode 721
Managing editor Dave Cameron is the guest on this edition of the pod, during which he discusses the question of assigning credit, especially where WAR is concerned. How much credit does Andre Ethier for a wind-aided home run? For catching a fly ball that’s caught 95% of the time by major-league outfielders? These are merely two of the questions asked poorly and slowly by the host and half-answered by Dave Cameron.

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Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @cistulli on Twitter.

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Audio after the jump. (Approximately 42 min play time.)

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Two balls and no strikes, one ball and no strikes — those are the counts that are called hitter’s counts. Pitchers are forced into a predictable corner, since they have to get back into the count, and are more likely to throw a fastball so they can put it in the strike zone. They have to come into the zone, at least, and that’s always better for the hitter. Some of these things are true, and important to the lesson the 23-year-old Cody Reed is currently trying to learn from 28-year-old former teammate Dan Straily. Some of these things are also not true.

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Over the weekend, I attended the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, and on Friday, I attended a couple of the presentations of research papers that were baseball-oriented. The first one, presented by John Salmon (based on work he did with Willie Harrison), was titled “Bullpen Strategies for Major League Baseball“, which is obviously a hot topic in the game right now. But while the title made the paper sound like it might touch on Andrew Miller’s postseason usage, the part of the talk I found most interesting actually had more to do with starting pitchers.

In the first half of Salmon’s presentation, he talked about home field advantage, and particularly, how the data shows that one of the primary factors in a home team’s edge might be that their starting pitcher just takes the mound first. While Jeff Zimmerman wrote about this here on FanGraphs back in 2013, I must have missed that piece, because this was new information to me. But Salmon is correct that the data is clear that the gap in performance between the home and road team in the first inning dwarfs the difference in every other inning.

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When I interviewed him in April 2013, Jason Hammel was a 30-year-old pitcher yet to hit his stride. Following his previous path, he went on to have a ho-hum season. In 26 appearances for the Orioles — 23 of them of them as a starter — Hammel had seven wins, a 4.97 ERA, and a 6.2 K/9. His two-seamer and slider showed signs of coming around, but for all intents and purposes, he was a run-of-the-mill, back-of-the-rotation righty.

That has changed. Since originally joining the Chicago Cubs prior to the 2014 season, Hammel has fashioned a 3.68 ERA and fanned 8.3 batters per nine innings. Last year, he won a career-high 15 games for the World Series champions. The cerebral 6-foot-6 hurler is now a 34-year-old Kansas City Royal, having inked a two-year, $16 million deal with the AL Central club over the offseason.

Hammel discussed his mid-career emergence, which was fueled by an improved slider and a subsequent confab with a sexagenarian guru, in the waning days of February.

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Hammel on what has changed since our 2013 conversation: “A big part of [becoming more successful] was throwing a slider for a strike. It was kind of the idea of pitching backwards. Before, I never had a breaking ball that I could start with. I was throwing a curveball more than a slider, and the curveball is more of a… I get a lot of takes on it, because it’s a bigger break. I had to find something else with spin that I could put in the zone. The two-seamer has been a big, big pitch for me, and the two-seamer and slider complement each other really well, because they’re going two separate directions.

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LAKELAND, Fla. — Monday perhaps offered a glimpse of the Dylan Bundy we’ve been waiting for on a windy, sunny afternoon at Joker Marchant Stadium.

In the bottom of the first, the Orioles were so sure a bending Bundy curveball froze Nick Castellanos for a third strike that Bundy and the rest of the infield took a collective step to the visiting third-base dugout before home-plate umpire Jerry Layne signaled a strikeout.

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