The Astros have a very young team; the Yankees do not. I’m not exactly breaking news here, but I am going to provide you some data to back up the claims. Thanks to the depth charts that we maintain here on the site, we are able to calculate team age not just by the average age of the players on the roster, but weighted by the amount of expected playing time that each player is projected to get this year. After all, having a 25 year old starter and a 35 year old reserve is not the same thing as having a pair of 30 year olds splitting the duty. Young teams often populate their bench and bullpen with veteran leaders, and there’s no reason to dramatically inflate their average team age based on the presence of those backups.

The depth charts also include expected future playing time for guys in the high minors who haven’t yet gotten the call to the big leagues, but should be expected to see some big league time this summer. The Astros weighted team age includes the playing time we’re expecting top prospects George Springer, Jonathan Singleton, and Mark Appel to get in Houston later this year, so this process evaluates a team’s age not just by what they currently have on the team but also the talent that should arrive in the near future.

Without further ado, the data.

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This year, in an attempt to clarify the difference between a catch and a transfer on plays around the base base bag, MLB informed teams that a clean transfer from glove to hand was now going to be a required element in making a legal catch. No longer could a player argue that the ball was dropped on the exchange between glove and hand in order to retire the lead runner in a double play attempt. To be credited with the first out, the player has to move the ball from his glove to his hand without losing possession of the ball. As an example, this play occurred last week.

Last year and for pretty much every year before it, that play is ruled an out at second base, as Zobrist received the ball into his glove before the runner got to the bag, and only dropped it when attempting to throw to first base for the second out. This year, that is not an out, and even after the Rays challenged the decision on the field, they were denied on appeal. The next day, MLB issued an official statement in the wake of the play:

“Umpires and/or replay officials must consider whether the fielder had secured possession of the ball but dropped it during the act of the catch. An example of a catch that would not count is if a fielder loses possession of the ball during the transfer before the ball was secured by his throwing hand.”

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Last October, Shelby Miller became something of a mystery. After spending the year in the Cardinals rotation and developing into one of the league’s best young hurlers, Miller became nothing more than an active roster cheerleader in the postseaosn. He pitched one inning in the Cardinals five game NLDS victory over the Pirates, then didn’t enter a game in either the NLCS or the World Series. All told, St. Louis pitchers threw 152 innings in October, but even with that workload, the Cardinals managed to give 151 of them to pitchers not named Shelby Miller.

He insisted he wasn’t hurt. If he was injured, the Cardinals could have simply replaced him on the playoff roster with someone else, someone they would use. The fact that they carried him for all three postseason series suggests that it wasn’t a predetermined plan to not use him and supports Miller’s assertion that he could have pitched. Mike Matheny didn’t just trust him in any kind of meaningful situation, and the Cardinals didn’t play many low leverage innings in October.

The Cardinals didn’t say much publicly about their decision, but it was reported over the winter that Miller was dealing with some shoulder fatigue in September, so despite Miller’s claims that he felt good, there might have been a physical reason for his absence. However, with an off-season of rest, the Cardinals have put Miller right back into their plans, and were presumably hoping that a little rest would allow Miller to go back to what he was during the regular season last year.

Well, apparently, an off-season of rest hasn’t fixed anything, because the Shelby Miller that has taken the mound for two starts in April mostly looks like the September version who the Cardinals decided wasn’t up to pitching meaningful innings in October.

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As we mentioned on Wednesday, we’re going to be contributing to FoxSports.com over the course of this season, and today, Jeff Sullivan is up with a piece on Yordano Ventura, the reigning Velocity King among MLB starters.

Last year, out of every starting pitcher who started at least one major-league game, Kansas City’s Yordano Ventura threw the hardest average fastball. His lead over second place was more than a full mile per hour.

This year, out of every starting pitcher who’s started at least one major-league game, Ventura has thrown the hardest average fastball. His lead over second place is almost two full miles per hour.

Fastball velocity gets a guy noticed. You could probably count on one hand the number of starting pitchers in the world capable of reaching triple digits during a game. Fastball velocity generates hype … and oohs and aahs. A good fastball allows a starter to get through the door, and down the road it buys a starter extra chances.

But as Toronto veteran Mark Buehrle demonstrates every five days, there’s a lot more to pitching than how hard you can throw. The questions with Ventura have nothing to do with his fastball; they have to do with everything else.

In January, FanGraphs ranked Ventura as the Royals’ second-best prospect, behind only Kyle Zimmer. Ventura throws a fastball, a curveball and a changeup, but his secondary pitches could use more development if he is to unlock the extent of his potential.

Armed with that incredible fastball, last year Ventura struck out just 11 of 64 batters in the majors. Before that, down in Triple-A, he allowed more than a hit per inning. Steps forward haven’t been necessary for Ventura to pitch in the majors, but there’s a difference between pitching and pitching well.

For Ventura, the goal is for 2014 to be a year of improvement, or refinement. After a promising spring, he got off to a wonderful start Tuesday, when he blanked the Rays for six innings. Though it was unfortunate the Royals lost 1-0 — the Rays scored in the game’s lone run in the top of the ninth — Ventura showed early signs of development that could bode well for the coming years.

Read the rest at FoxSports.com.

Masahiro Tanaka has now made two starts for the Yankees, and outside of a couple of home runs, he’s been ridiculous. He’s rung up 18 strikeouts while issuing just one walk, and he’s posted a 51% ground ball rate in the process, leaving him with a nifty 1.81 xFIP. His splitter is as good as advertised, and while it’s just two starts, it’s two starts that suggest that the hype was probably correct; Tanaka likely is one of the best starting pitchers in baseball.

But, a little more quietly, there is a pitcher in the National League that has put up a very similar line, and you probably won’t believe who it is.

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We are pleased to announce that, beginning today, FanGraphs is going to be contributing regular original content to FoxSports.com. My first piece for Fox is up now:

When the Detroit Tigers announced that they had signed Miguel Cabrera to an eight-year contract extension that didn’t even begin for another two years, the deal was immediately met with skepticism. The Tigers tacked on an additional $248 million in guaranteed money to lock up Cabrera’s age-33 to age-40 seasons, and the history of aging, super-sized, bat-only players is littered with disappointments. Exhibit A: Albert Pujols, who has been a severe disappointment since joining the Angels and would be my choice as the owner of the worst contract in baseball right now. The Pujols disaster is why so many of us — myself included — believe the Tigers might end up regretting the Cabrera extension.

But, at the same time, we should also acknowledge that the Pujols disaster is one of the most inexplicable anomalies in baseball history. There have been hitters as good as Albert Pujols before, but they generally haven’t declined nearly to the same degree that Pujols has since joining the Angels.

Read the rest at FoxSports.com.

We’ll be contributing several pieces per week to the FoxSports site, with writers like Jeff Sullivan and Eno Sarris also on tap to bring their unique perspectives. The content you find there will be similar to the content we’ve provided here over the years, and we’ll be sure to make sure to point you to the pieces we do over there so you don’t miss one of Eno’s great interviews or Jeff’s array of GIFs.

We’re excited to partner with Fox, but don’t worry, FanGraphs itself isn’t going to be changing. We’re not going anywhere; this will simply put some of our content in front of a different audience. This is just an addition to what we already have been doing, and it won’t affect what we do here.

We look forward to working with Fox going forward, and hope you’ll enjoy this new partnership as much as we will. So check out our first piece over there and get ready for a bunch more.

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Clayton Kershaw is the best pitcher in baseball, and by definition, that makes him also the best pitcher in the National League. In the American League, though, things are not quite as clear. The AL is home to a handful of truly excellent pitchers, and differentiating between them is the ultimate in picking nits. The last four Cy Young Awards have been won by Max Scherzer (still awesome), David Price (him too), Justin Verlander (yep), and Felix Hernandez (ditto), and they’re all still — for now, at least — in the American League. Yu Darvish hasn’t won a Cy Young Award yet, but he was the consensus favorite among the FanGraphs staff in our preseason picks. That’s a pretty fantastic starting five, and I’d have no qualms with anyone making an argument on behalf of any one of those as the AL’s premier starting pitcher.

But the more I watch him pitch, the more I think I might just pick Chris Sale.

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If I were to rank the months of the year in terms of difficulty of writing for FanGraphs, February would probably be #1; there’s just nothing going on in the second month of the year. The off-season is over, only the most meaningless parts of spring training are going on, teams aren’t aggressively signing long term contracts yet, and there’s just generally no real news on which to comment. February is the best month for me to take vacation, basically.

But behind February, April might be the second hardest month to write for FanGraphs, because while we have games to watch and data to look at, the overriding reminder of history that is drawing conclusions about anything this early in the season is probably foolish. Last April, Justin Upton was Babe Ruth. Last April, the Texas Rangers looked like the best team in baseball. April games matter in the standings and April performances do have some predictive value, but the samples are so small that we should rarely be willing to believe that a player has made a dramatic transformation from what they were before hand. Realistically, the conclusion of almost every data point we currently have is “That’s interesting; who knows what it actually means?”

But we still have to write about baseball in April, and we have to try and make it as interesting as we can. You don’t want to read five or six pieces a day that tell you to all the numbers right now are useless any more than we want to write them. But most of the numbers right now are useless, so we hunt for stories that are interesting and numbers that might be less useless than the rest. The overarching conclusion is still Beware Small Sample Size, but there are things that are least worth monitoring going forward. They might not continue, but if they do, it’s news. This is one of those things.

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