Scott Kazmir’s return to Major League Baseball has been pretty well documented at this point. After bottoming out by pitching in independent ball, Kazmir’s velocity started to pick back up this winter, and the Indians brought him to spring training on a non-roster invite. The velocities continued to impress and he pitched extremely well in Arizona, and with the Indians in need of useful starting pitching, they gave him a spot in their rotation, but then a strained ribcage forced him to begin the season on the DL. In his first start of the year, he gave up six runs in 3.1 innings, beating back some of the spring optimism about whether or not Kazmir could ever get back to what he used to be.

In the two starts after his debut, he was better, but neither the Royals nor the Twins are offensive juggernauts. There were encouraging signs, as his velocity was picking up and he was getting strikeouts again, but he hadn’t really put it all together yet. Until yesterday.

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You’ve probably heard that MLB umpire Angel Hernandez is in the news again, because he’s awful at his job and does embarrassing things to the sport on a too regular basis. You may also know that Hernandez has something of a reputation for drawing attention to himself, and is annually rated as one of the worst umpires by Major League players.

What you might not know, and what I didn’t know until I saw Joe Posnanski retweet something from Buffalo News writer Mike Harrington, is that Hernandez’s reputation for brutal calls and a total lack of professionalism goes back over 20 years. Harrington linked to this article written in 1991 by Bob DiCesare, covering Hernandez’s performance in a Triple-A game between the Buffalo Bisons and Iowa Cubs. The piece is brutal in its honesty, and rings true even today.

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Here at FanGraphs, we enjoy rolling out cool new things. It’s fun to be able to add stuff that we can all use on a daily basis, and David Appelman has done a great job of building some incredible tools for public consumption. Today, we’re going to introduce you to the newest additions to FanGraphs: Depth Charts and a dedicated Standings page. We’re rolling them out together because they actually go hand in hand.

We’ll start with the standings page, because that’s what you’ll see first when you visit the new section of the site. The standings table is broken into three sections: Year to Date, Projected Rest of Season, and Projected Full Season.

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Over the weekend, the Baseball Hall of Fame opened its newest exhibit, Diamond Mines, which was created to honor scouts and the history of scouting in baseball. I’m sure the exhibit itself is pretty neat, and if you’re planning on a trip to Cooperstown, you now have something else to look forward to.

But even if you’re not going to Cooperstown, this exhibit is fantastic, because in addition to the physical museum presence, they created an online searchable deposit of historical scouting reports. And it is awesome.

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According to Baseball-Reference’s Place of Birth Report, there are 13 major league players currently active who were born in either Japan, South Korea, or Taiwan. Of those 13, only four are position players — Ichiro Suzuki, Norichika Aoki, Munenori Kawasaki, and Shin-Soo Choo. Major League Baseball has historically been more willing to bringing pitchers across the Pacific, and that remains true today. However, the performance of the nine active pitchers currently working in the big leagues suggests that perhaps the discount rate being applied to pitchers from those regions might still be too high.

Here’s how those nine pitchers have done in the first five weeks of the 2013 season.

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This morning, Mike Petriello put out the following quiz on Twitter.

Here’s a list of every hitter in baseball w/ 40 PA, sorted by BB%. Dare you to guess who is #1 without clicking. fangraphs.com/leaders.aspx?p…

— Mike Petriello (@mike_petriello) May 2, 2013

Assuming you read the headline to this post, I’ve already spoiled the answer, but I’m not sure that knowing that Juan Uribe is the current leader in BB% makes it any less shocking. Juan Uribe! This Juan Uribe.

Uribe is 34-years-old. Uribe has been in the big leagues since 2001, and he’s been hacking his way through almost every at-bat since. Juan Uribe is Yuniesky Betancourt’s hero*. What is happening here?

*I don’t know if that’s true, but it would make sense if it were true.

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Last year, Mike Trout and Bryce Harper had two of the best seasons for age-19/age-20 players in baseball history. We might not ever see anything like Trout’s 2012 season from a 20-year-old again. Those two ruined our expectations for what underaged position players are supposed to do in the big leagues. Everyone else pales in comparison to what we just saw.

That shouldn’t cause us to overlook the fact that there’s another 20-year-old putting his mark on Major League Baseball right now. In Baltimore, Manny Machado is showing the early signs of being a superstar.

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When I’m watching baseball, I’m almost always also on Twitter. Twitter has made watching a game by yourself in your home a social experience, and so now, it’s almost like watching a bunch of games with a bunch of other people. It’s great. Twitter is really an amazing creation, considering that the idea is basically mass text messaging.

Among the people I follow on Twitter is Keith Law. Keith is a prolific tweeter, and he interacts with his massive audience pretty much every night. An ongoing point of this conversation between Law and his followers is a derision of the intentional walk. Seemingly every night, someone will send Law an example of a manager putting a batter on, followed by the guy behind the IBB’d hitter launching a bases clearing extra base hit, scoring everyone including the guy who just got walked. Or the pitcher, now without the safety net of having a base open, will end up walking the next guy unintentionally, occasionally forcing in a run without ever forcing the opponent to swing the bat.

Just based on the data that shows up in my Twitter feed on a nightly basis, it feels like the average hitter bats .950 and slugs 2.500 after the guy in front of him gets walked intentionally. And, you frequently hear announcers talk about the disrespect the IBB is showing to the on-deck hitter, and how that might motivate them to prove the opposing manager wrong. All of this talk led me to realize that I actually had no idea what really happened after an intentional walk was issued, but I wanted to find out if the narrative held up to the light of data.

So, as is my usual approach now, I asked Jeff Zimmerman to run a complicated query for me, and now I’m going to take credit for his hard work. Jeff was kind enough to extract the play-by-play data following an IBB, and then removed all of the situations where the next batter was a pitcher, since I don’t think too many people have problems with an intentional walk that forces a pitcher to swing the bat. What we really want to know is how often an intentional walk to get to a worse hitter, or to gain the platoon advantage, ends up working out.

The answer? More often than you might think.

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