It’s April 10th. Most teams have played eight games out of 162, or about 5% of their season schedule. You know it’s early. I know it’s early. Data from a little over a week of baseball is highly suspect, which is why you’ll see things like Coco Crisp with an .829 slugging percentage or Vernon Wells with a 206 wRC+. Over these kinds of samples, any player can look great or horrible. Even at the team level, the numbers don’t tell you much of anything.

However, there is one set of numbers that stabilize very quickly – overall league averages. While the variance among players and teams is large, early season data at the league level is actually highly correlated with overall seasonal averages, for pretty much any major number you want to look at. For instance, here’s April 2012 data compared with 2012 overall data for many of the pitching metrics we look at regularly here on FanGraphs:

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Yesterday, we talked about the red flags created by Jered Weaver’s performances over the last few months. Today brings news that Jered Weaver will be placed on the disabled list. For the Angels, this will likely be construed as a big blow. It is probably not that big of a deal in the long run.

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Rick Ankiel’s season began in about the best possible fashion. With the Astros holding on to a 4-2 lead on Opening Day, Ankiel was sent up to hit for Brandon Barnes in the bottom of the sixth inning. Derek Lowe threw him a meatball, and he responded by hitting said meatball 373 feet, good enough for a three run homer that would essentially put the game away. It’s hard to do much better than that on your first at-bat of the season.

Since that at-bat, though, things haven’t gone so well. Here’s Ankiel’s play log for the 2013 season. Read the rest of this entry »

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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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.

When the Marlins announced their opening day rotation, there was one shocking last minute addition: 20-year-old Jose Fernandez. One of the top pitching prospects in baseball, there had been no talk about carrying him on the Opening Day roster, and he was one of the Marlins first cuts earlier in spring training. While he’s an intriguing talent, he also hasn’t yet pitched above A-ball, and the Marlins are rushing him to the big leagues in a season that is almost certainly not going to result in contention. So, why did they abruptly promote Fernandez to the big leagues?

One idea that has been kicked around is marketing. There is no franchise in professional sports with a bigger image problem than the Miami Marlins, and the second year of the team’s new stadium is expected to be filled with empty seats. The roster has been gutted and filled with replacement level journeyman grasping on to the last legs of their careers, so not only is the team not good, it’s not particularly interesting either. Giancarlo Stanton is about the only reason to go to the park and watch the team play.

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The Texas Rangers have two good middle infielders, so the best prospect in baseball is starting the season in Triple-A. The St. Louis Cardinals have three good outfielders, so the second best prospect in baseball is starting the season in Triple-A. The Cardinals one glaring weakness is at shortstop. The Rangers spent all winter trying to trade for a young power hitting outfielder, only to fall short at the end.

So, naturally, there’s seemingly constant speculation about a possible trade between the two franchises. This speculation got pushed to the forefront on Tuesday, when Cardinals GM John Mozeliak was asked about the idea by Jim Bowden:

Mozeliak Cards GM just told us on Sirius 209/XM 89that if Jon Daniels calls him & offers him Profar for Tavares he would think about it

— JIM BOWDEN (@JimBowdenESPNxm) April 1, 2013

Mozeliak’s comment essentially boils down to “yes, I’d consider acquiring a 20-year-old potential superstar shortstop if I had the chance”, which, well, of course he would. There’s nothing there to suggest that the deal has been actually discussed by either organization, or that this hypothetical trade has any chance of happening. Even with Elvis Andrus signing his long term extension today, the Rangers still have plenty of options to keep Profar, and the Cardinals have other shortstop options that won’t require them to give up Taveras.

There’s a reason the #1 prospect in baseball — per Baseball America’s rankings, anyway — has never been traded in the season that he was considered be the best overall prospect in the game. A swap of the #1 and #2 prospects — technically, BA rated Taveras #3 this year, but given that Dylan Bundy is starting the season on the DL with elbow issues, we’ll just give them credit for flipping those two to better account for pitcher attrition — would be historically unique. It’s probably not going to happen. But, let’s just say it was on the table… does either side say no?

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Jack did a good job this morning dissecting the adjustments Yu Darvish has made and how those have paid off in a big way, but there was one thing he didn’t mention that Darvish is also doing now – throwing harder.

Here are the average velocities for Darvish’s pitches from 2012 and then last night, per PitchF/x:

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