After taking a week off, the things we learned make their triumphant return.

Jose Bautista is doing a pretty good Vernon Wells impersonation.

While Wells gets most of the credit for the resurgent Blue Jays offense (and rightfully so), Bautista is also whacking the baseball with regularity. He led all major league hitters in wOBA last week, putting up a .444/.565/1.111 line. Of his eights hits, four left the yard, bringing his season total to 10 – his career high in home runs is 16, accomplished in 2006 when he racked up 469 plate appearances. He’s always had above average power (career ISO of .171), but an increase in the amount of balls in the air has allowed him to act like a true cleanup hitter so far.

He won’t keep this up all year, but he will be an interesting trade chip for the Blue Jays. He’s capable of playing all four corner positions, makes just $2.4 million this year and is arbitration eligible at the end of the season, so he’s not strictly a rent-a-player. Come July, when Toronto’s efforts to keep up with Tampa Bay and New York have fallen short, don’t be surprised if Bautista is one of the more coveted guys on the market.

It’s time to start paying more attention to Tommy Hanson.

The Braves right-hander made a pretty nice splash as a rookie last year, running a 4.03 xFIP in 120 innings after tearing up the minors. However, while the results were good, the stuff was a tick below what it was in the minors, as his fastball averaged just 92.3 MPH after being consistently in the 93-96 range in the minors. This year, he’s found his old velocity (fastball is now averaging 93.6 MPH) and his strikeouts have been the big benefactor – he struck out 18 batters (while walking just one) over two starts last week, and his K/9 for the season now stands at 10.08, seventh highest in baseball.

Hanson was a strikeout machine in the minor leagues, and with his increased velocity, there are reasons to believe he can sustain his early season performance. Hanson is legitimately one of the best young arms in baseball, and given the way he’s pitching so far in 2010, he may be on his way to his first of many all-star appearances.

Jake Westbrook looks healthy.

Before Tommy John surgery cost him all of 2009, Westbrook was the classic model for how a sinkerball pitcher could succeed – pound the strikezone, get a ton of groundballs, and keep the ball in the yard. In two starts last week, Westbrook looked as good as new, running a 70.5% GB% while walking just three batters in 15 innings of work. He even tossed in 10 strikeouts for good measure, but don’t expect that to continue – he’s definitely still a pitch-to-contact guy.

With a 4.13 xFIP through his first eight starts of the season, Westbrook is pitching near his pre-surgery levels when he was an extremely effective innings eater. With the Indians seven games behind the Twins and Westbrook due for free agency at year’s end, it’s a pretty good bet that he won’t finish the year in Cleveland, but he certainly made himself more attractive to potential suitors with the way he pitched last week.

I’ve been an MLB.tv user since it launched. I was around back in the days when the mid-inning entertainment involved a creepy reflection of a guy shaving, visible through a pencil sharpener. Seriously. Every year, I’ve doled out around $100 for the right to watch baseball games on my computer, and put up with the oddities that came along with it. When they decided to stream the exact same commercial between every half inning, I persevered (barely). When the service inevitably wouldn’t work on opening day because they had switched technologies for no reason, I hung in there. When they looped the same 60 seconds of a Tom Petty song between each break, apparently in an attempt to drive us all insane, I stuck around. I’ve even come to terms with the ridiculous blackout policy, and just dealt with not being able to watch games that involve the Orioles, Nationals, Braves, or Reds, because I live a few states away from each of those cities.

Through it all, I’ve been a barely satisfied customer. The service provided has been good enough to justify all the crap that MLBAM put their customers through, and it gave me a way to watch baseball. It was baseball on a 15 inch screen, but it was still baseball. And it was good enough.

Last week, though, I discovered MLB.tv in a way that is no longer just good enough. It is amazingly awesome, and it’s MLB.tv through a PlayStation3. I am not at all into video games, but had been looking into building a computer that I could hook up to my TV in order to stream MLB.tv and Hulu to the television. Despite my best efforts, I quickly realized that piecing together all the components would run me at least a few hundred dollars, and it still wouldn’t replace my horrible cheap DVD player, and so a friend suggested I look into the $300 PlayStation3. It was essentially everything I needed in a pre-packaged box, plus it had the added benefit of being a Blu-Ray player, which I wouldn’t have gotten otherwise. So, I figured I’d give it a shot.

I’m blown away. I’m used to struggling with MLB.tv to make it work. On my laptop, I was constantly installing plugins, fighting the wireless connection to try to keep up with the video feed, and dealing with the inevitable lag that followed whenever I’d try to do anything else at the same time. On the PS3, I turned it on, downloaded the software, and it ran. In high definition. With zero problems.

The user interface is fantastic. Pick whether you want to join a game live in progress or start at the beginning of the broadcast, and it loads up seamlessly. Want to jump to a specific inning? That’s two clicks. Pausing? One click. Jumping between games? Easy. It couldn’t be any easier to use, which is the opposite of what I’ve come to expect from MLB.tv over the years.

The picture quality is ridiculous. In a good way. I got an HDMI cord from monoprice for about $3, and I’m not going to pretend to know the visual difference between 720P or 1080P, but I can tell you that it looks about 40 bazillion times better than it ever has on my computer. The difference is staggering, and since I was able to just connect the machine directly to the modem, I’ve eliminated all the issues with the wireless connection. It runs as smooth as a normal television broadcast, only it gives me the benefit of a DVR.

I can’t believe this is the same product I’ve been using forever. I’ve begrudgingly handed MLB $100 a year for a product that was just good enough, but by making one simple investment, I’ve increased the quality of that product a hundred fold. I almost can’t bear the thought of pulling up a game on my laptop again. Thanks to the MLB.tv plugin for the PlayStation3, I get baseball on my TV again. I may never play a video game on the thing, but it’s already been worth $300 to me.

Seriously, if you’re watching MLB.tv on your laptop, consider a PlayStation 3. It will change your life, even if, like me, you will only be using it as a media streamer and DVD player. I couldn’t recommend the experience any more. It’s a home run.

The Rays stand at 20-7, and are owners of baseball’s best record. They lead the American League in run differential, but that’s only natural, considering they are first in runs scored and first in fewest runs allowed. While they might sustain the latter, with an excellent pitching staff and a terrific defense, their offensive performance is a bit more of a house of cards.

Despite leading MLB in run scoring to date, the Rays offense hasn’t actually been all that great. They rank 10th in the league with a .337 wOBA, which is above average but not dramatically so. By comparison, the Yankees have a .365 wOBA, but have scored nine fewer runs. What gives?

Timely hitting. With the bases empty, the Rays are batting .227/.308/.373, and their .681 OPS in that situation ranks 19th in the league. With men on base, however, the Rays are at .306/.381/.490, second best in baseball. With runners in scoring position, they are hitting .319/.403/.524, again, second best in baseball.

The league average OPS goes up fifty points when a runner reaches base. The Rays OPS has gone up 190 points in those situations, and even further still when runners get to second or third. As such, they have a team Weighted Runs Created of 133 runs, or 27 runs fewer than they’ve actually scored.

This won’t last, of course. No team can hit this well with men on base over a full season. If the Rays want to keep playing baseball at their current level, they’re going to have to begin to start some rallies, rather than relying on getting so much production from the ones they’re creating now.

Nothing says Cinco De Mayo like a little chat de beisbol.

By virtue of getting blown out repeatedly, the Pittsburgh Pirates have the worst run differential in baseball, at a staggering -89 runs. Following in second place are the woeful Houston Astros at -52, and the Baltimore Orioles check in third at -42 runs. None of this is surprising – these teams aren’t very good.

Know who has the fourth worst run differential in MLB right now? The Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, at -37. Yes, the Angels have almost the same ratio of runs scored to runs allowed as the 7-19 Orioles, and yet, their past success and the name value of the guys on the roster continue to convince people that this is a good baseball team.

The evidence continues to mount that it’s just not true. Heading into the season, the projection systems were universally down on the Angels roster, projecting them for between 75 and 85 wins, a steep drop-off from their 97 wins of a year ago. The outfield defense looked really bad, the offense was relying on guys sustaining career best performances, and the success of the rotation involved big bets on a few guys with lingering health concerns.

To date, all of that has manifest itself on the field. The corner outfield rotation of Bobby Abreu, Juan Rivera, and Hideki Matsui have failed to make plays, costing their flyball pitching staff outs and allowing opponents to put runs on the board. In addition, Rivera hasn’t hit nearly as well as he did last year, and neither has Erick Aybar, another key breakout player from last year’s team who the Angels were relying on for offense.

But, while those problems are legitimate, the main concern for the Angels has to be their pitching staff.

Jered Weaver and Joel Pineiro are pitching strong up front (don’t let Pineiro’s ERA fool you), but beyond those two, the questions add up very quickly. Ervin Santana’s fastball is exactly the same as it was last year, and he’s not showing any signs of returning to the front-line starter that he was in 2008. Scott Kazmir continues to try to adjust to life without a good fastball, but it’s still not going well. Joe Saunders is pitching like a #5 starter who needs a better defense to survive.

The Angels rotation has always been the strength of their teams, as they ran away with the AL West. Now, though, it’s no longer a strength, and the rest of the team isn’t making up for the lost ground.

The Angels are a good hitting team that will struggle to keep teams from putting runs on the board. In many ways, they’re pretty similar to the teams that the Rangers used to run out a few years ago, featuring good hitters who couldn’t field and a pitching staff that couldn’t overcome their defense. That formula never worked for Texas, and I don’t see much evidence that it will work for Anaheim either.

A month into the season, we have a bit more reason to believe the projection systems. This Angels team has a lot of problems.

A trio of things gleaned from the last seven days.

The Cubs won’t be releasing Alfonso Soriano any time soon.

A few weeks ago, there was a kind of bizarre series of articles written about whether the Cubs would be willing to eat the remainder of Soriano’s contract, releasing him outright. He was coming off a miserable 2009 season, and didn’t start off 2010 very well, but it still seemed a bit premature to write the guy off after one wasted season, when he had been worth +16.8 wins over the three prior years.

Soriano drove that point home this week, launching four home runs on his way to hitting .400/.500/1.100, leading the league with a .640 wOBA. He’s now at a .448 wOBA on the season, and while that obviously won’t continue, his rest-of-season ZiPS projection has him at .275/.334/.513, a well above average hitter. He might not be worth his contract, but there shouldn’t be a question over whether Soriano can still play baseball.

Cliff Lee’s abdominal strain doesn’t seem to be a problem.

Making his Seattle debut on Friday night, Lee was better than anyone could have expected after missing all of spring training and the first month of the season with an ab strain that helped torpedo earlier seasons in his career. His velocity was up across the board on all of his pitches over last year’s averages, which is not what you’d expect from a guy making his first start off the DL in April.

He pounded the strike zone, throwing first pitch strikes to three out of every four batters he faced. He showed off the big curveball and diving change-up that helped him shut down the Yankees in October, getting swinging strikes with both pitches. In short, he was exactly as good as you remember him being, and showed no ill effects from the lost time. Ab strains are known as injuries that can linger, but if you were concerned about Lee’s health for 2010, his performance on Friday night should have calmed most of those fears.

Clay Hensley has reinvented himself.

You may remember Hensley as a sinkerballing back-end starter, a guy who had some success with San Diego a few years ago by getting hitters to pound his two-seam fastball into the ground. He didn’t throw enough strikes or miss enough bats to make it work long term, however, so now, he’s ended up as a reliever with the Marlins. And he’s decided to throw the old gameplan out the window, with great success.

Last week, Hensley made two appearances out of the pen, facing 19 batters. He struck out 13 of them. He has now struck out 21 of the 55 batters he has faced this year, a whopping 14.92 K/9. His groundball rate has plummeted from 51 percent to 31 percent, as he’s now featuring his curveball and change-up much more frequently. In short, he’s a totally different pitcher than he was a few years ago, and the Marlins look to be the big beneficiary of his overhaul.

He won’t keep striking out 40 percent of the batters he’s faced, of course, but you can’t fluke your way into this kind of performance without there being a drastic underlying change. Hensley has rebooted his career, and his previous performances are almost entirely irrelevant to projecting his future. It will be interesting to see how he performs going forward, and whether the Marlins can replicate this success with other near wash-out pitchers. Whatever they did, it worked.

A break from our usual Wednesday schedule, we’re doing this week’s on Friday, and we’ll run from 12 to 1 pm eastern. The guys over at RotoGraphs will also be here to answer questions.

There are six starting pitchers who, in the first month of the season, posted a groundball rate of a little more than 60 percent, ranging from Derek Lowe (60.5%) to Tim Hudson (63.3%). None of the other names would surprise you either – Felix Hernandez, Ricky Romero, Joel Pineiro, and Jorge de la Rosa are all well known as extreme groundball pitchers, and their sinkers are working well to begin the 2010 season.

However, none of them are even close to leading the league in groundball rate. St. Louis rookie Jaime Garcia is lapping the field, with a ridiculous 71.2% groundball rate through his first four starts. The gap between Garcia and Hudson is as large as the gap between Hudson and C.J. Wilson, who ranks 15th on the list.

It shouldn’t be surprising that a Cardinal pitcher is leading the league in inducing grounders, given that we’ve recently talked about Dave Duncan’s magic touch. However, Garcia’s not your standard pound-the-zone-with-a-sinker guy, as he has four pitches that he mixes in – a fastball, a slider, a curve, and a change. In getting his 14 groundball outs last night, he threw just under 60 percent fastballs, for instance.

Perhaps most impressively, he’s not just running up his totals by dominating left-handers. He’s faced 18 LHBs this year compared to 85 RHBs, as opposing managers have been stacking the deck against him and running out almost entirely right-handed line-ups. It hasn’t mattered, as they’re hitting the ball on the ground against him at a 68 percent clip. Of course, that’s better than the left-handers, who have hit the ball on the ground 90 percent of the time.

You don’t need a degree in regression to know that Garcia won’t finish the year with a 1.04 ERA, but given how he’s attacked hitters so far, we may have a new leader in the clubhouse for National League Rookie of the Year. Even in just 26 innings of work, he’s shown that he’s got the stuff to sustain quality performances, and he’s got the added benefit of having Dave Duncan around.

He’ll have to prove he can stay healthy for the long haul, but in terms of whether he’s good enough to get major league hitters out, Garcia is answering that question very quickly. This kid is for real.

Among early season performances, there is one that is the most shocking.

Carlos Silva, vs left-handed batters:

2008: .348/.381/.555, 2.19 BB/9, 4.37 K/9, 44.5% GB%, 14.6% HR/FB%, .355 BABIP
2009: .380/.436/.718, 3.94 BB/9, 2.25 K/9, 48.5% GB%, 21.1% HR/FB%, .359 BABIP

2010: .083/.081/.083, 0.00 BB/9, 3.97 K/9, 36.7% GB%, 0.0% HR/FB%, .100 BABIP

Silva, who throughout his entire career has struggled mightily with left-handed hitters, has held them to just three singles in 37 plate appearances in his first four starts. And all three of those singles came in his last start. In his first three appearances, he was perfect against LHBs, as they went 0 for 22 against him.

His line against right-handers isn’t all that much different than it has been in the past, even in his last two seasons. Nearly the entirety of the success he’s had to date can be credited to how well he’s gotten lefties out, which is just something he’s never been able to do before.

So, naturally, the first thing I did was take a look at his pitch selection. Silva’s lived primarily off of his two-seam fastball for most of his career, which is why he’s posted such large platoon splits. The pitch works against righties, but not against lefties.

Sure enough, Silva has finally decided to abandon his fastball-only approach to pitching. He’s thrown his sinker just 56.5% of the time (compared to 83.1% last year), and has replaced with his change-up, which he’s now thrown 30.7% of the time.

The change-up has the smallest platoon split of any pitch in baseball, so it would make sense that Silva relying more heavily on it would fare better against southpaws (and, at the same time, see a decrease in his GB%, which he has). To dig further, I asked resident pitch f/x guru Dave Allen to look at Silva’s pitch usage by handedness, and he found that Silva is throwing his change-up 40 percent of the time to LHBs this year, and produced this neat little graph to demonstrate how effective it has been.

He is pounding the down and away corner with change-ups and getting easy outs off of it. His change-up has been +7.7 runs through four starts, according to our pitch type linear weights, making it the most effective change-up in baseball to date.

Now, obviously, lefties won’t post a .100 BABIP against Silva all season, so there’s inevitable regression coming. But it does look like he’s finally learned that he can’t just attack them with two-seam fastballs and hope for the best. If he keeps pounding lefties with his change-up, he might actually stick in the Cubs rotation this year.

It is no secret that Dave Duncan is a huge fan of his pitching staff getting groundballs. He’s made a career out of taking discarded pitchers and turning them into useful parts by convincing them to get hitters to pound the ball in the dirt. As Steve Sommer showed a few weeks ago, there is a quantifiable “Duncan Effect”, where pitchers under his tutelage see a significant up tick in their GB%.

The newest member of the Fixed By Dave Duncan club is Brad Penny. You almost don’t need me to run off the numbers, as the story is so predictable. In his first four starts for St. Louis, he’s running a 53.4% GB%, which would be a career high. He’s followed the Joel Pineiro path to success by pounding the strike zone, issuing walks to just 3 of the 109 batters he’s faced this year. The groundballs and strikes combo is working like a charm, and Penny looks to be well on his way to finding career revival, thanks to Duncan’s teachings.

However, while the results are reminiscent of Pineiro’s conversion, the process is entirely different. Last year, Duncan got Pineiro to reduce the frequency with which he threw his off-speed stuff and rely heavily on his sinker, taking his fastball percentage from 58% to 71%. Penny has done the exact opposite; he threw 71 percent fastballs last year, but Duncan has him down to 51 percent this season.

Instead of his fastball, Penny has added a new pitch, a splitter (Pitch F/x calls it a change-up) that is averaging 89 MPH and has been devastatingly effective so far this year. You can see it as the big yellow blob in the first chart below, and see how this is a pitch he just wasn’t throwing last year in the graph of a game from last April below that.

His splitter has been +4.3 runs above average so far, making it one of the best pitches in baseball to date. So it’s not just a trick pitch, but an actual viable weapon. And Duncan apparently taught Penny how to throw it in a month.

For all the talk about how great Leo Mazzone was, Duncan is a guy who we have tangible evidence of his philosophies changing how guys pitch, and seeing dramatic differences in results. If you’re ever going to put a pitching coach in the Hall of Fame, it should probably be this guy. What he’s done over his career is nothing short of amazing.