Two weeks into the season, a narrative developed around Matt Carpenter and his aggressive behavior at the plate. In 2013, Carpenter had a breakout season, hitting 55 doubles on his way to a seven-win season. After a solid — but not quite as good — 2014 that was marked by incredible patience and a high walk rate, Carpenter flipped the script in the playoffs. He got more aggressive early in the count and took advantage of his scouting report against Clayton Kershaw and the Dodgers. That aggressive approach  carried over into 2015 with Carpenter seeing about half a pitch less per plate appearance through the first two weeks of the season. Buster Olney mentioned it on Sunday Night Baseball, and I bought in.

Two weeks later, the initial data supporting that narrative has already eroded. Carpenter is now seeing just about the same amount of pitches he has throughout his career. However, that does not mean the aggressive Carpenter narrative is dead, nor does it deserve to be. In some ways, Carpenter has reverted back to 2013 Carpenter — the patient, but slightly more swing-happy player that was missing last season. On pitches in the strike zone, Carpenter has done more than just go back to 2013 levels. He is swinging at pitches in the strike zone more often than any time since he was a role player on the Cardinals 2012 team.

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At its best, baseball is an outdoor, summer sport. In order to fit 162 games and the playoffs into the calendar, Major League Baseball is forced to start in late March or early April and end in late October or early November when the weather is less likely to cooperate. Attendance is up roughly 500 fans per game in the early part of the season, and the fans have turned out in Kansas City and San Diego after a playoff run and an acquisition-rich offseason, respectively. MLB has publicized shorter games, although it is not clear what kind of effect that would have on attendance. All teams, especially those in the northern half of the country have been able to take advantage of good weather, and MLB should do its best to get fewer games played when the weather is not best for baseball.

Here is a graph showing average per game attendance through Sunday’s games, per Baseball-Reference.

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Chase Utley just finished the worst month of his major league career. The 36-year-old second baseman with knee problems in his past played well last season, hitting .270/.339/.407, with his 4.5 WAR leading National League second basemen. Last year was his his tenth straight season with more than three wins and the eighth time in his career he has had at least four wins in his career. An offseason ankle problem slowed his Spring Training regimen, and the results in April have not gone Utley’s way. Much of the underlying statistics are similar for Utley and pitchers do not appear to be pitching him differently, but the results have been lacking. For a player of Utley’s caliber, chalking up a bad month to a rough run of luck is simple for a player in his prime, but at Utley’s age, questions will linger whether he might be done as an effective everyday player.

Chase Utley hit a meager .114/.198/.200 in 81 plate appearances, and his wRC+ of 1 was second worst among the 186 qualified hitters, besting only Matt Joyce. Utley has played at an incredibly high level for a long time, and there are sure to be lengthy discussions about his possible induction to the Hall of Fame, but April’s production was far below the standards Utley has set over the course of his career. Utley had the worst month of any in his 13-year career.

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The Boston Red Sox rotation began the season with some scrutiny as the starting five was filled with average to above average types and no pitcher resembling an ace. That scrutiny has turned to criticism as we near the end of the first month of the season and that rotation has allowed more runs than any other starting group in the American League and their 5.75 ERA is the worst in Major League Baseball. The rotation has gotten off to a terrible start, but the offense has produced and the Red Sox will still enter May with a winning record at 12-10. While a bloated ERA has generated calls for the Red Sox to make a trade for a starter, the current rotation has pitched better than its ERA would indicate. Going forward, the Red Sox rotation should get much better results than we have seen so far.

The Red Sox have given up a lot of runs, but the rotation’s FIP is a middle of the road 3.91. The Red Sox and Cleveland Indians are the only two rotations in MLB to have their ERA and FIP differ by more than one, and for the Red Sox that number is 1.84. The team’s walk rate at 8.8% is a little too high, but they make up for the high walk rate by striking out 22.9% of hitters. Their 14.9% K-BB rate is in the upper third of American League teams. Individually, there is not a single starter with a lower ERA than FIP.

In a more visual form:
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Joc Pederson does not fit the traditional “three true outcomes” profile visually. Listed at 6-foot-one and 185 pounds, Pederson plays center field and is a far cry from the lumbering slugger personified most in Adam Dunn over the past decade. However, Pederson has been a high walk, high strikeout player with decent power throughout his minor league career with some very good comps and that has carried over so far in Major League Baseball in the early part of the season.

Over the past three seasons, Pederson has moved quickly and steadily to the three true outcomes looking at the level where he received the most plate appearances in each season.
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With Clayton Kershaw and Zack Greinke anchoring the Los Angeles Dodgers’ rotation, it will be nearly impossible for the Dodgers to have a bad rotation, but the Dodgers had depth problems entering the spring with Brett Anderson penciled in as the number five starter and little behind him in case a starter should falter. The lack of depth gained some early exposure, with Hyun-Jin Ryu unable to start the year with the team as he continues to work his way back from shoulder problems. The Dodgers received another blow last night, with news that Brandon McCarthy would miss the rest of the season as he joins the Tommy John Surgery waiting list.

The Dodgers have gotten by in the early going without relying on a single fifth starter, instead giving one start each to Mike Bolsinger, David Huff, and Scott Baker. David Huff is no longer on the 40-man roster, although the Dodgers will have an opening if they choose to put Brandon McCarthy on the 60-day disabled list. Scott Baker is currently scheduled to make this Friday’s start against Arizona, making him the de facto fourth starter behind Kershaw, Greinke, and Anderson. The Dodgers have an off day on Thursday which means they can pitch their top three starters on normal rest Saturday through Monday before needing their fifth starter again on Tuesday.

Prior to McCarthy’s injury, the Dodgers pitching Depth Chart for the rest of the season looked like this.
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The St. Louis Cardinals took two of the three games from the Milwaukee Brewers over the weekend, but the wins cannot wash over the losses the team suffered. Over three games, Yadier Molina, Adam Wainwright, and Jason Heyward all left games early due to injury. Molina did not play on Saturday or Sunday, but has avoided the disabled list so far. Heyward apparently hurt his groin, and after lobbying to stay in the game, he is day-to-day. The biggest blow came on Saturday when Wainwright could not get out of the batter’s box, probably injuring his achilles. The Cardinals will likely be forced to play the season without their ace, leaving the team with options both internally and outside the organization, but no realistic option will make up for Wainwright’s absence.

There were injury concerns with Adam Wainwright heading into the season. After struggling in the summer months of 2014 and gutting through the playoffs with less than his best, an offseason surgery on his right elbow, the same part of his body that needed Tommy John surgery four seasons ago, raised questions about whether Wainwright would be able to carry the load for the Cardinals in 2015. His velocity and strikeouts were down to start the season, but so were his walks, and he’d been brilliant to start the season. Those injury concerns did not come forward as expected when he injured his ankle attempting to get out of the batter’s box, but with Wainwright likely gone for the season the Cardinals face a difficult task replacing one of the best pitchers in baseball.

Despite missing all of 2011 recovering from Tommy John surgery, Adam Wainwright’s 27 WAR since 2009 ranks sixth among Major League Baseball pitchers and is in the top 20 among all MLB players. His 16 wins since returning from surgery in 2012 sit even with Max Scherzer and David Price and trail only Clayton Kershaw and Felix Hernandez among MLB pitchers. Wainwright was incredibly effective when he pitched, but just as important for the Cardinals, he provided massive amounts of innings, preventing wear on a bullpen and a rotation trying to break in young starters.

From 2012-2014, including the playoffs, he pitched over 700 innings, with over 500 of those innings coming in the last two years. Over the last two seasons’ Wainwright’s +11 WAR have accounted for more than 40% of the Cardinals starting pitching total during the time. With Wainwright, the Cardinals’ rotation has pitched very well so far this season, with a 2.39 ERA that is the best in baseball and a 3.06 FIP that ranks fifth. Lance Lynn, Michael Wacha, John Lackey, and Carlos Martinez look to still make up a solid front four to the Cardinals’ rotation, but finding a fifth starter could leave the Cardinals’ scrambling for innings as they attempt to replace their ace. The Cardinals were already looking to manage starter innings this season, per Derrick Goold, and the loss of Wainwright only serves to amplify the difficulty of balancing starter innings with trying to preserve their rotation arms.
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Last season, Derek Norris and John Jaso took the bulk of the catching starts for Oakland, starting 140 of Oakland’s games at behind the plate. The duo performed well for the A’s and the 126 wRC+ by Oakland catchers ranked third in Major League Baseball behind only the Pittsburgh Pirates and Milwaukee Brewers. As the A’s tend to do, they remade their roster in the offseason sending Norris in a deal to the San Diego Padres that netted Jesse Hahn, and sent Jaso to the Tampa Bay Rays in the deal that landed Ben Zobrist. The deals cleared the way to playing time for Stephen Vogt, a 30-year old catcher with under 500 plate appearances in his career, with a decent amount of those appearances coming from first base and the outfield with the A’s in 2014.

The projections did not expect much from the Oakland catcher. The FanGraphs Depth Charts expecting a .255/.303/.398 season and producing roughly two wins. Vogt has gotten off to a great start in 2015 with a .360/.441/.700 line in 59 plate appearances including seven walks, four home runs, three doubles and one triple. The projection systems have begun to take notice. ZiPS now projects Vogt for a .259/.310/.415 line for the rest of the season while Steamer has Vogt with .265/.316/.420, already an improvement over the projections from a couple weeks ago and with his early season exploits, a two-win season has turned into one that could top three wins with the potential for more if he hits like he has over the past year. Since being called up at the beginning of June 2014, Vogt has hit .292/.341/.473 with a 130 wRC+ in 346 plate appearances.
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Guessing the starting pitcher with most strikeouts per nine innings early on in the season should not be too difficult. Clayton Kershaw has struck out more than a batter per inning in his career, and in the early part of this season has shown more of the same, striking out 35 batters in just over 24 innings pitched for an excellent 12.95 K/9. There are a few other players we would expect to see in the top ten in the early going with Felix Hernandez, Matt Harvey, and Gerrit Cole fanning a bunch of players along with Trevor Bauer’s quest to never allow a player to make contact with a baseball (19 IP, 26 K, 11BB), and even Brandon McCarthy, Tyson Ross, Chris Archer, and Francisco Liriano are not a complete shock, but to see Jason Marquis in second place on this list behind only Clayton Kershaw is very surprising no matter how early we are in the season.

That Jason Marquis has pitched 15 innings thus far in 2015 is an unusual development given the way his career has taken shape. Here are his numbers over the past five years.

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For better or worse, the Kansas City Royals have garnered a fair amount of attention to start the season. On the better side of the ledger, the team now sits at 10-3, with the second best record in the American League behind only the 11-2 Detroit Tigers. Even finishing a game over .500 the rest of the way would give the team a solid 85-win season, and the Playoff Odds here at Fangraphs give the Royals a better than one in three chance at making the playoffs. While those might not seem like great chances, they are sixth in a league where five teams make the playoffs and they are already ahead of preseason darling Cleveland Indians.

The ugliness that consumed the weekend for Kansas City certainly is not drawing the type of attention a team should hope to receive, but perhaps lost amid the beanings and the yelling and the pointing, there was a significant and rare day for the Royals as Salvador Perez did not start on Sunday. Erik Kratz took his place, although Perez did not receive the day off as he entered the game in the seventh inning and caught the final two innings behind the plate.

This early in the season, a catcher making most if not all a team’s starts is not overly unusual. Perez started the first 11 games, but off days early on meant that he received two days of rest during that time. While his games and plate appearances are near the top of the catcher Leaderboard and his 107 innings behind the plate are second in baseball to Derek Norris’ 111 thus far, it is too early to get alarmed about his workload thus far. It is the upcoming workload that should be concerning.
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