So you want the designated hitter in the National League, eh? Well, you’re going to have to talk it over with this guy first:

Jokes aside, I’m not even sure Madison Bumgarner would mind if the designated hitter took over. It doesn’t seem like he particularly enjoys hitting. He doesn’t work on it in the cages or in batting practice and he wasn’t exactly champing at the bit to come off the bench as a pinch-hitter, as one might expect other #PitchersWhoRake would. And it would allow him to put more of his energy into what he actually does enjoy doing: pitching.

Bumgarner enjoys pitching, and we enjoy watching him pitch, but whether he enjoys hitting or not, we enjoy watching him to do that, too. Bumgarner’s actually a good hitter, and not your typical “good hitter for a pitcher.” No, he’s actually a good hitter. His career 47 wRC+ might lead you to believe otherwise, but between 2013 and -14, he seemed to flip a switch, and since then, he’s been the best-hitting pitcher in baseball. Consider:

Since 2014

Prince Fielder: 116 wRC+
Madison Bumgarner: 115 wRC+

— August Fagerstrom (@AugustFG_) April 11, 2016

That seems good.

There’s a reason I’m writing about Bumgarner as a hitter right now. This didn’t just come out of the blue. The reason is that, over the weekend, Madison Bumgarner faced Clayton Kershaw, undeniably the best pitcher on the planet, and Madison Bumgarner did this:

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Useless and true: Jake Odorizzi is currently the major league’s pitching WAR leader. He’s made one start! Danny Salazar has made zero starts. All this means is that Odorizzi’s first start was a good one, and maybe the best so far, or maybe not. Noah Syndergaard had a pretty awesome debut, too. Jose Fernandez was sweet. Chris Archer looked good. Odorizzi was right there. He struck out 10 Blue Jays in 5.2 innings, allowing two runs (one earned) on four hits and two walks. Nice little start! Against a nice little offense.

Tampa Bay’s rotation ranked 15th when we rolled out our positional power rankings, but it’s also a rotation that figures to posses considerable upside. Everyone’s young, and everyone’s hinted at a higher level. Archer, obviously, is fantastic. Last year, he positioned himself as an ace, and even he’s got room to improve. Drew Smyly struck out a shocking number of batters last season, and with just a year of health could reasonably go from a name that just baseball nuts know to a name that everyone knows. Matt Moore will seemingly always have potential. There’s plenty of talent down on the farm. Plus, there’s Odorizzi. You could make the case for anyone here as being on the cusp of a breakout. At the very least, everyone’s doing what they can to take that next step.

Odorizzi, in particular, has something in the works, something about which he’s been vocal as of late, and something that was on display in his season debut. It’s best to be up front right now and say the results, admittedly, were mixed, but Odorizzi understands he has a weakness, has formulated a plan to combat that weakness, and is seemingly committed to seeing it out.

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A little more than a decade ago, an undersized, often-overlooked second baseman climbed the ranks through the minor leagues and made his debut in Boston, peppering line drives off the Green Monster in Fenway Park’s left field while capturing the hearts of Red Sox fans with his aggressive and well-rounded style of play.

After 10 years of Dustin Pedroia, watching Mookie Betts burst onto the scene over the last two years must be like déjà vu in Boston.

Of course, the players have their differences, the most obvious being Betts’ place in the outfield. His move from his natural place at second base was dictated by Pedroia’s presence at the position. But the similarities in stature, and approach, cannot be understated:

In the early stages of his career, Betts has put the ball in the air a bit more often, and thus hit for a bit more power. Pedroia’s struck out less and gotten on base slightly more. But these differences are minuscule; both have an elite control of the strike zone due to their ability to make a ton of contact while possessing the eye to draw a good number of walks. And the most striking similarity is that both inflict massive damage to the pull field.

Highest pull-field wRC+, 2015

1. Kris Bryant, 290
2. Bryce Harper, 261
3. Colby Rasmus, 260
4. Edwin Encarnacion, 257
5. Mookie Betts, 254

Last year, Betts was one of the five best pull hitters in the game, his name appearing alongside four of baseball’s best power hitters in overall pull production despite his 5-foot-9 frame. His power output to the pull side, admittedly aided somewhat by the Green Monster, exceeded that of Josh Donaldson’s. Pedroia, meanwhile, has been among baseball’s most consistent pull threats for a decade.

Red Sox hitting coach Chili Davis is quick to point out, though, that while both do the brunt of their damage to the pull side, neither hitter goes to the plate with a pull-field approach.

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Aroldis Chapman was supposed to be a starter. Maybe supposed is a strong word, but when he debuted in professional baseball as a 22-year-old out of Cuba in Triple-A, he did so as a starting pitcher, and if not for injuries to then-Reds closer Ryan Madson and a handful of other Cincinnati relief pitchers, the club seemed prepared to have Chapman open the 2012 season in the starting rotation.

But those injuries happened, and Chapman instead returned to the bullpen, where he’d pitched for the previous season and a half. He returned to the bullpen, he was handed the keys to the ninth inning, and he hasn’t given them back since. Watching Chapman on the baseball field in the ninth inning has been a treat all these years, but it’s always felt like something of a missed opportunity. Sure, we see the 104 mph fastball and the strikeout rates over 50%, but it’s almost felt like cheating, in a sense. It’s all still remarkable, yeah, but this is a guy who could start, throwing just one inning at a time.

Don’t we all want to see what he could do if he came out in the first and pitched as deep as he could every game? Aren’t we curious how much of the stuff would carry over during the transition? Wouldn’t it be fun if Chapman didn’t lose anything, and routinely threw six or seven innings with the same caliber stuff he throws in the ninth? At some point over the last couple years, we’ve all accepted the fact that we’d probably never get to see it in action, Aroldis Chapman the starter.

And then Noah Syndergaard made his first start of the 2016 season.

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11:54

BRING IT JASO:

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Moments before the season’s first pitch, ESPN’s Tim Kurkjian giddily exclaimed something to the effect of, “Baseball season is about to start, and we have no idea what’s going to happen!” Kurkjian, 59, said this with a sense of childlike wonder. The kind of wonder that can only come from experiencing something for the first time, or the anticipation of a first-time experience. The kind of wonder that baseball renews annually.

Well, all the teams — with the exception of Detroit and Miami — have now either played a game or at least had a game postponed, and baseball hasn’t disappointed. Baseball never disappoints. We’ve missed this for so long, and now it’s back, so let’s celebrate it. Let’s take in all the weird baseball things that have already happened this season, just two days in. Something weird and fun has happened in every game! This is a post all about fun facts. Fun facts are great. And fun.

Pirates vs. Cardinals

We’ll begin with this one not only because it was the first game, but because I’ve already written this fun fact here. Francisco Liriano made the start for the Pirates, and his final pitching line was six innings, three hits, no runs, five walks, and 10 strikeouts. No pitcher since at least 1913 (and, presumably, before then, too, since pitchers didn’t strike out 10 batters in a game then) has ever finished a game with that pitching line. The first pitching line of the season was one that’s never happened before.

Blue Jays vs. Rays

These two clubs are the only teams to have played two games this season, and in that second game, Josh Thole hit a home run. Josh Thole’s only job in major-league baseball is to catch R.A. Dickey’s knuckleball. When he hits a home run, it happens on accident. We he does anything else besides catch a knuckleball, it happens on accident. Josh Thole hadn’t homered in almost three years. The last game in which Josh Thole hit a home run, Mariano Rivera got the save. A Josh Thole home run isn’t quite a Ben Revere home run, but it is a Josh Thole home run.
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It’s difficult to write about the bigger picture when there have been precisely three games played in the regular season. The picture, as it stands now, is microscopically small. So we focus on the little things. We observe, but we try not to draw conclusions. Mostly, we wonder and speculate about the upcoming year, just like we have been throughout the entire offseason, except now, we do so with a tiny bit of knowledge about what that year actually entails.

One of the things I’m interested to watch this year is the development of an eight-year trend of pitchers throwing fewer and fewer pitches in the strike zone while getting batters to chase more and more balls. Most specifically, I’m interested in watching Francisco Liriano, the leader of the “throw strikes never” movement. The last couple years, Liriano has simultaneously thrown the fewest percentage of pitches inside the zone while also generating one of the highest chase rates.

Liriano already walks a ton of batters, and knowing those two facts, the logical question one asks oneself is, “Why do batters keep swinging?” Seems it should be easy to let Liriano beat himself. Spoiler alert: nothing about baseball is easy.

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Spring Training stats don’t matter. Right? Right. Well, mostly. It’s true — you shouldn’t be paying attention to things like batting average, ERA, or even home-run figures in the spring. There’s just too little time, too much volatility in the statistics, and too much uncertainty surrounding the quality of opposition for those numbers to have, well, any meaning. But last year, Dan Rosenheck’s excellent work in The Economist, later nominated for a SABR Analytics Conference Research Award, revealed that certain peripheral Spring Training statistics actually can have some predictive value for the regular season.

It needs to be stressed: even then, the effects are small. Nothing that happens in Spring Training should drastically alter your perception of a player. And for most guys, nothing should change. But, for the few players at the very end of each spectrum in these particular statistics, it’s okay to move your expectations up or down a tick or two.

You should read Rosenheck’s article and also view the slides he used to present his research at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, but I’ll briefly summarize his findings here anyway:

• For batters, the three most predictive statistics that stabilize most quickly are: strikeout rate, walk rate, and isolated power on contact.
• For pitchers, the three most predictive statistics that stabilize most quickly are: strikeout rate, walk rate, and ground-ball rate.
• Each player’s Spring Training figures should be compared against his own projections to find the largest outliers.
• We can learn the most in the spring about younger players, who have less major-league playing time, therefore less significant data to fuel the projections, therefore more uncertainty within those projections

Using those four basic principles from Rosenheck’s work, we can fairly easily use the Spring Training leaderboards from MLB.com and our depth chart projections here on the site (a mix of ZiPS and Steamer projections with author-updated playing-time estimates) to find the players who changed their outlook the most this spring (though still not that much!).

The Hitting Winners

Jake Lamb

• 2016 projections: 25.6 K%, 8.4 BB%, .200 isolated power on contact
• 2016 spring stats: 24.2 K%, 19.7 BB%, .405 isolated power on contact

By this measure, Arizona’s third baseman Jake Lamb has had the single most encouraging spring of any batter in baseball. He’s still striking out more than the average batter, but he also has the highest walk rate of any qualified batter in the spring — more than double his projected rate — and he’s doubled his power output, perhaps thanks to a change in his swing path, inspired by his teammate, A.J. Pollock.
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Tyler White has already accomplished a hell of a lot for a baseball player, no less a baseball player who wasn’t drafted until the 33rd round. He earned six minor-league promotions in just three years. He hit .311/.422/.489 across those six stops — a surefire way to quickly climb the organizational ladder. He was invited to the Houston Astros’ big-league camp, where he hit .348/.446/.543, and at the end of it all, he was handed the Opening Day job as the team’s first baseman, and why wouldn’t he?

It was somewhat of a surprise, given White having never played in the majors, and the Astros’ status as a contender, and Jon Singleton having been the favorite throughout the winter, but White outplayed Singleton, and frankly, White’s outplayed Singleton every step of the way.

So a 25-year-old rookie is now the starting first baseman on a team many consider to be the best in the American League, and expectations, naturally, are high. It doesn’t take much more than a quick perusal of #AstrosTwitter to see the hype surrounding White. Many feel he’s the long-term answer at first base for a team who gave 47 starts to Luis Valbuena and Marwin Gonzalez there in the midst of a playoff run last season. Some are calling for Rookie of the Year. Someone I spoke with recently loosely compared him to Paul Goldschmidt, if not only as late-round first basemen who were slept on during their ascent through the minor leagues, despite doing nothing but crushing every level at which they played.

And it’s true — White has been slept on. Even this year, a year after putting up a .467 on-base percentage and 178 wRC+ at Triple-A, he didn’t make a single top-100 prospect list. Not at MLB, not at ESPN, not at Baseball America, not at BaseballProspectus. Our own Dan Farnsworth was higher on White than any other prospect evaluator this offseason, and even Farnsworth’s bullishness pegged White as the sixth-best prospect in the system.

Mostly, it has to do with the position. White came up as a third baseman, but has since been moved to first and may even be better suited as a designated hitter. He offers little in the way of speed, and without any value coming from the field or the bases, the bat’s got to be elite for him to have value as a prospect. His career minor-league wRC+ is 157, which sure hints at an elite bat — for reference, Goldschmidt’s was 163 — but what makes White such a compelling case, beyond the production defying his late-round draft status, is his offensive profile.

See, White’s overall production in the minors has mirrored that of a slugging first baseman, but the way he goes about that production has not. More specifically: for a first baseman, he doesn’t have much in the way of power. Instead, he derives his offensive value from a remarkable ability to control the strike zone; in the minors, he’s walked 174 times and struck out 164 times. Yes, that’s more walks than strikeouts across more than 1,200 plate appearances.

White is intriguing due in part not only to his career trajectory, but also his profile. Both seem nearly unprecedented, and so in cases like these, when we begin treading into unfamiliar territory, it only makes sense to gain context by means of historical perspective.

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Dan Straily needed to see a doctor. He wasn’t running a fever or suffering from strep throat; he had a bum shoulder. The symptoms of his malady were decreased velocity and general ineffectiveness. He initiated some independent research, and upon the recommendation of Houston Astros pitching coach Brent Strom and bullpen coach Craig Bjornson, Straily, 27, picked his practitioner.

After sitting in the waiting room that is Triple-A for much of the 2015 season, Straily paid a visit to Driveline Baseball in Seattle, where he met with Kyle Boddy. Boddy — the subject of a recent post here by Eno Sarris — isn’t an M.D., but you can think of him like a pitching doctor. Straily showed up, rattled off his ailments, and named his desired health benchmarks.

Straily told Boddy he needed to get his fastball back to sitting at 92 mph, with the ability to touch 94. That’s where he was when he first came up as an exciting, 23-year-old pitching prospect with Oakland back in 2012. Lately, his fastball had been sitting 89, and he struggled to touch 92 at all, and his effectiveness plummeted. The reason was the shoulder; he needed to get that healthy. And his breaking ball, he told Boddy, needed sharpening up.

Straily’s average fastball velocity by year

Boddy listened to his patient, and ran the preliminary examinations. That meant a trip to the biomechanics lab to analyze Straily’s delivery, and some tests to measure the movement and spin rate on his pitches. The doc came back with good news.

“I brought everything back and I said, ‘You know, your breaking ball is actually fine. I think that problem will go away if you throw 94 and sit 92,’” Boddy said. “And [Straily] said, ‘Alright, perfect.’ So we were on the same page from the get-go.”

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