Jered Weaver is already having his spring velocity scrutinized. Weaver himself doesn’t want to answer questions about it, and he’s issued frequent reminders that there are more important things than fastball speed, and he’s right. Weaver has never lit up the radar gun, and he’s still toward the front of a big-league rotation, even though he’s dropping into the mid-80s. Location trumps everything, and Weaver is a location pitcher. If he can locate, he’ll be fine.

But there’s no denying the bigger truth here. Weaver has been progressively losing strength, and he no longer seems like the ace he used to be. With his max velocity dropping, he’s working with a reduced margin of error, and the result is that Weaver’s become more vulnerable. Earlier in his career, he worked to conquer his vulnerabilities. Now he’s got new ones, and at 32, it’s not like he’s still ascending toward his peak. At this point, Weaver is still a perfectly fine starter on a contending team, but it’s worth thinking about how he’s used. He isn’t a guy you can expect to be successful in any situation. He isn’t a Clayton Kershaw. He isn’t a Corey Kluber. He isn’t the old Jered Weaver.

The Angels’ intention is to get back to the playoffs. They’re plenty good enough, and some of their division rivals have taken a step back. Odds are, the Angels and Mariners will be going neck and neck in the AL West, and so any little advantage might end up mattering. Weaver is going to be one of the Angels’ five starters. One thing they could do is just run him out there every five days, no matter what. But what if Weaver were more carefully managed? What if we were to try to optimize a Jered Weaver pitching schedule?

If Weaver were just any old guy, I don’t think it would be that big a deal. But there are things about him, things worth keeping in mind. See, Weaver, historically, has loved pitching in Anaheim. That’s not unusual — the ballpark plays pitcher-friendly. But Weaver’s been somewhat extreme. Over his career, he’s allowed 2.9 runs per nine innings at home, against 4.0 runs per nine innings on the road. Over just the last five years, the gap is 2.5 against 3.8. Weaver gives up a lot of fly balls, and when he’s pitching at home, the overwhelming majority of those fly balls just die. On the road, they’ve been a lot more likely to get over a fence.

With Weaver, then, you want him pitching at home. Beyond that, if at all possible, you want him pitching at home in sunny matinees. It seems like his delivery makes the ball difficult for lefties to pick up. And speaking of lefties — Weaver’s seen a lot more of them over time. Some of this is just the context of his opponents, but some is also the perception of increased vulnerability. Weaver has been most vulnerable against lefties on the road. His home/road splits are predominantly due to his performances against left-handed hitters.

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I think you could say 2014 was the year Garrett Richards started making sense. He was supposed to strike a bunch of guys out. He was supposed to pitch like a staff No. 1. He was supposed to be awesome, and last year, he finally became awesome, taking over an Angels rotation with the more established arms in decline. Richards hasn’t answered all the questions, and his significant injury last August raised a new one, but at this point, it feels like Richards is what he was supposed to be. And he’s maybe even more remarkable than you thought.

It’s easy to see the big gain in strikeouts. It’s easy to see the drop in FIP and xFIP. It’s easy to see the increase in whiffs. Here now are last year’s top five qualified pitchers in slugging percentage against:

1. Garrett Richards, .261 SLG
2. Clayton Kershaw, .289
3. Felix Hernandez, .303
4. Chris Sale, .305
5. Adam Wainwright, .310

The belief is that Kershaw had the most insane season. And Kershaw did have the most insane season, overall. This is looking at just one thing. But Richards had a big edge in slugging, and he had that edge while pitching in the more hitter-friendly league. The likely reason? It’s the intuitive reason.

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Bryce Harper was in the news a couple weeks ago. It had nothing to do with his performance — in 2015, he hadn’t yet performed. It had nothing to do with his health — in 2015, he hadn’t yet gotten injured. It had everything to do with his words. Harper generates three kinds of stories, and this was another one about him not hiding his confidence. Harper spoke openly about how much he believes in his current cast of teammates, and while every player would claim to believe in his cast of teammates, Harper has a way of drawing extra attention, and he didn’t beat around any bushes. Harper went so far as to talk about the disadvantage of facing the Nationals’ starting staff in the playoffs.

Of course, while we like our players to be humble, it’s not like Harper was talking about anything we hadn’t already thought and said ourselves. The Nationals do seem like a juggernaut. The Nationals do seem like they should take the NL East running away. The Nationals do have a rotation that would be terrifying to face in October. Say what you will about Harper’s personality, but he just said what most people already believe. There’s no such thing as a playoff shoo-in this early in the year, but the Nationals are about as close as it gets.

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What if I told you Allen Craig played hurt last year, and I could prove it? You’d probably say something like “uh” or “that won’t be necessary.” Submitted as evidence: last season, Allen Craig sucked. He finished with a wRC+ that was just about half his previous season’s mark. Submitted as further evidence: Craig and everyone around him admitted he was playing hurt (Update: actually, maybe not!). There was absolutely zero mystery Craig had an injured foot, and hitters like to say almost all their success comes from the lower body. We can’t pin all of Craig’s struggles on his ailment, but it sure would make sense as an explanation.

Conveniently, though, we see other indicators. It was widely understood Craig was hurt. Because Craig was hurt, he had a different swing. Because he had a different swing — and different levels of strength — Craig was attacked in a different way. Allen Craig’s pitch pattern in 2014 strongly hinted at something being wrong, and so Craig’s pitch pattern in 2015 will tell us, and tell us quickly, to what degree he’s recovered. Even before Craig has much of a batting sample size, the pitchers will tell us if he seems like a threat.

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It can be a bit tricky to do this job from the west coast. As soon as you wake up, you’re behind, and I find I always have to begin my days reading. On the plus side, it’s usually reading I’d have to do anyway. Also on the plus side, you never know where you might find an idea. Earlier today, I was reading Eno’s latest post, on Joey Votto and Jay Bruce. Not only did the post provide excellent insight — it also took me back to something from last July. Eno was talking to Bruce about shifts, and using the whole field. An excerpt of a response:

But you hear people talk all the time, ‘I don’t know why he doesn’t just hit the ball to left field, or bunt.’ Well, the shifts are getting more sophisticated, where the third baseman is playing in. And the other guys are over. How many guys do you really know that hit for power that hit ground-balls to the opposite side of the field?

This is data I’ve played with a little before. Nori Aoki, for example, hits a ton of grounders toward the opposite field. Aoki also has 19 career home runs. Not a power threat. You already know many of the guys with stronger pull tendencies on the ground. They see a lot of shifts, and the group includes players like Chris Davis, Ryan Howard, and David Ortiz. But let’s see about answering Bruce’s question. Are there any powerful hitters who send grounders the other way? I know I already ruined the surprise before I even started the body of the post, but, do play along, won’t you?

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This is something I’ve already shown you before. I mean, this, specifically, is not, but this is a slightly sharper version of the same graph. Team wins vs. projected team wins from the past decade:

Right, so: the Angels exceeded their preseason projections by the most. The Cubs undershot their preseason projections by the most. By the projections, over the decade, the Angels should’ve won 48 more games than the Cubs. What actually happened was that the Angels won 150 more games than the Cubs. That’s pretty wild. We can also take this a little deeper.

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This time, at least, it’s a little different. Yu Darvish sustained an injury while pitching. Cliff Lee sustained an injury while pitching. Gavin Floyd, Masahiro Tanaka, Jose Fernandez, Matt Harvey, so many of the others — they sustained their injuries while pitching. Marcus Stroman sustained an injury while fielding. His throwing arm is completely fine. His throwing arm, also, is completely useless to him at the moment, because you can’t pitch through a torn ACL. The freak injury will knock Stroman out for the duration of 2015, and though he should be good to go after that, the calendar says “2015” right now, and we’ll be without something we all thought we’d have. Stroman, like the others, has been taken from his team, and he’s been taken from the game.

There’s also that other twist. Darvish is a devastating loss, but then, the Rangers didn’t seem particularly poised to challenge for the playoffs. Lee would be another devastating loss, but even with him healthy, the Phillies looked like a mess. Floyd was just re-injured, and the Indians could win the AL Central, but the Indians also have a ton of pitching depth, and they knew Floyd was a risk. The Blue Jays had dreams of winning the World Series. Stroman figured to be the No. 1, and the team didn’t look deep with him. This is a massive blow, and it’s a massive blow to a team right on that win-curve position where a massive blow can be the most massive. People are mourning this. It’s not that much of an overreaction.

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The best thing about having ZiPS on the site is having ZiPS on the site. The second-best thing about having ZiPS on the site is it gives people like me an opportunity to recycle blog posts like this. Already, I repeated a polling project, asking you guys how you feel about the various team projections. Now I’m repeating a post from January, where I examined team depth based just on Steamer projections. Now we’ve got the full blended Steamer and ZiPS projections, and we have the newest depth charts possible, so it only makes sense to do this again. I can’t afford to not do this again.

Do I need to explain to you the importance of depth? Probably not, and probably especially not since I’ve already written this. But, I mean, you have your starters, and then you have your other guys. Ideally, the starters all work out, and nothing goes wrong. Ideally, it’s nothing but eight or nine position players and one five-man rotation, and you sweep your way to the World Series. But the thing that usually happens is misfortune. It happens in different amounts to different organizations, but you can expect every team to need reinforcements. Right now, it might not be clear what will go wrong, but something or some things will go wrong, and the strong teams are prepared for adversity.

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Maybe the problem is on our end. Maybe the problem is the increasingly unrealistic expectation of health, establishing a psychological baseline no longer supported by the modern game. In this game, pitchers get hurt, and while pitchers have always gotten hurt, because pitching is a dangerous thing, the sense is things are getting worse, and we have to adjust to what that means. Maybe we just need to mentally brace ourselves for the seemingly inevitable blows. Last season, the elbow robbed us of Matt Harvey and Jose Fernandez, among so many others. Already this season, we came in nervous about Masahiro Tanaka, and now the elbow might have claimed Yu Darvish and Cliff Lee.

The two have different injuries. Darvish has a slight tear of the UCL, and the overwhelming likelihood is Tommy John surgery that’ll knock him out until into next season. Lee doesn’t seem to have a UCL problem, but he still might have a UCL problem, and even if he doesn’t, he’s dealing with the same discomfort that forced him to be shut down last summer, and if Lee requires a surgical fix, the estimate is a recovery of 6-8 months. Darvish might try to pitch through, but we know how that usually goes. Lee might try to pitch through, but in the best-case scenario, that means pitching through pain. We might not see Darvish until the middle of 2016. We might not see Lee ever again on a major-league mound. It’s too early to know anything for sure, except that the news of the last few days has changed the baseball landscape.

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Strength of schedule, usually, is more of a football concern. The schedules are a lot shorter, meaning there’s a more narrow distribution of opponents, and that can make for some significant differences. It’s a worthwhile consideration in the evaluation of any given team — losses are more forgivable if you’re facing juggernaut after juggernaut. There’s not much impressive about clobbering a pushover.

You see less discussion of strength of schedule in baseball. This is easy enough to explain — the schedule sometimes feels interminable, and so people naturally assume that, over six months, differences more or less even out. On the other hand, we know that schedules are unbalanced. We know that some divisions are stronger than others. What that means is that there will be differences in schedule strengths, and then considering playoff spots can be determined by one win, that makes this important. Granted, that makes everything important. In a tight race, every run and every win are critical, so that goes for any advantage or disadvantage.

With teams essentially set, and with schedules having been laid out ages ago, I decided now would be a good time to project 2015 schedule strengths. How big are the differences between the toughest schedule and the weakest? Even though this isn’t a thing that’ll make a whole world of difference, it could very well make some difference, so now it’s time to take a look at that.

The method is simple. At FanGraphs, we feature team projections, based on author-maintained depth charts and two different projection systems blended together. Every team has a projected total Wins Above Replacement (WAR) value, so all I did was grab the 30 schedules off MLB.com and calculate, for each team, the average single-game opponent WAR. The higher the average WAR, the tougher the schedule. This is, naturally, only as good as the projections, but then our only alternative is, I don’t know, guessing? This is like very educated guessing.

No adjustments have been made for home games or road games, since those even out. In the chart below, you’ll see American League teams on the left in blue, and National League teams on the right in green. It’s immediately apparent that all the NL teams are projected to have lower opponent WARs than the AL teams. This is because the AL is still considered the stronger league of the two.

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