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Funny thing about the WAR leaderboard is, as much as it’s still very early in the season, familiar names are starting to find their places. There’s Mike Trout. Of course there’s Mike Trout. If “WAR” didn’t sound so damned good, the stat might be called Wins Below Trout, and one would reasonably expect him to lead baseball from now through the end of the year. There’s Chase Utley, and as much as the Phillies have fallen apart around him, Utley remains one of the better all-around players in baseball, despite the injuries he’s been through. There’s Troy Tulowitzki, and of course Tulowitzki is one of the elites for as long as he can stay on the field. There’s Justin Upton, who has flashes of superstardom. There’s Freddie Freeman, who’s young enough to have this much upside. There are good players, and real good players, and some early surprises, and among the early surprises is Colorado’s Charlie Blackmon.

If you read FanGraphs, you’re more than a casual baseball fan, so you’re more likely to have heard of Charlie Blackmon. Also, if you read FanGraphs, you’ve read Carson Cistulli, so you’re more likely still to have heard of Charlie Blackmon. Blackmon has long been one of Cistulli’s crushes, but the thing about Cistulli’s crushes is that he deliberately falls in love with the fringey and unheralded. Those players aren’t supposed to blossom into stars, not anywhere outside of Cistulli’s head, but here we are and we have to acknowledge what Blackmon’s been up to since winning a job with the Rockies out of camp.

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Quick answer: whenever you feel like it. Longer answer: to follow.

You’ve already had the entire weekend to forget about last week, and over the weekend, there was an incident involving Carlos Gomez and Gerrit Cole that cleared the benches and that will lead to suspensions. So you’re forgiven if you don’t remember much from Friday, but from Friday, I’d like to present to you a sequence of events. Prior to the Gomez sportsmanship incident, there was a sportsmanship incident in a game between the A’s and the Astros with Jed Lowrie and Bo Porter right in the middle.

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I’d say it isn’t often we run polls here on FanGraphs. It’s not really the sort of thing we specialize in, but then, what are the FAN projections but polls, in a sense? What is the Fan Scouting Report? We’re big supporters of crowdsourcing, if you’ll allow me to speak for the whole company, and in this instance I have a genuine interest in the tallied opinions of the many. What follows is not an analytical investigation. What follows is the lead-up to a question I ask of you.

At this point, some of you are probably approaching pitch-framing fatigue. It’s still new research and exciting research, but it’s also been heavily cited and we’re all familiar with the basic principles and various standouts. We don’t even know the extent to which it makes a difference. But, here, let me throw a couple things at you from the last few days.

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The Pirates signed Edinson Volquez as a reclamation project, and it was easy enough to explain. A season ago, Volquez posted a 5.71 ERA, which is terrible. But he also posted a 4.24 FIP and a 4.07 xFIP, and on that basis alone, one could’ve argued that Volquez still had a place in the league. His pitches had remained the same as ever. The results didn’t follow, but the Pirates were willing to take a chance, just as they’d taken chances on other seemingly damaged pitchers in the recent past. Some got no better, but some were repaired.

Stop now and take a look at things. Between 2008-2013, out of pitchers who threw at least 500 innings, Volquez put up the second-worst walk rate and the second-worst strike rate. Now, out of qualified pitchers in 2014, Volquez is putting up a top-20 walk rate and a top-20 strike rate. Used to be, Volquez would throw about six of every ten pitches for strikes. So far this month, he’s thrown about seven of every ten pitches for strikes. There’s tweaking Edinson Volquez, and there’s making him a whole new guy. What might be a reasonable explanation for this?

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As long as there are humans in charge of the strike zone, there are going to be inconsistencies. And as long as there are inconsistencies, there are going to be suspicions of bias.

Sometimes these are specific and a little paranoid. There are fans who believe umpires are biased against their favorite teams. Other times these paranoia are general and accepted without actual hard proof. For example, there’s a common belief that pitchers considered aces get the benefit of a bigger strike zone, that they’re given the benefit of the doubt around the borders, and this is just a part of the game, and there’s nothing to be done about it, really.

But is this really a part of the game?

We can accept it, or we can investigate it, and we might as well investigate it before we decide whether or not to accept it. This wouldn’t have been an option in the ’90s, when people believed Greg Maddux and Tom Glavine were getting calls. But we’ve had PITCHf/x data for the past several years, and we can make use of it toward this end. What strikes zones do aces get, relative to the non-aces?

We’ll cover the window between 2008-13. First, we must define an ace. This is subjective, but I’m going with a definition of at least five Wins Above Replacement, based on runs allowed. In other words, an ace-level season is defined as a season worth at least five WAR as a starting pitcher within the six-year window. This gives me a sample of 99 pitcher-seasons, or about 17 a year, which sounds fine to me. These seasons will be compared against other, inferior starting pitcher-seasons, of at least 50 innings each.

The next step is the more complicated step, involving a little math. For every pitcher’s season, we have to figure out what the strike zone was like that they pitched to. It turns out this is actually pretty simple. Over on FanGraphs, we offer PITCHf/x-based plate-discipline data. You can see the rate of pitches thrown in the strike zone, and you can see the rate of swings at pitches out of the strike zone. FanGraphs also offers raw strike and pitch totals. From all this information, one can calculate an “expected strike” total.

This can then be compared to the actual strike total. If a pitcher got more actual strikes than expected strikes, it can be said he pitched to a more favorable zone. If a pitcher got fewer actual strikes than expected strikes, it can be said he pitched to a less favorable zone. The theory here is that ace-level pitchers end up with more actual strikes than expected strikes, because they get more calls off the edges.

For every pitcher-season, I calculated the difference between actual strikes and expected strikes, per 200 innings. So what do we find from the resulting data?

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The first step was identifying pitch-framing as a skill. I don’t mean to diminish all the work that was done — it was phenomenal work, and illuminating work. We can’t stop talking about it! But there are other steps, or if you prefer, follow-up questions. Three of them:

1. How much does pitch-framing matter?
2. Is there a pitch-framing aging curve?
3. To what extent can better pitch-framing be taught?

As far as No. 1 is concerned, we’ve got a lot of educated guesses. As far as No. 2 is concerned, it doesn’t seem like there’s much of an aging curve at all. And as far as No. 3 is concerned, it’s interesting to look at certain case studies. It seemed like J.P. Arencibia improved a season ago after working pretty hard on his receiving technique. And now we’ve got the case of Jason Castro, which, given his team, probably isn’t a coincidence. Well, no, it definitely isn’t a coincidence. I’ll get to that!

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Two things, both from Wednesday. Before the first game of a Yankees/Cubs doubleheader, the YES Network broadcast was profiling scheduled starter Masahiro Tanaka. They, of course, had very positive things to say, and at one point, Al Leiter remarked, “what I like is that he’s attacking the zone.” No nibbling, with that guy. Aggressive, polished rookie.

Later, Wednesday night, I got an email from Dave Cameron, asking if hitters should just stand there with their bats on their shoulders, since Tanaka doesn’t throw strikes. Why not force him to come into the zone? Is he even able to come into the zone often enough?

Two analyses by two analysts of one pitcher on one day, arriving at basically opposite conclusions. Leiter said Tanaka attacks the zone. Dave said Tanaka doesn’t attack the zone. What’s going on here? It’s time to gush some more about Masahiro Tanaka.

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Not long ago, I pointed out a couple hilarious game strike zones called by Sean Barber and Clint Fagan. Both umpires called balls on pitches well within the usual zone, and both umpires called strikes on pitches somewhere around the shins. They were awful displays of umpire judgment, but after that, Barber called a much better zone in his next game, and far more importantly, both Barber and Fagan are Triple-A umpires and not regular major-league umpires. The regulars are better than the prospects, just like we see with the players.

And about those regulars — I’ve pointed out in the past that they seemed to be calling more consistent strike zones. One of the neat things about a post like that is that it can be updated, and now that we’ve got a few hundred games finished in 2014, I come bearing some further encouraging news.

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There was a variety of reasons for why certain people were opposed to instant-replay expansion. It was certainly an affront to baseball purists, who’d already had to deal with replay on boundary calls. Replay reviews would serve to disrupt the flow of the game, irritating observers and players alike. But maybe most importantly, replay threatened to slow down a slow game. Baseball doesn’t exactly fly by at a dizzying pace at the best of times, and the game hasn’t been in need of additional minutes of nothing. Baseball was thought by some a boring sport before agreeing to sometimes spend several minutes stopping the game to look at the same play over and over.

It’s the middle of April and we have some early results. There have been nearly 70 challenges, and those games have lasted an average of 197 minutes. If you’re not super good at mental math, that’s three hours and more than a quarter of another hour. That’s too long, considering baseball is supposed to be maybe three hours of programming. The easy assumption, then, is that replay is to blame. But while the current replay system could use a little bit of polish, there’s also a lot more that needs to be said.

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