It is an irrefutable fact that nothing that happens at the beginning of April can cost a team an entire baseball season. That is, short of a disaster or otherwise some act of God. You know what there’s a lot left of? Regular-season baseball. There is so much regular-season baseball left to be played. Things are going to happen, and seasons are going to change course. At this point we’re practically still in extended spring training.

But it is likewise an irrefutable fact that every single game of a regular season matters. Which is why we turn our attention to a game between the Rays and Rangers in Texas on Monday night. A year ago, the Rays finished within a few games of a playoff spot. The Rangers lost the division on the season’s last day, and then they were eliminated in the one-game wild-card playoff. The Rays and Rangers both project to contend in 2013. Things are going to be tight, most likely, making everything matter more, and on Monday, the Rangers closed out the Rays thanks to what we might charitably label a controversial call.

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Monday afternoon, the Brewers were leading the Cubs 7-2 going into the bottom of the ninth. Brandon Kintzler took the mound, but after three straight batters reached base, he was replaced by Jim Henderson. Henderson allowed a little bit of damage, but he successfully slammed the door, picking up a save. Henderson pitched in part because John Axford threw 18 pitches on Sunday. Henderson pitched more because Axford allowed two more runs Sunday, bringing him to a season total of six in 2.2 innings. Fueling those six runs allowed have been four dingers, as Axford’s problems from 2012 appear to have carried over into the new campaign.

The talk now is that Henderson will replace Axford as the Brewers’ closer. Axford has been getting booed at home, on account of the sucking, and if the Brewers want to contend and make the playoffs, they can’t afford to have an unreliable closer who’s demonstrated his unreliability. Many feel that Axford has earned a demotion. Many reached that point ages ago. It’s no longer a question of whether Axford should be demoted. It’s a question of: what’s the matter with John Axford?

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What follows is coverage of a pitch thrown by a Tampa Bay Ray, a pitch that was taken and therefore not swung at. It was taken for a strike, and it was sufficiently unusual to end up sparking this post, but this isn’t really about pitch framing. Jose Molina didn’t even play, and while we’re here, just for the record, relative to Jonathan Lucroy, Molina gets too much framing love. It’s not that Molina isn’t outstanding. It’s that Lucroy is, quietly, similarly outstanding, but people forget about him. But this isn’t about Jose Molina or pitch framing.

The Rays hosted the Indians on Sunday afternoon, and however many people were watching at the start, far fewer people were watching in the top of the ninth, when the Indians held an 11-run lead. And of those watching, fewer still were paying close attention, so few noticed Fernando Rodney’s first pitch to Mark Reynolds leading off the ninth inning. The pitch was a fastball for a called strike, and you can see the pitch embedded below:

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Hi everybody and welcome to the second part of the first part of a new recurring Friday series. The series began with the week’s wildest pitches, and now we move on to the wildest swings because batters need to be ridiculed for their humiliating failures too. So often, we celebrate these players for being extraordinarily talented, for regularly doing things of which we’re not even capable. Consider this your weekly reminder that ballplayers are humans and sometimes, if only for fleeting instants, humans suck. Consider this also your weekly reminder that, the overwhelming majority of the time, ballplayers are terrific.

As with the wildest pitches, identifying the wildest swings is done using PITCHf/x and basic math. I confirm everything by going to the video, and I’m not going to include checked swings, because I’m looking for full, ill-advised commitments. I’m probably also not going to include swings during hit-and-run attempts, since the hitter generally feels like he has to swing at everything so the decision is practically out of his hands. I don’t want swings attempted because the hitter feels like he has to swing. I want swings attempted because the hitter thought the swing would be productive. Each week, there will be featured a top-five list. Each week, starting RIGHT NOW.

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Hello friends, and welcome to the first Friday of the 2013 MLB regular season. On this Friday we will debut a new series, to run on every Friday hereafter. The name of the series is “The Worst of the Best”, and each Friday it’s going to involve two separate but related posts, chronicling the wildest pitches of the week that was, and the wildest swings of the week that was, where for our purposes the week that was spans from the previous Friday to Thursday. Or, in this case, from Sunday to Thursday. Each post will consist of a top five, complete with a bunch of images, so prepare your computers if you have really terrible old slow computers.

I’ve done something somewhat similar to this before. I came up with this name in a hurry and I’m not wedded to it, but the idea is that we’re observing the worst performances from some of the best players in the world. These are the moments at which the world’s greatest baseball players are the most like us. Maybe even worse than us! It’s all going to be PITCHf/x-derived, so this isn’t a subjective list, but we are left with the reality that every so often, PITCHf/x misses a pitch. Also PITCHf/x doesn’t keep track of intended pitch location, which could matter a little here. But we’re all just going to deal with that, because I said so and because none of us really has a choice. Now let’s just go ahead and get to the start of our first list. This is going to at least not be the opposite of fun.

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All offseason long, the Detroit Tigers denied interest in re-signing free-agent closer Jose Valverde. Every other team in baseball also effectively denied interest in signing Valverde. The Tigers did next to nothing to address their closer situation, and on Wednesday, Phil Coke blew a save against the Twins. Thursday, the Tigers signed Valverde, albeit to a minor-league contract with an early-May opt out. There have been, I think, two primary responses:

(1) It’s a minor-league contract so it’s utterly risk-free — if Valverde doesn’t earn a big-league job, he won’t be given a big-league job. What’s the harm?

(2) The Tigers won’t be able to help themselves. Valverde isn’t what he was, but it won’t be long before he’s closing again for Detroit, and possibly costing them games. He’s “proven”, he’s familiar, he’s still thought of as a closer despite everything. This is how it starts.

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There are, I imagine, several questions one could ask about Roy Halladay. Does he eat breakfast? does he eat granola for breakfast? Which is his favorite breakfast granola? But, regarding Halladay as a baseball pitcher, there is one particularly pressing question: will he ever get back to being what he was? It would’ve been nearly impossible for Halladay to conclusively answer that question on Wednesday in Atlanta, and indeed, in the aftermath of Halladay’s start, the question remains unanswered, conclusively.

The good news, if you missed it: Halladay finished with nine strikeouts. The bad news, if you missed it: the rest. Halladay allowed five runs in 3.1 innings, and he became the first pitcher in recorded baseball history to record nine strikeouts in so brief an outing. Of course, we know better than to look at innings thrown — more meaningful is the number of batters faced, and in that regard Halladay’s start was not unprecedented. Four times before, pitchers have struck out nine of 15 batters, while Halladay faced 19 Braves. Dan Osinski once struck out ten of 16 batters. Just last April, Marco Estrada struck out nine of 17 batters. But anyway, this isn’t about establishing an historical context — this is about Halladay, and what he is, and what just happened.

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Know first that this began as a far more ambitious project. But the ambitious project didn’t pan out, and though ambition is noble, it isn’t something to be celebrated on its own. One cannot succeed without ambition, but at the same time, one cannot succeed without more than just ambition. What we’ve been left with, in the ruins of my attempt, is a little grab-bag of fun facts. I still find this stuff interesting, and it isn’t stuff you run across every day, but this could’ve been more. It probably never will be more.

In the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t make a huge difference how quickly a player can run from home to first. It does make some difference, but most hits will be hits no matter what. Yet it’s better to have speed than to not have speed, and one can’t really improve how quickly he runs. Not by the time he’s a professional baseball player, not when he’s trying to go 90 feet. I’ve recently become somewhat interested in timing players from the moment of contact to the first-base bag. More specifically, I was interested in timing Jesus Montero, but it turns out this isn’t very complicated to do. And we shouldn’t need a big sample size, because a player should run somewhere around his “true talent”, so to speak. The key is to isolate close plays. There will always be some variation, depending on any stumbles and on where the pitch was located and on so many things, but, scouts time players to the base. Why don’t we share in the fun? (The fun of knowledge)

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Some time ago, Brandon McCarthy asked a question about first pitches of seasons. McCarthy is neat and fun and smart and good and he recently dropped a FanGraphs reference in an article, so we pay attention to McCarthy, and to his question we issued a response. McCarthy was asking about offspeed frequency with the first pitch of a season. Turns out offspeed pitches are almost never thrown to begin a year, or at least that’s been the case during the PITCHf/x era. Things might’ve been the opposite before and we’d have no way of knowing because all that information is inaccessible if not unavailable and/or non-existent. It stands to reason that the fastball has always been the popular pick to kick things off.

McCarthy’s question got me interested in McCarthy’s question, but it also got me personally interested in first pitches of seasons in general. What gets thrown, where does it get thrown, and what do hitters do? As of Tuesday, every team in baseball has now played at least one game of the 2013 regular season. So every season is underway, so we can assemble a complete record of 2013’s first pitches. Are you also curious about these things? Are you not at all curious, but can you not pull yourself away from this article? Below, please find a thorough table, followed by more stuff commenting directly or indirectly on the table.

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I nearly began this post with a story of how I arrived at the topic, involving Dave Cameron and email and Lucas Duda. Instead, I’ve chosen to begin this post by simply alluding to the story and moving on to the meat, because the story is irrelevant and uninteresting.

On Monday, the Brewers opened at home against the Rockies. Some familiar problems popped up — John Axford blew a save in the top of the ninth — but the Brewers ultimately emerged victorious, with Jonathan Lucroy making headlines by driving in the winning run. A walk-off sac fly doesn’t feel the same as a walk-off single or a walk-off dinger, but no one would ever accuse Lucroy of being the most electrifying player in baseball. He’s just a pretty good player on a pretty good team, and on Monday they happened to win together.

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