Monday morning, Dave Cameron posted his bottom half of the 2013 starting pitcher positional power rankings. Just going to go ahead and paste a few select excerpts:

There’s a reason the team keeps getting tied to Kyle Lohse – he would be a pretty big upgrade over the internal candidates for the Brewers rotation.

And:

If they had another quality starter, having two interesting upside guys with big variance at the back of the rotation would be more palatable. As it is, the Brewers look like they’re at least one good pitcher short of being a contender this year.

Funny story!

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I can’t remember the last time a front office admitted to actually being desperate. Even if everybody knows that the front office is desperate, the front office has a vested interest in issuing denials, since no one wants to be taken advantage of. Brian Cashman and the Yankees, I’m sure, would say they haven’t been desperate lately, even despite all the Yankees’ injuries. But Cashman reached out to Derrek Lee, unsuccessfully. Cashman reached out to Chipper Jones, unsuccessfully. And now the Yankees are taking Vernon Wells off the Angels’ hands, two years after the Angels made the mistake of acquiring Wells in the first place.

When the Angels traded for Wells, there was no other explanation except that the Angels were desperate. The offseason hadn’t gone as the organization intended, and they felt like they needed to make a splash. With the Yankees trading for Wells, again there’s no other explanation except that the Yankees are desperate. The offseason hasn’t gone as the organization intended, and they felt like they needed to land insurance.

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Think fast! Tell me something Mike Trout isn’t very good at. If you said “winning Most Valuable Player awards”, you’re not wrong. If you said “ice hockey” you’re also not wrong, probably. But in terms of on-field baseball skills, Trout is across-the-board outstanding. There are, of course, some things he’s better at than others, and one notes that he just had twice as many strikeouts as walks, but Trout hits, he waits, he fields, and he runs. Trout doesn’t have a weakness — he has only relative weaknesses — and as for strengths, while it’s not as sexy as hitting dingers, Trout’s a hell of a base-runner. Our metric gives him 12 extra runs for his base-running in 2012, which is incredible. And of Trout’s 54 attempted steals, he was thrown out only five times.

One time, in the season finale, Trout was thrown out stealing by Jesus Montero, and we already wrote about that. It was notable, because Trout’s a good base-runner and for a catcher, Montero’s a heck of a DH.* (*Not really, because his hitting wasn’t good either.) But I wanted now to write a follow-up, about the other times Trout was thrown out stealing. I’ve been supplemented with information from BIS, covering the four times Trout was gunned down trying to take second. He was, for the record, 43-for-47 going for second, and 6-for-7 going for third. The latter situation is different, so we won’t get into it here. Let’s focus on those four. How, exactly, did teams manage to throw Trout out, where so many other batteries failed? Are there any patterns we can observe? We will proceed individually.

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Is a pop-up the same as a strikeout? No, of course not, by definition they are very different things. A pop-up requires contact, whereas a strikeout requires no contact, or at least very little contact, or a two-strike foul bunt. Pop-ups and strikeouts look nothing alike, to the eye. However, to the numbers, pop-ups and strikeouts look very much alike. On one level they are very different, and on another level they are very similar.

A few weeks ago, Dave asked whether infield flies should be included in FIP. The idea is that IFFBs have little to do with defensive skill, and pop-ups are effectively strikeouts, in terms of plate-appearance result. Pop-ups don’t advance runners, and pop-ups are almost always outs. They’re not literally always outs, but then, a batter can reach on a strikeout if the ball gets away from the catcher. So while pop-ups lead to outs slightly less often, they’re still just about automatic.

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Somehow it’s still spring training, and it won’t stop being spring training for another week and a half. We’re at the point now where everyone is beyond ready for meaningful games to begin, but just because spring training might last too long doesn’t mean it doesn’t serve a useful purpose. In spring training, pitchers and hitters can start building up their stamina. In spring training, young players can try to push veterans for jobs. In spring training, teams make money! And in spring training, players can work on tweaks during live game action without the games yet being of any real significance. Players seem to be constantly making little adjustments.

Now, the people over at Hardball Talk do great work in chronicling all the best-shape-of-his-life stories that emerge around this time of year. It’s intended in fun, but it could also conceivably be of some analytical value. Here, I want to chronicle stories of pitchers making mechanical adjustments, tweaks to their deliveries. Implementing changes they made over the offseason, or even earlier in spring. I think it would be handy to have this information in one place, even if it’s presently unclear why that might be. It could be of use down the road.

I’ve spent a lot of time on Google, and below, you’ll find what I’ve recovered. Note that changes to delivery are not the same thing as trying a new pitch — that might make for an interesting but separate reference post. Also, this is about pitchers tweaking their mechanics, not hitters tweaking their mechanics. And finally, before we proceed, please let me know in the comments if there are stories that I’ve missed. I’m almost certain that there are, and there are possibly several of them. Think of this as crowdsourcing in a way, and if you provide a link, I’ll add the information to the post. Now, the rest of the post.

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You don’t know how close you came to reading a “Hand-ley Ramirez” joke. I guess now you might.

Hanley Ramirez participated in the recently-concluded World Baseball Classic. He played third base, even though he was to spend the regular season as a shortstop. While attempting to make a play in the field the other day, Ramirez jammed his thumb, and shortly thereafter he was removed. Initial estimates put him out for 2-10 weeks, pending further word. Further word is in, and it’s not good news for Ramirez or for the Dodgers. It is good news for Ramirez’s backups, if they’re selfish.

According to Ken Rosenthal, and since confirmed by others, Ramirez is having surgery to repair a torn thumb ligament. His thumb won’t be able to do anything for three weeks, and it’s estimated that Ramirez could return to action in eight weeks. Depending on the length of any rehab assignment, then, the Dodgers will be without Hanley Ramirez until mid- or late-May. Which means Ramirez is set to miss a quarter or a third of the regular season, barring any setbacks or surprises.

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If I had to distill the core purpose of FanGraphs down to a two-word remark, I’d assert that the purpose is to “answer questions”. Given a third word, I’d assert that the purpose is to “answer baseball questions”. That’s really what we’re all doing here; that’s really what we’re all doing almost all of the time. Many of the questions we try to answer here are important, in a baseball sense. They’re questions like “is this player good?” and “is this player going to be good?” and “why is this player good?” Other questions are less important, like “how many players bunted for doubles in the 2012 regular season?” I specialize in examining the unimportant questions, and today we’ll tackle another.

The goal is expressed in the headline: I want to talk about who’s going to throw the fastest pitch in the upcoming baseball season. There’s no trophy for the achievement (yet), and the fastest pitch might not even go for a strike, but we’re a people who love us some fastball velocity, to the extent that we dress it up with fancy words like “velocity” instead of simpler, more accurate words like “speed”. Surely, a player would be honored to know if he threw the league’s fastest pitch in a season. Pitchers like velocity, too. We all think velocity is important, so let’s talk about the pitch with the most velocity.

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Many find that the easiest part of writing is the actual writing. Writing is just putting words onto a page. The more challenging part of writing is coming up with ideas for things to write about, and as far as baseball writing is concerned, that’s especially true around this time of year, when spring training is still going on despite near unanimous disapproval. So the baseball writer finds it particularly convenient when an idea is handed to him by somebody else. Tuesday afternoon, Brandon McCarthy presented an idea:

? for my stat enthusiast followers- in last 5 years, has any team’s opening day starter started the season with an off-speed pitch?

— Brandon McCarthy (@BMcCarthy32) March 19, 2013

Just like that, Twitter provides something pursuable. Thanks to PITCHf/x, Gameday, and MLB.tv, we can try to answer McCarthy’s question, and though the data gets less accurate the further back you go, that’s the data’s fault, not the user’s fault. Let’s see what’s out there.

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I was just down in Arizona with a lot of the rest of the FanGraphs crew, and as such, I found myself involved in a number of baseball conversations, with people from the crew and with others as well. One of the many conversations turned to Jesus Montero as a defensive catcher. One person who covers baseball on a daily basis for a newspaper couldn’t believe that Montero managed to throw out Mike Trout as a would-be base-stealer. One respected baseball talent evaluator referred to Montero as perhaps the very worst defensive catcher in the majors. Immediately, I knew this would be something worth exploring in greater depth.

The newspaper guy actually made the mistake of saying Montero threw Trout out twice. That didn’t happen, but it did happen once; Miguel Olivo managed to throw Trout out twice. One other time, Trout stole successfully off Montero, meaning for the season Trout was 1-for-2 with Montero behind the plate. He was nabbed on October 3, in the final game of the regular season.

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