The World Baseball Classic is, of course, its own tournament, fully enjoyable all by itself. But if we’re honest with ourselves, we’ll concede that we think of the regular season first. So we watch the WBC with the year ahead very much in mind. The Seattle area had particular interest in Wednesday night’s game between Venezuela and the United States, in San Diego. The US was scheduled to open with Mariners starter Drew Smyly. Venezuela was scheduled to open with Mariners starter Felix Hernandez.

Felix, at this point, is among baseball’s more intriguing unknowns. One of the best pitchers in the world is coming off the most disappointing season of his career, a season in which all the numbers went in the wrong direction. That’s typically a sign of decline, but Felix spent the winter working hard to try to regain his strength. His outing was sure to be monitored closely, and he wound up spinning five shutout innings, without a single walk. The public is forever keeping track of Felix’s velocity, and on a few occasions, he pushed his fastball past 92. There were reasons to be encouraged, as Felix blanked a strong lineup.

And yet maybe that’s missing the point. So many times, the story has been about Felix Hernandez’s fastball. In this case, the story should probably be about Drew Smyly’s fastball.

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Earlier today, my first post about catch probability was published. In that post, I mostly looked at the two years of information, together. In here, I’d like to keep the two years separate. I mean, this is a whole new data source, with a number of potential applications. Why would I ever write just the one article and stop there? I have a weekly quota to hit, and this is better than whatever else there is to analyze.

Catch probability is a new Statcast metric, which you can read about here. As complicated as it might seem, it’s actually quite simple to understand, and it can give us better answers to questions people have been asking for decades. This is where you can find all the data, so you can poke around on your own. This is all brand new, and it’s kind of a first draft. The data will improve as adjustments are made for batted-ball direction and for outfield dimensions. Already, though, we can learn from what’s been provided.

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Here’s the thing about catch probability: It’s existed for close to two decades. It’s at the heart of what we refer to as the advanced defensive metrics. Defensive Runs Saved, Ultimate Zone Rating — they couldn’t exist and do anything without catch probabilities in some form. It’s just that, for the longest time, those probabilities were generalized, educated guesses. You might’ve heard that baseball has entered the information era.

Here’s a weekend tweet from Daren Willman:

Here’s the new @statcast catch probability leaderboard we introduced @sabr https://t.co/I1NDOCRVFO

— Daren Willman (@darenw) March 12, 2017

If you missed the link in there somehow, here it is again: the Statcast Catch Probability Leaderboard. We have most of two years of Statcast information, and now we’re getting to see it applied to player defense. Specifically, in this case, outfielder defense. If you don’t entirely understand what catch probability is, here’s the MLB.com glossary entry. Take a given fly ball or line drive to the outfield. What are the odds a given batted ball is caught? Statcast can tell us, by considering hang time and necessary distance to cover. This is the start of something beautiful.

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It is perhaps important to maintain some perspective. Carlos Martinez is 25 years old. He was born in the Dominican Republic, and when he was 18, he spent his first year with a Cardinals affiliate. Last month, he agreed to a $51-million contract extension. Martinez is already a massive success story as a professional. Barring some unlikely series of catastrophic decisions, he and his family will never have to worry about money again. We should all be so blessed.

So the Martinez path is already something like four or five standard deviations better than the usual. But, you know, we’re bad at perspective. We tend to think of these people as baseball players first, and, say, just last week, we got to glimpse Martinez as a baseball player, pitching in a competitive environment for the first time since signing the multi-year guarantee. I want to show you two pitches I haven’t been able to stop thinking about.

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As the person in charge of the FanGraphs Community blog, I read over every submission that isn’t curiously-worded spam about industrial milling machinery or picking up girls. This week, a post about Matt Carpenter was submitted and published, and here is a link. I’ve been meaning to review Carpenter’s 2016 for a while, and the Community post beat me to the punch. Go ahead and read that, and if you want, stop there. I’m just going to talk more about Carpenter in the following paragraphs. His most recent year, you see, was something extraordinary.

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The quick background: Travis Sawchik talked with J.D. Martinez about his fly-ball-oriented approach, and at one point Martinez said opponents were making adjustments to him. The player himself didn’t want to go into specifics, but it didn’t take much digging to see that Martinez is vulnerable against pitches up. It’s not something unique to him — I followed that post with this post, talking about the recent home-run spike. League-wide home-run rates skyrocketed against pitches in the lower third of the zone. They also went up against pitches in the middle third of the zone. They didn’t budge at all against pitches in the upper third of the zone.

Which is interesting! It supports the idea that more players have changed their approaches and swings to attack pitches down. Now, unless you’re super-human, you can’t, as a hitter, protect against everything. Fly-ball hitters tend to be vulnerable closer to the belt. There seems to be an ongoing shift toward more fly-ball hitters. This all got me thinking about pitchers who like to elevate. And when we’re talking about elevating, we’re pretty much exclusively talking about fastballs, since you rarely want to elevate the other stuff. You know whose pitchers like to keep their fastballs up? Tampa Bay’s, more than any other team.

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Home runs were everywhere last season! You might have heard. Conveniently, just as baseball was beginning to express concern that hitters didn’t have enough of a chance, balls started leaving the ballparks in record number. This was, naturally, examined over and over. One popular explanation is that baseball arranged to have the actual ball manufactured differently. A related and popular explanation is that the ball was manufactured differently kind of by accident. And then there’s the theory that hitters simply tried to hit more homers. You can see how that could lead to more homers.

That last theory gets tied into all the various swing-changers we’ve seen over the past few years. What if there are just more hitters than ever trying to hit the ball both hard and in the air? Anecdotally, it passes the smell test, and I should say I love being able to follow a relevant Travis Sawchik post. Travis just spoke with J.D. Martinez, one of the more well-known swing-changers. Martinez tries to hit the ball in the air every single time, which he didn’t used to do. Martinez seems to hold ground balls in contempt. This is, in short, the story of how Martinez turned around his own big-league career.

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We still talk about the Tigers as a team headed off a cliff, and it’s no mystery why. The reasons are the same as they’ve ever been, and the longer-term outlook remains unpleasant. Yet the team might not get enough credit for what it was able to do in the middle of a down 2015. Yoenis Cespedes was turned into Rookie of the Year Michael Fulmer. And David Price was turned into breakout candidate Daniel Norris and wild but hard-throwing Jairo Labourt. Oh, and Matt Boyd was a part of that, too.

Boyd was intriguing to me at the time, just because of the success he’d had at the highest levels of the minors. He was written about as a low-upside type, yet he still seemed like a major-league starter. Granted, as a major-league starter in 2015, Boyd nearly allowed a run per inning. That’s terrible! Last year’s version settled down. Boyd kept his ERA in the mid-4s, and right now he’s in there for a rotation spot.

For my taste, Boyd continues to intrigue. I’ll explain why, because that’s what we do here, and I want to say right now that Boyd, as is, isn’t anything special. But he’s close. Fulmer and Norris get the bulk of the attention, but Boyd could be ready to emerge. He has one step left to take.

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It’s that time again! Last year, I wrote this post on March 9. This year, it’s going up on March 7. I suppose that means this post is consistent. Let’s get into talking about schedule strength.

I think I say it every time, but with baseball, people tend not to care about this very much. Or at least, they do care about it, but they care about it far less than they care about almost everything else. There’s a general assumption that baseball schedules are more or less even, and the truth is that they really are. You can get overwhelmed when you think about a 162-game slate, as opposed to a football schedule that’s one-tenth as long. You’d think it allows for more regression. There can be real differences at the extremes, however. Last week, I spent a little time examining projected division strength. Might as well go the one step further.

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