The past year has been a mixed bag for Shelby Miller. In these digital pages during 2014, Dave discussed him being broken during April, Eno postulated on whether he was fixed following the regular season, and then he was traded by the Cardinals in November for Jason Heyward. Now, fresh off a two-hit shutout that is the culmination of a fine early season run, he’s sitting on a microscopic ERA (1.33) and WHIP (0.83). Have the Braves really fixed Miller?

Let’s start with a statistic: .183. That’s Miller’s current BABIP. No other qualified starter in the major leagues has a figure under .215. Case closed, right? His FIP is 3.28 largely because of that BABIP, his high LOB%, and low HR/FB rate, and the regression is coming for him. Yes and no: even if we can expect less absurd batted ball numbers moving forward, there are still a few interesting changes Miller has made that warrant a closer look.

Miller’s turnaround from his general malaise in 2013 and 2014 (when his strikeout rate cratered and walk rate rose by almost 60%) started in September of last year, when his overall command improved, helping to reverse the trends in those strikeout and walk rates. He never had bad command in the minors, so perhaps there was always the potential for a return to better times with his ability to limit free passes.

Eno mentioned that he also started locating his fastball a little bit higher, leading to more whiffs, something Miller may or may not have been consciously doing. That, along with his curveball regaining some of its effectiveness, drove a small return to form at the end of last year.

This year, we’re seeing something entirely different out of Miller. His pitch usage has changed, moving directly to his cutter and sinker over his four-seamer. Take a look:
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Clayton Kershaw is in unfamiliar territory. The three-time Cy Young award winner and consensus best pitcher in baseball finds himself sporting a 4.24 ERA in mid-May, prompting questions about what might be wrong. As we’ll see, luck has largely been unkind to Kershaw, and he’s due for a big regression toward better numbers; however, he hasn’t been the Kershaw we’ve seen for the past two years in one important part of his game, and that has led to some poor results.

Pitchers can’t control everything on the baseball field. After the ball leaves their hand, control is ceded to the batter, the defense, and luck. Also chief among the factors pitchers have little control over: the rate of men they leave on base, the rate of balls in play that go for hits, and the rate of fly balls that go for home runs. Metrics like FIP (Fielding Independent Pitching) and xFIP try to take out a lot of the variability in a pitcher’s stat line influenced by things outside of their control, attempting to measure only what the pitcher is responsible for.

Kershaw has been a victim of some of those factors in 2015. First of all, there’s the rate of balls in play that have actually gone for hits. Here’s a chart of Kershaw’s batting average on balls in play against him over the course of his career compared to league average:

This year batted balls have been finding holes in the infield and gaps in the outfield, something Kershaw doesn’t have much control over. Once those batted balls start finding gloves, they’ll start getting turned into outs more often.

Kershaw’s rate of runners left on base in 2015 has been unlike years past as well. Here’s a chart of the rate at which he’s stranded runners on base over his career compared to league average:

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Corey Kluber just regressed very quickly. After a high-profile winless start to his post-Cy Young-winning campaign that had many wondering what was wrong with him, the Cleveland right-hander struck out 18 Cardinals yesterday over eight innings, allowing only one hit and no walks along the way. In reality, there was nothing wrong with Kluber; his 5.04 ERA was mostly a mirage overlaying a 3.20 FIP, and given the fact that his peripherals were almost in line with last year’s stellar figures, better times were always ahead.

The better times came all at once, however, and they came in a package that almost made (and did make) history: Kluber finished the eighth inning just three strikeouts shy of the single game record for most in a game, 21. He didn’t get the chance to go out for the ninth, something that is being hotly debated, but the facts speak for themselves: Kluber had the most strikeouts in a game since 2004, he was only the second pitcher ever to have 18 Ks in eight innings (Randy Johnson, 1992), and his game score of 98 was the highest in an eight inning outing since 1914.

I won’t list all of the records because there are a lot of them, but the bottom line is that he had an almost impossibly great day. August summed up the impact on Kluber’s season stats well in this tweet:

Corey Kluber today: ERA from 5.04 to 4.27 FIP from 3.20 to 2.57 K% from 23.8 to 29.2 BB% from 5.7 to 5.0 Record from 0-5 to 1-5

— August Fagerstrom (@AugustF_MLB) May 14, 2015

That’s quite a turnaround, as you might expect, so let’s dive a little deeper into the start. We’re going to kick this off with a GIF. It’s a good GIF, and it illustrates a few points we’re going to talk about. The camera angle changes slightly as the innings progress, but it still gives us a pretty good idea of where Kluber was operating yesterday. Green circles are swinging strikeouts, red circles are looking strikeouts:

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A cursory examination of the WAR leaderboards for shortstops in 2015 shows a few surprising developments. At the very top, we have the nice blend of defensive and offensive aptitude in Zack Cozart, and the mainly defensive-minded duo of Brandon Crawford (who has surprised at the plate this year) and Andrelton Simmons. Then, where we might expect a name like Ian Desmond or Troy Tulowitzki, we instead have Marcus Semien.

It’s only May, so we’re still dealing with the usual parts of the game that suffer from small sample size issues when it comes to player comparison and valuation, like BABIP and defensive metrics. Still, there’s something about Semien being toward the top of the boards that warrants our attention: not only is the A’s shortstop there because of his offense, he’s there despite his defense.

On Sunday, we saw both the best and worst of him. Let’s start with defense. During the bottom of the second, Logan Morrison hit a routine one-hopper up the middle to Semien, who was shifted along with the rest of the infield. The outcome was one Athletics fans have wearily gotten used to:

That was the 24-year-old’s 9th error of the season, briefly tying him with Ian Desmond and Danny Santana for the league lead, that is until he moved into sole possession of first by making another on Monday (he made one last night too). If you don’t like errors, Semien sits at -1 runs by DRS, good for 20th in the majors.

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Kris Bryant finally did it. After not hitting a home run in 19 games following his call up, he went out on Saturday in Milwaukee and clubbed a Kyle Lohse slider 389 feet out to left-center. The homer was the one number conspicuously missing from his season statistics, but it was always coming: the 23-year-old put up famous power numbers in the minor leagues, he’s been hitting inside fastballs to the warning track in right-center, and there was nothing telling us anything was wrong. Part of his power drought was surely his ongoing adjustment to major league pitching, something all rookies have to contend with. However, his treatment by pitchers so far shows just how unique Bryant might be, and puts him in a rare class of hitters.

Unsurprisingly, there was something special about the home run Bryant hit, beyond it being the first of many in his career. Let’s take a look at it, slowed down at impact, with a bit of an effect on the ball to make it more visible:

There are a few things to note: it was a slider, it was on the first pitch of the at-bat, and it was over the outer third of the plate. It caught more of the strike zone than Lohse wanted, but it wasn’t the worst hanging slider anyone has seen. This serves first and foremost as a reminder that Kris Bryant is very talented at hitting baseballs. It also informs us of the approach we’ve seen pitchers use when attacking Bryant so far in his young career, and the adjustments he needs to make in order to be successful at this level.

Lost in the frenzy over a big power prospect not hitting home runs is the fact that hitting for power requires getting good pitches to hit (unless you’re Vladimir Guerrero). Usually, a hitter doesn’t view a first-pitch slider on the outer third of the plate to be a great candidate for a home run to left-center field, but this is where Bryant currently finds himself.

To begin to illustrate that point, let’s start with a list. Here are the names of players since the year 2000 with at least 17 walks in their first 21 career games:

• Kosuke Fukudome (18)
• Carlos Santana (17)
• Adam Dunn (17)
• Andy LaRoche (17)
• Kris Bryant (17)

That’s it – five players. Not all of these hitters lit the world on fire, but they were/are known as high OBP/power guys (with the exception of Andy LaRoche). The bottom line is that this happens very rarely, and Bryant is being treated in a unique way usually reserved for a certain type of hitter.

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Rehabbing a partially torn UCL with rest was an unconventional route for the Yankees and Masahiro Tanaka since the discovery of his injury last July, and there was always the possibility that it simply wouldn’t work, with the right-hander having to go under the knife at some point. While that exact situation has yet to be realized, here we are in early May with Tanaka on the indefinite-day DL due to forearm and wrist issues. As we know, forearm injuries are a big red flag, especially when your elbow is already a little balky.

Still, the Yankees have managed to cope without Tanaka so far, putting the 25-year-old Chase Whitley into the rotation: Whitley has a 0.75 ERA/1.53 FIP, 20.4 K-BB%, and 1.08 WHIP in two starts. That’s a tiny sample, and we would be remiss if we didn’t cast a lot of doubt on his ability to keep up anything near that sort of performance, but it now bears some looking into, as do the Yankees’ plans should they hit any other bumps in the road regarding their rotation (spoiler: they almost surely will).

How good has the Yankees rotation been so far this season? Great, actually. Here’s the ERA / FIP of the starters for all 30 clubs so far this season (mouse over the chart for interactivity):

The Yankees are fifth in FIP, showing how great a surprise they’ve been this year, driven mainly by Michael Pineda. As we’ll see, that level of success in the future is dependent on a lot of things lining up.

First, let’s take a look at Whitley. He couldn’t stick in the rotation last year, eventually moving to a relief role, but he has the arsenal of a starter: fastball, slider, and changeup. I’ll say this: more people would know Chase Whitley’s name if he had a fastball that matched his secondary stuff. His slider, always an average offering, is a little different this year (he’s taken almost four MPH off of it compared to 2014, and it has an inch more vertical drop), though it’s still a fly ball pitch with not a ton of depth. It’s been good this year, but the jury is still out on whether that can be sustained. His changeup is the real prize: last year, it would’ve placed in the top-10 of swinging strike rates among starters had he qualified. At its best, it looks like this:

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Yesterday, we looked at the biggest changes in fastball movement (rise and sink) in starters and relievers from their offerings in 2014 vs. this season. Today, we’re going to do the same thing with breaking balls (pitches known for their movement), which should hopefully yield some interesting takeaways as we move forward with this young season.

As I said in the previous article, more movement doesn’t always mean better results: it can be a catalyst for some changes in peripheral numbers, however, and can point toward raw improvement in a pitch. We’ll go into some information related to whiff rates and batted ball profiles with these breaking pitches, looking for any change in production that goes along with change in movement.

The standard preface: all stats are farmed from Baseball Prospectus’ PITCHf/x leaderboards. It’s obviously still very early, so take these results with a grain of salt, and mostly as something interesting to watch as the season progresses. Today we’ll divide these pitches by curveball and slider, looking at starters and relievers together. We’ll also divide sliders by lefties and righties, as the movement data is obviously quite different for each of them. As a baseline, I’ve used a 50 pitch minimum for both starters and relievers in 2014.

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There’s something about the calendar flipping from April to May that makes it seem like the baseball season is somehow better realized, with the small samples and fluctuations of the opening frame left behind in favor of more stability. The cold days in the Midwest are less numerous; we now know the teams with a capacity to surprise, and the ones that never really had a shot. That sense of May stability is an artifact of our human desire to demarcate, to divide, and to end and begin things: the real truth is that every day is merely a day before and after another, moving relentlessly toward a finality — a month, a season, a career.

Our monthly divisions are a veil draped over the game to provide meaning where there may be none. Still, knowing the futility of our plight, we’re going to press on with that propensity for order and use the end of April to look back at changes between last month and last season in relation to one subset of data: movement of pitches. I’ll be looking at who had the biggest change in movement for their offerings between last year and this year, and perhaps we can glean some data related to whiff rate, batted ball breakdown, or other peripheral statistics that suit our fancy.

Finally, a reminder: more movement doesn’t always mean better results. It does make for entertaining data and visualizations, however. Today, we’ll go over fastballs, so we won’t have the gaudy swing and miss stuff that we’ll have tomorrow, when we’ll look at breaking balls and offspeed pitches. All stats are farmed from Baseball Prospectus’ PITCHf/x leaderboards. Today we’ll divide fastballs by four-seam and two-seam, as well as starters and relievers. As a baseline, I used a 500 pitch minimum for starters in 2014, and a 100 pitch minimum for relievers.

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We didn’t envision April going like this. The Cleveland Indians received 35 total votes for a playoff appearance in our 2015 preseason staff predictions, the most out of any team in the American League. Four weeks after those predictions were published, Cleveland finds themselves 7-14 — seven and a half games back of the Royals in the AL Central — tied for the biggest deficit in any division outside of the one containing the Brewers.

If we’re searching for a silver lining, the early going hasn’t been easy schedule-wise, with six games against Detroit that resulted in one win and a few bullpen implosions that have ended up as walk-off losses. Those one-run games on the road are the types of results that can easily swing win/loss records; however, if we look at Cleveland’s Pythagorean W/L, it gives us only an ever-so-slightly healthier 8-13. Alas, we can’t simply blame many of their losses on volatile one-run results.

Still, as we like to point out here in the early going, losses count in April just like wins do, and Cleveland has now gone from trendy sleepers in the division to having to play catch up against two fast-starting squads in Kansas City and Detroit. Before the season began, we gave Cleveland a 43% probability of winning the Central with 86 projected wins, and after yesterday’s results, that figure now stands at 13.4% and 82 projected wins.

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I attended the Oakland A’s game last night, something I do a few dozen times a year, and Sonny Gray happened to be on the mound plying his trade against a talented Anaheim squad. Though he was shaky in the first inning (his career ERA in the first inning is 4.50, so there could be something to that), he settled down to go eight innings with two earned runs, six hits, one walk, and six strikeouts. He was efficient, looked like an ace, and the A’s won the game.

I moved to the Bay Area just before Sonny Gray was getting his first shot in the majors. In relation to how many games I’ve gone to in Oakland, I’ve witnessed an inordinately high number of his starts in person, so I’ve been able to witness how he’s grown and evolved as a pitcher over the past few years. As April comes to an end, I’m confident enough in those changes to finally write about them. To frame our discussion, let’s begin with a chart of Gray’s fastball usage (separated by type), from the time he was promoted in 2013 until now:

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