I know it’s obvious, but it’s worth a reminder. The most important thing to consider before serving up a Julio Urias take is that he is 19 years old. Think about what you were doing as a 19-year-old. Think about what Julio Urias is doing as a 19-year-old. When Stephen Strasburg was 19, his competition was the Mountain West Conference. When Jacob deGrom was 19, he was a shortstop at Stetson University. Julio Urias has already struck out seven major league batters. He’s 19! That’s more strikeouts than literally every other active major league pitcher had when they were 19, aside from Felix Hernandez who may one day be enshrined in the Hall of Fame.

So Julio Urias is 19, and we must always keep that in mind, but he’s now been tasked twice with getting major league hitters out, and he hasn’t done a great job. He can be both unfathomably young and also ineffective at the same time — they aren’t mutually exclusive. The age isn’t an excuse; it just serves as context.

But we can have more context than age and results! How about the process? How’s the stuff? Ultimately, it’s the process that matters; the age will change and results can be wonky. Execute the process enough times and the results will follow. There’s still only so much we can learn from two games, but at the very least it gives us an excuse to analyze Julio Urias, which we’ve all been waiting for, and maybe we’ll see something to help quiet some of the alarm bells currently going off in Dodger Nation. We’ll observe some good, and we’ll observe some bad. We shouldn’t come way with a much different opinion of Urias’ future — two starts shouldn’t have moved the needle anyhow — but we’ll certainly come away with more information.

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Madison Bumgarner hit another home run. Sure, it was against Aaron Blair, and sure, this just keeps Bumgarner tied with Jason Heyward, but, Aaron Blair is a quality prospect in the major leagues, and this keeps Bumgarner tied with Jason Heyward. Bumgarner apparently figured out hitting in 2014. Maybe he got bored because he’d already mastered pitching. Since then, over just shy of 200 trips to the plate, Bumgarner has batted .234/.265/.451, good for a 101 wRC+. The next-best offensive pitcher has been Zack Greinke, with a wRC+ of 65. On the mound, Madison Bumgarner is Madison Bumgarner, and at the plate, Madison Bumgarner is Jonathan Schoop. The Giants’ advantage is that no other pitcher hits like a powerful second baseman.

This table is funny to me:

The name right after Bumgarner is Kyle Schwarber. When Bumgarner has hit a ball between the lines, he’s had basically the same rate of home runs as Kyle Schwarber. You know the image you have of Kyle Schwarber. Bumgarner has made that kind of contact.

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The worry is always the same whenever an Asian hitter comes over. The hitter wouldn’t be getting the chance in the first place were it not for an outstanding performance, but there’s always the question of how the hitter is going to handle major-league fastballs. In part, this might just come from arrogance, but it’s not without its legitimacy. Many Asian hitters have high leg kicks that work as timing mechanisms, and more importantly, there just isn’t a lot of big velocity in South Korea or Japan. The hitters are mostly unproven against the stuff you find in almost every big-league bullpen. So, it’s fair to wonder how a player might adjust.

What we already knew from last season: Overall, Jung Ho Kang adjusted. Kang was so successful, in fact, opportunities have been given to other Korean hitters. Because Kang did so well, it won’t surprise you to learn he did well against fastballs. I’m only writing this because of how Kang has been pitched this year since coming back from injury. Kang has worked beyond the fastball test. Pitchers would rather let him see almost anything else.

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The Mariners started James Paxton on Wednesday because they had to put Felix Hernandez on the disabled list with a hurt leg. That’s bad! Paxton proceeded to get lit up, by literally the San Diego Padres. That’s worse! Here, watch Paxton give up an opposite-field dinger to Wil Myers:

Familiar enough. Here’s last year’s Paxton giving up a dinger to Eduardo Escobar:

There’s nothing good about giving up eight runs in less than four innings. It’s even worse when that happens in a pitcher-friendly environment, against a pitcher-friendly opponent. Paxton was so ineffective the Mariners won’t commit to giving him another go, even though Felix is down a few weeks. By results, Wednesday was a nightmare.

By process? By process, it was less nightmarish. There were actually positive signs. Based on everything but the results, Paxton showed promising skills, and the Mariners should want for him to get another opportunity.

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Another page has been ripped off of the calendar, and sample sizes are finally getting to a point where they actually matter. This, then, represents a good occasion to take a first look at starting-pitcher contact-management trends. Today, it’s the National League.

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Yesterday, MLB announced that Marlon Byrd has been suspended 162 games for failing a second PED test, which will effectively end his big league career. As a guy who turns 39 in a few months, he was already nearing the end of his days as a productive player anyway, and with a chunk of the suspension carrying over to next season, it’s unlikely any team will offer him a contract this winter. So this is probably it for Marlon Byrd.

But having his career end like this isn’t much solace for the pitchers that Byrd faced, or the teams that lost games in which the Indians gained an advantage from having him on the field. For instance, here’s Dan Haren’s comments in the wake of the news coming out yesterday.

@Ken_Rosenthal can I get back all the home runs he hit off me please? Thanks

— dan haren (@ithrow88) June 1, 2016

Also last year magically returned from a broken wrist in 16 days, at age 38. Proceeded to homer off me that day. https://t.co/7ubQOpskCk

— dan haren (@ithrow88) June 1, 2016

This is one of the issues the current system can’t really address. Sure, Byrd’s career is likely over, but maybe it would have been over four years ago had he not started looking for chemical assistance, and so what did he really lose by taking the banned substances? For players in his position, on the bubble of the major leagues, the incentive to use will always be larger than the costs of getting caught as long as one doesn’t care too terribly much about their reputation.

So every time a player fails a test and gets suspended, there’s a push for a different set of punishments, ones that would try to reduce the financial incentive to take PEDs, or at least increase the cost of getting caught. The most common suggestion is to allow teams to void the contracts of players who fail drug tests, so that players can’t use the money to secure a large financial commitment, then benefit from that commitment even after the suspension ends. Unfortunately, this suggestion is highly problematic.

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Just as much as we’ve trained ourselves not to take Spring Training stats at face value, we should also by now have trained ourselves not to take player and manager Spring Training quotes at face value. Words are words, and until those words become actions, they’re not super fun to consume or analyze. Like, here’s a few examples pulled from a preseason story by the excellent Clark Spencer, with expectations for the upcoming season inferred from comments by star pitcher Jose Fernandez and manager Don Mattingly.

Spring Training Report #1

• Expectation: “He just might not resort to his fastball quite as much…”
• Reality: Fernandez’s fastball rate is mostly unchanged, and in fact is slightly above (52%) his previous career-high (51%).

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Michael Pineda is having a hard time right now. Not when it comes to plate appearances ended by the umpire — his strikeout minus walk percentage is 21st in the big leagues, just ahead of Jake Arrieta’s. Usually that’s good enough, since K-BB% was once shown to be the best in-season predictor, and because it’s hard to be bad if you’re striking a bunch of guys out and not really walking anyone.

Usually. But not right now. Not in the Bronx, at least. Because, since 2000, nobody has recorded a K-BB% over 15% (Pineda is at 17.7% currently) and suffered from a worse batting average on balls in play. Nobody has allowed more homers per nine innings in that group, either. After contact, the ball has not been Pineda’s friend.

Still, we might just chalk it up to luck and call it a day. We might, if it wasn’t so obvious from watching Pineda that he’s having trouble with command and that things aren’t quite right.

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We are excited to have Corinne Landrey join the FanGraphs writing staff. She’ll be contributing here several times per week, and is going to be an excellent addition to the site. Below is her first post as a FanGraphs author.

If you know one thing about Cole Hamels beyond his profession or employer, it’s likely the fact that he throws a magnificent changeup. It’s the pitch upon which Hamels’ impressive career has been built from the moment he made his major-league debut as a 22-year-old kid. Like any successful pitcher, Hamels has had to adjust and improve over the years first by refining his curveball and later adding a cutter to his repertoire, but the changeup has been the omnipresent ace up his sleeve throughout his major-league career. Until now, that is.

For the first time in Hamels’ decade-long career, his changeup is no longer serving as his go-to secondary pitch. That honor now belongs to the cutter he began using in 2010 after watching his teammate Cliff Lee use the pitch with tremendous results down the stretch the previous season. Since then, the pitch has developed into Hamels’ preferred third pitch and now its usage has officially surpassed the changeup:

This year Hamels has gone to the cutter 202 times, or on 24% of his pitches, whereas the changeup has been used just 185 times, or 22 percent of the time. This usage shift, however, is not the result of a season-long trend. In fact, during the month of April, Hamels threw his changeup more than he threw any other pitch, fourseamer included. But after his start on April 20th, something changed.

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Last night, in Baltimore, Mookie Betts did this.

Those three home runs pushed his season total to 12, putting him in a tie with guys like Mike Trout, Miguel Cabrera, Giancarlo Stanton, and George Springer, among others, and ahead of a group that includes Jose Bautista, J.D. Martinez, and Miguel Sano. Through the first two months of the season, Betts is hitting for the kind of power you expect from a slugging cleanup hitter, not a diminutive leadoff guy. And while Betts hasn’t had any three-homer nights before, this power surge isn’t that new.

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