Monday night saw a hot competition in warm conditions in southern California, as Joe Blanton and the Angels played host to Luis Mendoza and the Royals. The Angels, predicted by many before the year to advance to the World Series, were looking to turn their fourth-place season around before a partisan audience. The Royals, predicted by many before the year to play the role of American League dark horse, were looking to keep the pressure up on the Central-favorite Tigers. The game was tight for all nine innings, as the 32,203 fans in attendance were treated to a duel, and in the end the Angels emerged victorious by a score of 0.79 to 0.12.

This was a game marked by excellent pitching, as neither the Angels nor the Royals allowed a single home run, or even one single walk. For the Angels, Blanton started before yielding to Michael Roth and Robert Coello. For the Royals, Mendoza would yield to former starter Luke Hochevar. While the game was therefore light on star power, at least on the mound, those who pitched pitched like aces, with the Angels ultimately only squeaking by.

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With all due respect to the Dillon Gee–John Gast match-up in St. Louis tonight, there’s one marquee pitching match-up on the schedule for tonight’s games: Felix Hernandez vs CC Sabathia in New York. Neither pitcher throws as hard as they used to, but they’ve both managed to adapt to life without their fastest fastball, and both remain among the best starting pitchers on earth.

Sabathia, in particular, is lethal against left-handed hitters. Witness his strikeout rate by batter handedness, in graph form.

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Drafting 15th in 2012, the Indians selected Texas A&M right fielder Tyler Naquin. A collegiate standout, Naquin earned the Big 12 Player of the Year Award before Cleveland selected him and shifted him from right field — where he started 115 games as a freshman and sophomore — to center field. As Marc Hulet noted last month, Naquin’s ability to play his new position will determine his success.

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The first round of the Major League draft is just a little over three weeks away, and the Houston Astros will select first for the second consecutive year. Right now, the consensus belief is that there are two college pitchers — Mark Appel of Stanford and Jonathan Gray of Oklahoma — who are a step ahead of the rest, though University of San Diego third baseman Kris Bryant is putting on quite the power display and could be an option if the Astros preferred to build around bats rather than arms. However, the decision for the Astros may not be made simply on talent alone.

Last year was the first draft under the new bonus structure, which assigns a fixed amount of dollars to each team based on where they pick in the draft, with some pretty severe penalties for exceeding those limits. Now, if a team is interested in paying over the slot value for a pick, they’ll have to borrow the money for that overpayment from another pick, making the draft as much a game of cost management as it is talent acquisition.

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Senator John McCain introduced a bill in the Senate last week which aims to ban local TV blackouts for sporting events played in publicly-financed stadiums. But don’t get too excited baseball fans. The bill is aimed NFL blackout rules, for the most part. MLB blackouts due to the crazy MLB blackout map won’t change under this proposed legislation. The Fox Game of the Week blackouts on Saturdays may be covered, but those will disappear in 2014 anyway under the new Fox/MLB national TV contract.

Dubbed the Television Consumer Fairness Act of 2013, McCain’s bill proposed legislation has three goals:
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So, Yu Darvish is off to a pretty good start to 2013. Through eight starts this season, the Ranger’s right-hander currently sports the following statistics:

Darvish currently ranks first (or tied for first) among qualified starters in K% and SwgStr%, and he has posted the 6th best adjusted FIP in the league (56 FIP-). After a blazing start, his ERA- has dropped to 20th and his HR/FB now ranks 84th, but overall it’s clear Darvish has been a beast in 2013.

After watching this wonderful footage from Darvish’s dismantling of the Angels last night I was struck by how slow is curveball actually is.

Our own Carson Cistulli isolated his four slow curves from that night — check out the final bender to Mike Trout, resulting in a strikeout in the 6th inning. And, yes, that was 61 mph.

I wondered whether the differential between Darvish’s fastball and curveball was the largest in the league. And, so, to the data I went.

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Knuckleballers aren’t like other pitchers, or so the saying goes. Their pitches flutter like butterflies, they pitch at less than max effort, they don’t depend on velocity, and they can pitch into their fifties. All of these things seem true, and yet the more we know about knuckleballers the more they might actually be more like all the other pitchers out there. So when 38-year-old R.A. Dickey has lost some oomph on his seminal pitch, maybe it means something, just like it usually does for other pitchers.

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A few weeks ago in one of my FanGraphs chats, I was asked who had a better chance of rediscovering his old self, between Scott Kazmir and Ubaldo Jimenez. I made the same sort of crack any one of us would’ve made at the time, like how you’d respond to the idea of Rich Harden or Nick Johnson staying healthy. Kazmir or Jimenez getting on track was practically unthinkable, or so I assumed, before Kazmir turned it on and Jimenez turned it on also. Now the Indians are tied with the Tigers for first place in the Central, with a suspect pitching staff looking a little less suspect than projected.

Jimenez has been one of the more perplexing starters in baseball over the years, thanks in large part to the fact that he used to throw a hundred miles per hour. He doesn’t do that anymore, and people want to know why. He ran into some unsightly struggles, and people want to know why. Jimenez tried to win himself a Cy Young in 2010, and he hasn’t been the same pitcher since, and these sorts of guys are always fascinating. Proposed explanations for Jimenez’s decline have concentrated on his mechanics, which sounds insightful until you realize, well, yeah, of course. But Jimenez’s mechanics have always been unusual and complicated. So they’ve drawn attention.

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If you google for the phrase “pitching and defense wins championships”, the search engine returns 28.8 million results. Even if you put the statement in quotes, requiring that the exact phrase be used, there are still 99,000 pages where Google will show you that statement being written on the web.

Not all of those pages are advocating on behalf of that statement’s truth, but some of them certainly are. And, perhaps most recently, this sentiment was argued for on MLB Now, when White Sox broadcaster Hawk Harrelson lectured Brian Kenny about the merits of statistical analysis in baseball. In that conversation, Harrelson said, among other things:

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It’s hard to imagine the White Sox having a more depressing start to the season. They are stuck in last place in the American League Central, and their hitting has been abysmal. When you remove pitchers’ hitting from the equation, the White Sox wRC+ is tied for dead last in baseball with the Marlins, who are not even trying to field a competitive team. And while usually the team has fan favorite Paul Konerko to look to as a bright spot, even he has stumbled badly out of the gate. With the AL Central suddenly seeming rather competitive, the question arises — is it time for the White Sox to blow it up and sell?

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