The Mets are off to a great start. They have increased their playoff odds more than other club since Opening Day. The Mets always had significant potential, and downside — considerable error bars in either direction — given both the club’s talent and injury concerns.

Now a couple turns through the rotation, the Mets’ starters have generally pitched well and remain healthy. Michael Conforto, meanwhile, has made a remarkable return from his shoulder injury. The Mets are being rewarded early for electing to bolster this talented, but highly volatile, core with the signings of Jay Bruce, Todd Frazier, and Anthony Swarzak.

But the Mets could also be better.

This week, the club sent down their second-best hitter (217 wRC+) and position player to date (0.3) in Brandon Nimmo, ostensibly because there was no place to put him following the return of Conforto. The Mets have Yoenis Cespedes in left, Bruce in right, and a resurgent Adrian Gonzalez at first base. The Mets also have a quality reserve outfield option in Juan Lagares. Nimmo is blocked. But let’s hope he’s not sequestered in Las Vegas for too long. The Mets have sidelined one of the more intriguing players in the game.

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The Phillies wouldn’t have signed Jake Arrieta if they didn’t think they had some chance to win right away. Arrieta would improve that case himself, and his acquisition addressed what had been a thin pitching staff, but even a few months ago, the Phillies were expressing some cautious optimism. Aaron Nola, obviously, is incredibly good. The team was willing to dismiss Jerad Eickhoff’s rough 2017 as a consequence of injuries. And much of the organization was excited about Nick Pivetta. With Nola, Eickhoff, and Pivetta, the Phillies could dream on a rotation that could hold its own, even before Arrieta came along.

Pivetta now has three 2018 starts under his belt, and the last two have been terrific. In fairness, we’re talking about a Marlins lineup that’s not at 100%, and a Reds lineup that’s even further from 100%. The competition has not been stiff. But Pivetta’s struck out 16 of 47 batters, without issuing one single walk. There’s improvement in the results, and even more important than that, there’s improvement in the process. As a rookie in 2017, Pivetta flashed a promising weapon. It would appear he’s now using it with more confidence. It’s time for the National League to get accustomed to seeing Nick Pivetta’s curveball.

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Baseball is enjoyable this time of year. It’s like catching up with a friend we haven’t seen in a while. We spend April trying to figure out what the game is — not as it is right now, I mean, but as it will be all season. We parse through small bits of over- and underperformance, endeavoring to sift signal from the noise. Shohei Ohtani has been great. That probably means something! Ryan Flaherty has also been good. We might expect that means less. The Dodgers will likely recover; the Padres likely won’t.

With any friend, part of learning the who of them is knowing what matters and what is mere flotsam; alma maters and disappointments, cities lived in. Sayings only our mothers use. It’s why it is so hard to make new friends as an adult: grown-ups have all these stories from way back, full of people we don’t know, doing all sorts of things. It’s a lot to learn.

And while baseball’s who shifts around and grows, changing with new players and seasons, there are bits that endure, memories of childhood and cut grass that constitute a more fixed personality. I thought I might look beyond April to other artifacts, stories from way back full of people. So, inspired by how little they change year to year, I made perhaps an odd choice — namely, of reading The Official Professional Rules of Baseball and The Official Baseball Rules (2018 Edition), to see what baseball tells us about itself.

Here are a few of the things I found.

Baseball allows for small moments of grace…
Sports inspire intense competition. It’s sort of the whole thing. Once play begins, teams are generally expected to press their advantage, however minute. It’s why managers challenge when an opposing runner comes of the bag for the briefest of instants. It’s annoying, and a bit fussy, but there might be an out hiding in there. Can’t just give up an out! Baseball knows this about itself, this impulse to be fastidious in the service of winning, but it also knows that we humans are prone to make mistakes. Managers have to wear those mistakes when they come in the fourth inning, but earlier, before the stakes are set, baseball allows its generals a bit of grace.

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In a game that will be remembered more for a bench-clearing seventh-inning brawl between the beasts of the AL East — we’ll get to that, you blood-lusting rubberneckers — Gary Sanchez scored some points with a few swings of the bat himself on Wednesday night against the Red Sox. While the early struggles of reigning NL MVP and Bronx newcomer Giancarlo Stanton have gotten more attention, it was the Yankees’ 25-year-old catcher who owned the dubious title not just as the team’s coldest hitter, but as the majors’ single worst batting title-qualified player in terms of both wRC+ and WAR. Whether it was the intimate confines of Fenway Park, the struggles of the Red Sox pitching staff, or the inevitability of positive regression, by the fourth inning of the Yankees’ 10-7 victory, Gary got his groove back, at least for one night. Sanchez clubbed two homers and added a double, driving in four runs and more than doubling his season totals in hits, homers, and RBI.

Sanchez, who last year led all major-league catchers with 33 homers and a 130 wRC+ while batting .278/.345/.531, began the 2018 season in a 2-for-36 skid. Through Tuesday, his positive contributions at the plate could be counted on Mordecai Brown’s pitching hand: an RBI double off the Blue Jays’ John Axford on Opening Day, a two-run homer off the Rays’ Blake Snell on April 4, and a hit-by-pitch against the Orioles’ Darren O’Day on April 5. He went 0-for-17 between the first two hits, and 0-for-15 between the latter one and Wednesday’s game. Since he hadn’t drawn a single walk, that hit-by-pitch juiced his batting line all the way to .056/.081/.167. That’s a -42 wRC+, which is something closer to an ASCII approximation of a smashed fly than it is a comprehensible comparison to league average. He entered Wednesday as one of eight qualifiers with a negative wRC+

Sanchez had some good company in this particularly decrepit Small Sample Theater: a guy who hit even more homers last year (Morrison), two of the game’s best defensive center fielders (Kiermaier and Buxton, who is apparently constitutionally incapable of hitting major-league pitching before May 1), a top prospect (Brinson), and so on.

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I love the Miami Marlins. I love them because I love baseball and thinking about baseball. I also love them, though, because I love the law and thinking about the law. At this moment in history, no source is more dependable for simultaneously providing raw material on both fronts — baseball and the law — than the Miami Marlins. Whatever that organization’s flaws, they are not uninteresting.

I’ve written here on multiple occasions about the lawsuit the City of Miami and County of Miami-Dade has filed against Jeffrey Loria for purportedly denying them what they believe they are due of the net proceeds from the $1.2 billion sale of the Miami Marlins to the Derek Jeter/Bruce Sherman ownership group.

Surprisingly, the case now offers a new twist — specifically, the Marlins have suggested that the dispute should be heard by an arbitrator, not state court. And to do that, the Marlins are claiming to be a citizen of… the British Virgin Islands.

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Giancarlo Stanton still looks like Giancarlo Stanton. He’s a gigantic human being who possesses a fierce swing that inflicts damage upon baseballs when his bat makes contact. The problem in the early part of this season is that his huge swing is making slightly less contact than it did a year ago when he was the National League MVP.

Stanton has swung at 116 pitches this year and has whiffed 48 times, per Baseball Savant. Based on his fantastic 2017 season, we would expect to see about 34 whiffs. While a difference of 14 whiffs over 250 pitches doesn’t seem like a lot, it’s the difference between normal, awesome Stanton and this abnormal version of Stanton that has struck out in 40% of his plate appearances.

To better understand just what’s going on with Stanton, let’s try to take the early-season numbers we have and separate normal Stanton from abnormal Stanton. To start, here is a table showing some statistics from his career, from last season, and from this season to spot the problems.

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I know that, just yesterday, the Yankees allowed 14 runs. They allowed eight runs the game before that. They allowed seven runs two games before that. By park-adjusted ERA, the Yankees presently rank 20th in baseball, which is not very good. This is hardly the time to celebrate the pitching staff.

On the other hand, by park-adjusted FIP, the Yankees presently rank fifth in baseball. By park-adjusted xFIP, the Yankees presently rank second in baseball. By strikeout rate, they’re first. The Yankees have been great! They just haven’t gotten the results. Perhaps this *is* a good time to celebrate the pitching staff.

Yet this isn’t really a celebration at all. Rather, it’s an observation. It might be an observation of a good thing, or it might be an observation of a bad thing. Could even be an observation of an ultimately insignificant thing. But, the Yankees’ pitching staff? Collectively, they’re out there on an island. There’s no other pitching staff like it.

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On Thursday, a company called Sports Media Technology (“SMT”) sued MLB Advanced Media (“MLBAM”) over Statcast. The complaint in the lawsuit is 92 pages long, and I read it so you don’t have to. But if you did want to, here it is.

According to the lawsuit, in 2006, MLB and MLBAM entered into a contract with SMT to develop PITCHf/x. However, according to SMT’s lawsuit, MLBAM then breached that contract, poached at least one key engineer from SMT, then used SMT’s PITCHf/x technology to create Statcast.

According to SMT, Sportvision and MLBAM signed a contract before SMT purchased the company that gave Sportvision exclusive rights to provide use of their PITCHf/xpitch-tracking system for three full MLB seasons. However, SMT now alleges that MLBAM has not only failed to live up to that agreement but they’ve also been working with third parties to emulate that technology. Per SMT, that not only fails to fulfill the contractual obligations of their agreement but also is a misuse of their patented technology.

Now let’s make one thing clear at the outset: the Complaint represents only one side of the story. We don’t know if it’s true or not, and SMT’s case has real problems. We’ll get to those in a second.

Some reports have pegged this as a simple breach-of-contract suit, framing it as SMT suing MLBAM for prematurely terminating the deal in 2016 so as to proceed with developing Statcast. But that’s not really accurate.

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Although the Diamondbacks lost to the Giants on Tuesday night, Paul Goldschmidt finally got on the board with his first home run and first multi-hit game of the season. Normally, that would barely be worth mention, but the 30-year-old five-time All-Star first baseman is off to the worst start of his eight-year career, producing a batting line that teammate Zack Greinke wouldn’t sign for — that, at a time when the Diamondbacks have been busy banking wins while the heavily favored Dodgers scuffle. And even then, amid the small samples that reign at this time of year, one typically Goldschmidt-esque night made his start look far less dire.

The Diamondbacks, who a year ago won 93 games as well as the NL Wild Card game, are now 8-3, leading the NL West by 2.5 games. As Jeff Sullivan pointed out, through Monday night, the Snakes, who were projected to finish 80-82 had improved their playoff odds more than any team besides the Mets.

What stands out most about the Diamondbacks’ start thus far is that it has had little to do with the success — or, more to the point, the lack of same — of what are generally viewed as their best players. Through Monday, the team’s 2017 leaders in position player WAR (Goldschmidt and Jake Lamb) and two of their top three in pitching WAR (Greinke and Robbie Ray) had combined to produce just 0.1 WAR. Meanwhile, the bulk of the heavy lifting… Well, let’s just pull back the curtain on Small Sample Theater:

Again, those stats are through Monday, not Tuesday, via which Goldschmidt raised his batting line to .158/.360/.316 for a 101 wRC+, still subpar but much less gawkworthy. Such substantive (positive) regression is the reason it’s dangerous to write about anything this early in the season — prior to his RBI triple on Monday, Goldschmidt’s wRC+ was an even more dismal 61 — and yet we forge ahead.

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Pitchers learn and develop different pitches, and they do so at varying stages of their lives. It might be a curveball in high school, a cutter in college, or a changeup in A-ball. Sometimes the addition or refinement is a natural progression — graduating from Pitching 101 to advanced course work — and often it’s a matter of necessity. In order to get hitters out as the quality of competition improves, a pitcher needs to optimize his repertoire.

In the third installment of this series, we’ll hear from four pitchers — Anthony Bass, Matt Andriese, and Bobby Poyner — on how they learned and/or developed a specific pitch.

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Anthony Bass (Cubs) on His Splitter

“I learned a split from my friend Matt Shoemaker, who is with the Angels. That’s his out pitch. I picked it up from him, and then when I was overseas in Japan [in 2016], I watched the way they threw their splits and started incorporating that into the way I use mine. It’s started becoming a swing-and-miss pitch for me.

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