I got asked the question in my chat this week. Dave also got asked it in his. What do you do to solve Byron Buxton’s problems at the plate? This is essentially the question. People want to know. The answer, to me, is you let him play. It seems that we get these questions each April about a phenom struggling in his first taste of a full major league season. So while I’m writing this piece with Buxton in mind and as the lead example, it is also sort of universal.
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Previous: AL Starters’ Changeups.

While 2017 sample sizes build to a credible level, we’ll continue our series on 2016 ERA qualifiers’ pitch-specific quality. We’re giving all of the offerings a letter grade, weighted 50% on bat-missing and 50% on contact management. Last time out, we looked at AL starters’ changeups; today, we’ll switch to the senior circuit.

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Cleveland’s got a good pitching staff. It’s part of what got them to the World Series last year, and it’s what they’re hoping to ride to another playoff berth. They’re blessed with excellent arms like Corey Kluber, Andrew Miller, Carlos Carrasco, Cody Allen and Danny Salazar.

Michael Martinez is not, by trade, a pitcher. He’s technically a hitter, but his career 33 wRC+ doesn’t exactly support that claim very well. The best way to describe Martinez from a job description standpoint would be to say that he’s a fielder, a utilityman, perhaps. He’s a survivor, who’s managed to stick on big league rosters in some capacity since 2011 despite being a nearly nonexistent asset at the plate. Martinez is the ultimate 25th man, who will be forever emblazoned in the visuals of history by making the out that won the Cubs their first World Series in more than a century. One of the jobs of a 25th man is to do anything that is required of him. And that means that in certain situations he’s a pitcher, too.

Cleveland was losing 10-4 to Chicago in the ninth inning last night, following a disastrous outing from Josh Tomlin. Rather than burn another reliever, Terry Francona turned to Martinez, his trusty 25th man. For the first time in his big league career, he took the mound. Martinez had somehow avoided the task until now, despite being the last man on the bench for some bad Phillies teams. The only other time he’d pitched was all the way back in A-ball in 2007, when he’d gotten into two games and totaled 1.2 innings of work. He did not allow a hit in either outing, because A-ball is a magical place.

The big leagues are not A-ball. The big leagues are full of hitters who sneeze at A-ball pitching, and one or two who hit like Michael Martinez. Everyone on the White Sox is technically a big league hitter. Yet we can all agree that there are more difficult assignments than innings composed of Carlos Sanchez, Omar Narvaez, Leury Garcia, and Tim Anderson.

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From results to stuff, Drew Pomeranz became Rich Hill’s doppelgänger last season. He even took an unorthodox route, like Hill, to the front of a rotation. The former fifth-overall pick in the draft was traded to the Rockies early in his career, struggled as most young arms do in Colorado, had some moments in Oakland in a mixed relief-and-starting role, and arrived at Padres’ camp last spring competing for a rotation spot.

Hill and Pomeranz share many traits. They’re both left-handed. Both also feature some of the highest average spin-rates on their four-seam fastballs, allowing them to pitch up in the zone due to the perception of rise. Last season, Hill’s fastball averaged 2,456 rpm; Pomeranz’ averaged 2,471 rmp. (The MLB average is about 2,220.) They also have curveballs of dramatic shape and arc as their signature pitches, and they each trust the bending pitch.

Among pitchers who logged at least 100 innings last season, Hill led all major-league pitchers by throwing his curveball at a 42.4% rate. Pomeranz was second with a 39.2% usage rate.

Both received advice on curveball usage. Hill was convinced by Brian Bannister to depart from conventional pitch usage as a member of the Red Sox; Pomeranz, by the Padres’ coaching staff, according to MLB.com’s AJ Cassavell.

The Padres made a point of asking Pomeranz to throw his hook more than he did in three seasons as a starter with Colorado — when he used the pitch less than 17 percent of the time.

Pomeranz increased his curveball usage from 17% in Colorado to 26.8% and 30.6% in Oakland in 2014 and 2015, respectively, while working primarily out of the bullpen. From his 2015 level at Oakland, Pomeranz then increased the pitch’s usage by nearly a third last season at the heeding of the Padres staff.

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It’s very frustrating to do baseball analysis in the offseason — there’s no actual baseball to analyze! It’s very frustrating to do baseball analysis during spring training — the results don’t matter and we don’t get all the same stats! It’s very frustrating to do baseball analysis in the first few weeks — it’s all a small sample size! The lesson overall? It’s very frustrating to do baseball analysis.

But it’s also very rewarding, and so we make a go of it even when we’ve barely completed 10 games of a 162-game season. One thing to which we turn at this point of the season is pitch velocity and movement. My personal sense is that these things become meaningful quickly. Very quickly.

While there’s research that has pushed me in that direction, I hadn’t seen work that looked at precisely how quickly movement and velocity stats stabilize, or become meaningful. So I asked Brian Cartwright to run the numbers.

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Over the winter, the Cardinals talked a lot about upgrading their defense and getting more athletic in the outfield ,in particular. They let longtime Cardinal Matt Holliday go become a DH in the American League, preferring not to put his glove in left field any longer. After trying to trade for Adam Eaton, they eventually signed Dexter Fowler to play center field, allowing them to move last year’s center fielder (Randal Grichuk) back to left field.

Fowler’s not a great defender, but Grichuk is a better athlete than most left fielders, and Piscotty appears to be a decent right fielder, so this group looked like a solid-enough group of gloves. It’s not the Rays or the Red Sox, but the new Cardinals outfield looked capable of running down enough balls in the gap that outfield defense wouldn’t be a huge problem.

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Remember when we used to write for Fox? A few Septembers ago, I published an article for Fox, titled “The Attempted Reinvention of Elvis Andrus.” At that point, Andrus was not a very good hitter. What he was was a changing hitter, a hitter in progress. There was enough there to get my attention, although we hadn’t yet entered the era where people are constantly talking about swing-changers. Andrus, back then, was a curiosity.

After last night, he’s got three home runs in 2017. Another player with three home runs is Mike Trout. Andrus also has three doubles and a triple, so he’s slugging .800. Those numbers don’t really matter, but when you look at them, you also look at what Andrus pulled off a season ago. There’s no longer just an attempted reinvention. The reinvention is effectively complete. Elvis Andrus is somehow still just 28 years old, and now he’s an offensive threat.

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Last fall, Andrew Miller pitched 19.1 innings in 15 postseason games. Extrapolated out to a full 162-game season, that would equal 209 innings. That is basically an impossible load for the modern reliever. Consider, for context, that the only relief pitcher since World War II to top 170 innings is Mike Marshall, who did it twice, including 208.1 innings in 1974. The last major-league reliever to top 150 innings was Mark Eichhorn in 1986. Since the strike in 1994, Scott Sullivan’s 113.2 reliever innings in 1999 represents the majors’ highest mark. No reliever has crossed the 100-inning threshold in the last decade.

All indications suggest that, if a bullpen revolution is really to occur in baseball, it isn’t simply going to be a matter of a single pitcher recording a ton of innings. Exhibit A in an argument against the reality of an Andrew Miller Revolution is that Andrew Miller himself is only on pace for around 88 innings this season. What Miller did in the postseason last year is likely to remain a product of the postseason.

There might be a different sort of bullpen revolution occurring in Ohio, though. Only, this one isn’t happening in Cleveland. Rather, it’s unfolding about four hours southwest on I-71. If there is a bullpen revolution brewing, it’s happening in Cincinnati.

Consider: if a team were starting a bullpen from scratch and trying to create an ideal bullpen, they would likely abide by three basic principles.

1. Put the best pitchers in the most important situations.
2. Ignore the save statistic.
3. Use the best pitchers for multiple innings.

Let’s evaluate the Reds’ bullpen usage this season so far by each of these three principles.

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There’s no shortage of disappointing teams in the early going. The playoff-hopeful Cardinals are 3-6. The playoff-hopeful Rangers are 3-5. The playoff-hopeful Giants are 4-6. Scoot all the way to the bottom of the standings, though, and two teams stand out. The Blue Jays are a terrible 1-7, and Dave just wrote about the decision they could shortly be facing. And the Mariners are a hardly-better 2-8, already multiple games behind every team in the division. Based on the calendar, it remains too early for anyone to panic. Yet no one should doubt that a challenging start can result in significant damage.

It’s not too hard to put a semi-positive spin on things. While the Mariners have wound up losers in eight games, they’ve had a lead at some point in seven. Last night, they lost a game they led 5-0. Over the weekend, they lost a game they led 8-1. Games like that are fluky. A week ago, they lost a game they led in the bottom of the 13th, because they had to use a pitcher who was replacing another pitcher whose wife was having a baby. Tough losses always feel like unfortunate losses. But, they are losses, and they all count just the same. It feels like we just reached the end of spring training, but life comes at you fast.

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The commissioner’s office, as we know, is interested in quickening a game that continues to slow, a trend recently revisited here by Jeff Sullivan.

While the intentional walk no longer requires four actual pitches to be thrown, while limits have been placed upon the length of instant-replay decisions, and while pitch clocks might be on their way to the major leagues after having been present in the minors for a couple years, there’s been less discussion about another pace-of-play variable currently under inspection: mound visits.

Mound visits undoubtedly slow the game. Part of the problem with regulating them, however, is that we don’t know how much (if any) value they provide for the pitchers and coaches meeting in the middle of the infield. While there must certainly be occasions when they benefit a club, does that occur often enough to warrant the frequency of the meetings?

Consider an extreme case from Monday night’s game in Pittsburgh. Talented but erratic Pirates starting pitcher Tyler Glasnow was having a rough go of it in his first start of the the season.

After he issued back-to-back walks to load the bases in the first, Ray Searage did what has been done for as long as there have been pitching coaches and struggling pitchers. He went out to have a word, to press pause, to change focus, to hopefully hit a sort of reset button with Glasnow.

Searage appeared to implore Glasnow to “Go after these guys.”

It didn’t work.

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