Editor’s Note: the following post contains spicy language.

J.D. Martinez had just concluded a chat with a Tigers beat reporter when I approached him Monday afternoon. I sensed him preparing to escape my forthcoming interview request in the Joker Marchant Stadium clubhouse as I walked in his direction. He’d just risen from the cushioned chair in front of his locker and picked up a cardboard box of personal effects as I introduced myself. His body language wasn’t suggestive of much interest in engaging in conversation with me and, to be fair, I was a stranger. We had never spoken. He had just finished playing six innings of an exhibition game and was presumably was looking forward to the rest of the day.

But then I explained why I was interested in speaking with him. He rested the box on a laundry cart, freed his hands, seemed to warm to the idea (or possibly not), and opened up.

I wanted to ask Martinez whether baseball is on the cusp of a fly-ball revolution, whether we’re about to see the sort of approach already adopted by Martinez, Josh Donaldson and Justin Turner — all of whom have experienced great personal success — become more widely adopted and accepted in the majors. Jeff Sullivan and I have written quite a bit about the potential fly-ball revolution in recent weeks as you can read here, here, here and here. But Monday offered a chance to get a key perspective from an early adopter and perhaps a significant influencer.

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If nothing else, Team Israel looked like a nice little story for the World Baseball Classic. It was their first time qualifying for the event, but they lacked the name recognition on their roster to be considered a serious threat. Being thrown into a pool with Chinese Taipei, the Netherlands, and South Korea — teams that feature players from high-level professional leagues — felt nearly insurmountable. But here we are, with Israel already having qualified for the next round following wins over Korea and Taipei. Their showdown tonight with the Dutch team’s loaded infield may be something of a reality check. Nevertheless, Team Israel’s success shouldn’t be a surprise. They’re legit.

There isn’t a prototypical star on Israel’s roster. They weren’t able to bring in a top-tier Jewish talent like Ryan Braun. But what Team Israel does boast is the benefit of having more than a few big-league players in the lineup — and some of the best players in the minors, as well. Ike Davis isn’t hitting 30 homers in the big leagues anymore, but he’s still better than most of the professional players in the world. Cody Decker, Nate Freiman, Sam Fuld, Ty Kelly, Ryan Lavarnway, Jason Marquis, and Josh Zeid are better than most of the professional players in the world. They’ve reached higher highs than most of their competition.

It’s important to remember this one, all-important thing: baseball is hard. Being good enough to play in the leagues in Korea and Taipei is really hard. Being good enough to get even a single plate appearance in Major League Baseball is probably even harder. The teams from Korea and Taipei are largely All-Star teams, the best of the best of highly competitive leagues. But they’re not fully stocked, either.

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The Orioles, to put it bluntly, haven’t had the best of luck at developing pitching. (They haven’t been particularly successful with acquiring it, either, but that’s another matter for the moment.) Starting pitchers who both (a) have been signed and developed by Baltimore and (b) have also thrown at least 50 innings since 2011 have combined for an underwhelming 10.7 WAR.

Dylan Bundy was supposed to be the crown jewel of Baltimore’s renaissance. He was, at one point, considered to be the best pitching prospect in all of baseball. The idea was, he supposed to arrive in Baltimore and serve as the club’s ace. It hasn’t happened yet. Bundy missed time with Tommy John surgery and other injuries. He made his return last year, making the Opening Day roster, in part, because he’d exhausted his option years after signing a big league deal when he was drafted. He pitched out of the bullpen and then moved to the rotation.

His first full season wasn’t a smashing success. Though he showed flashes of brilliance, his 4.70 FIP left a lot to be desired. When he was on, though, he was on.

 

Bundy can strike guys out, but his 8.53 K/9 doesn’t scream ace. We know that strikeouts aren’t the only means to effectiveness, though. Consider, for example, the work of Danny Duffy before Duffy morphed into a frontline starter last year. Let’s compare some of Bundy’s numbers from last season to the 2015 version of Duffy. The numbers aren’t exactly the same but possess many underlying signs of life.

This isn’t an exact science, of course, and shouldn’t be taken as gospel. As Tony Blengino recently noted in a piece about contact management, though, Bundy is exceptional at generating pop ups, which are high-probability outs, and an effective way to suppress BABIP. Bundy has also displayed a knack for limiting exit velocity on his batted balls. Duffy featured a similar profile and converted that success into a breakout in 2016. Bundy’s already striking batters out at a higher rate than the 2015 iteration of Duffy. If Bundy can keep inducing pop ups at his current rate, all while limiting damage in other ways, he could be a special pitcher this year.

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It might be surprising, but there’s one thing Joey Votto isn’t good at. Well, to be more precise, there’s one thing that Joey Votto doesn’t think he’s good at. He’s done a lot of work, and it looks like he’s good at it. When it comes to defense, though, he credits the work and not any natural ability. And then last year happened, so maybe he’s not so good at it, after all.

That’s Votto’s rolling UZR per 150 games since 2008. UZR requires a large sample to become reliable, so any single year of data needs to be regressed heavily. But there appears to be a trend here. In any case, I’m apparently not the first to notice a downturn in Votto’s defensive ability last year, nor to mention it to him. “It’s hard to ignore when people ask you on a consistent basis about it,” he grimaced when I asked.

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It’s that time again! Last year, I wrote this post on March 9. This year, it’s going up on March 7. I suppose that means this post is consistent. Let’s get into talking about schedule strength.

I think I say it every time, but with baseball, people tend not to care about this very much. Or at least, they do care about it, but they care about it far less than they care about almost everything else. There’s a general assumption that baseball schedules are more or less even, and the truth is that they really are. You can get overwhelmed when you think about a 162-game slate, as opposed to a football schedule that’s one-tenth as long. You’d think it allows for more regression. There can be real differences at the extremes, however. Last week, I spent a little time examining projected division strength. Might as well go the one step further.

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It’s easy to think of what could have been. Bullpen depth is all the rage these days among contenders, so Jeffrey Loria tried to get in on the action by making an aggressive pursuit of Kenley Jansen. A last-minute change of heart ultimately took Jansen back to Los Angeles, so the Marlins were left without a shutdown closer. And then there was last summer’s misguided trade for Andrew Cashner that robbed the Marlins of — among other players — Carter Capps. Capps is healthy now, still throwing the way he threw, and there’s nobody else quite like him. Jansen and Capps — those are two sexy names. The Marlins have neither.

So I’m not here to say the Marlins have done everything right. I’m not here to say they have baseball’s best bullpen. You don’t draw big bold headlines by signing Brad Ziegler and Junichi Tazawa. Yet, wouldn’t you know it, but the team has sort of succeeded in accomplishing its goal. Although by name value alone the Marlins relievers are something less than a super-group, there’s an awful lot to like here; all that will matter is performance, and this unit ought to perform.

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Two balls and no strikes, one ball and no strikes — those are the counts that are called hitter’s counts. Pitchers are forced into a predictable corner, since they have to get back into the count, and are more likely to throw a fastball so they can put it in the strike zone. They have to come into the zone, at least, and that’s always better for the hitter. Some of these things are true, and important to the lesson the 23-year-old Cody Reed is currently trying to learn from 28-year-old former teammate Dan Straily. Some of these things are also not true.

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Over the weekend, I attended the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, and on Friday, I attended a couple of the presentations of research papers that were baseball-oriented. The first one, presented by John Salmon (based on work he did with Willie Harrison), was titled “Bullpen Strategies for Major League Baseball“, which is obviously a hot topic in the game right now. But while the title made the paper sound like it might touch on Andrew Miller’s postseason usage, the part of the talk I found most interesting actually had more to do with starting pitchers.

In the first half of Salmon’s presentation, he talked about home field advantage, and particularly, how the data shows that one of the primary factors in a home team’s edge might be that their starting pitcher just takes the mound first. While Jeff Zimmerman wrote about this here on FanGraphs back in 2013, I must have missed that piece, because this was new information to me. But Salmon is correct that the data is clear that the gap in performance between the home and road team in the first inning dwarfs the difference in every other inning.

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When I interviewed him in April 2013, Jason Hammel was a 30-year-old pitcher yet to hit his stride. Following his previous path, he went on to have a ho-hum season. In 26 appearances for the Orioles — 23 of them of them as a starter — Hammel had seven wins, a 4.97 ERA, and a 6.2 K/9. His two-seamer and slider showed signs of coming around, but for all intents and purposes, he was a run-of-the-mill, back-of-the-rotation righty.

That has changed. Since originally joining the Chicago Cubs prior to the 2014 season, Hammel has fashioned a 3.68 ERA and fanned 8.3 batters per nine innings. Last year, he won a career-high 15 games for the World Series champions. The cerebral 6-foot-6 hurler is now a 34-year-old Kansas City Royal, having inked a two-year, $16 million deal with the AL Central club over the offseason.

Hammel discussed his mid-career emergence, which was fueled by an improved slider and a subsequent confab with a sexagenarian guru, in the waning days of February.

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Hammel on what has changed since our 2013 conversation: “A big part of [becoming more successful] was throwing a slider for a strike. It was kind of the idea of pitching backwards. Before, I never had a breaking ball that I could start with. I was throwing a curveball more than a slider, and the curveball is more of a… I get a lot of takes on it, because it’s a bigger break. I had to find something else with spin that I could put in the zone. The two-seamer has been a big, big pitch for me, and the two-seamer and slider complement each other really well, because they’re going two separate directions.

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