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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The Orioles shocked the baseball world by making the American League playoffs last season, based largely on a 29-9 record in one-run games. This .763 winning percentage in one-run games was the best in baseball and had every analyst who knew how to calculate a Pythagorean record screaming, “Lucky!”  Was the Orioles record in one-run games lucky? Or, the better question is, how much of it was luck?

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Several high-profile hitters have been slowed by back injuries this season. The Yankees’ Kevin Youkilis is on the disabled list with a sprained back for the third time in his career. Shane Victorino missed eight games from late April to early May because of a bad back. Jose Bautista missed about a week of play with back spasms. When back problems occur to hitters, fans should not be surprised to see a marked loss of future production from those players.

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I think we’re all aware that the lefty vs. righty matchup favors the batter.  But to what extent?  And what are the implications?  Prepare to be inundated with a bunch of charts and tables.

For the purposes of this article, I’ll be sticking to using wRC+, my favorite all-in-one, level-playing-field batting stat.  My sample consists of all batters from 2002-2012 who had at least 200 total PAs against lefties and at least 200 more against righties.

The charts in this article will break down the frequency distributions of wRC+ for left-, right-, and switch-hitting batters, grouped to the nearest multiple of 10.  For example, the chart below shows that 21.5% of right-handed batters (RHB) hit for over 85 but less than or equal to 95 wRC+ against right-handed pitchers (RHP).

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The hard-throwing, 24-year-old Matt Harvey has quickly become a must watch when he toes the rubber for the Mets. Called up in late July of last year, Harvey and his blistering fastball (94.6 average velocity) currently sport a 31.3% strikeout rate and an ERA- of 25 — no, not 75, 25. In 2013, Harvey has made four starts, lasting at least seven innings in each appearance. He has only allowed one home run and a paltry 10 hits in 29 innings.

Harvey does feature a number of pitches, but he’s heavily reliant on his four-seam fastball, throwing that pitch 60% of the time. That ranks him fifth among all qualified pitchers in 2013. And that fastball has been deadly.

According to the PITCHf/x leader boards at Baseball Prospectus (powered by Brooks Baseball), Harvey has induced a .042 ISO (2nd best) and a .167 BA (3rd best) against when using his fastball. David Golebiewski from Baseball Analytics recently wrote about Harvey’s ability to win with the high fastball. The numbers were eye-popping. Harvey so far this year has induced whiffs on high fastballs 48.4% of the time, and he’s throwing upstairs over 50% of the time.

I was curious how this compared to others this year and in previous years. So I did some digging.

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Earlier this month I wrote about whether we should be concerned with when we see pitchers throwing slower in April, particularly with regards to CC Sabathia.

If we are trying to predict whether the pitcher has truly lost some zip on their fastball, the answer is somewhat. Pitchers who are down at least 1 mph compared to April of the previous year will go on to finish the season down at least 1 mph about 38% of the time. Essentially, they are over four times as likely to be truly losing velocity compared to those that are not down in April. However, the signal gains in strength as the season goes on. So, if a pitcher is down at least 1 mph in July compared to July of the previous year their likelihood of being down at season’s end jumps to 14 times more than pitchers that are not down in July.

But does being down in April predict an injury? This is something I had not yet investigated. Given the increased discussion about April velocity declines I thought I should take a quick look.

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A while back, Jeff Zimmerman and I introduced the concept of Edge% — a metric that attempted to quantify the extent to which a pitcher worked the edges of the strike zone. Jeff initially looked at how this applied to Tim Lincecum and how his performance depended to some extent on his ability to pitch to the edges of the plate. I followed up with a high-level piece that compared the performance of pitchers at an aggregate level depending on how extreme their Edge% was in a given season.

While the findings were interesting, they were also a little inconsistent. That’s because Jeff and I independently created two distinct metrics. We decided to combine our efforts (as we have been known to do) and settle on a single, consistent formula.

And that’s the focus of this article.

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The ranking might change day-by-day, Jarrod Parker said, but he agreed: “Overall I would say the fastball and changeup are my two better pitches.” And that changeup is special — he threw it more than any secondary pitch last year, it was his best-rated pitch, and a big part of why he had the 21st-best swinging strike rate among qualified starters. It wasn’t always that way, though. Coming out of high school, Parker was a fastball/curve guy. So what happened?

“I got hurt and didn’t want to throw as many breaking pitches, so I started working on a changeup.”

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I’m always looking for new angles to unlock the mysteries of BABIP, so I was intrigued by Jeff Sullivan’s exploration of pull rates against pitchers.  So I grabbed the data from baseball-reference.com, and set to work subjecting it to my usual rigmarole of correlations and multiple regressions.  You know how they say if your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail to you?  Well, plug your ears — there’s about to be a lot of wild, uncontrolled pounding going on in here…

I’ll cut right to the chase — did I find anything interesting relating to pitchers’ overall effectiveness when it comes to their Pull%, Middle%, and Opposite%, as I’m calling them?  Well, I found one decent connection that will seem obvious and stupid after you think about it, and a slight but kind of interesting connection.  I’ll provide you with some correlation tables that have left few stones unturned.  But, mainly, the research might help to set some things straight about how important this stuff actually is for pitchers.

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Every year we hear stories about pitchers whose fastballs don’t seem to have the same life as last year. The most talked about are typically front-line starters that rely on their fastballs. In early 2013, the name that’s being discussed the most is Yankee ace CC Sabathia.

Throughout spring training, Sabathia’s velocity has been a point of concern. Coming off of elbow surgery during the offseason, Sabathia’s first regular season start did nothing to quell that concern. As The Star-Ledger’s Andy McCullough notes:

Sabathia’s fastball topped out at 91.7 mph on Monday, according to Pitch f/x data from Brooks Baseball. On Opening Day in 2012, his fastball hit 94.5 mph. On Opening Day in 2011, his fastball touched 94.7 mph.

(By the way, if you don’t read McCullough on a regular basis you are missing out.)

In the end, McCullough notes that while it’s reasonable to be concerned, Sabathia is likely to improve as the season wears on and has good enough secondary stuff to still be very good.

Overall McCullough is right, however, I think there is greater reason for concern than some may think.

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