By framing runs above average on StatCorner, Chris Iannetta was 54th of 78 catchers that caught at least 1000 pitches last year. This year, he’s first. All it took was a little studying. After reading up, a little twist of the butt and a new relaxation technique was enough to change the fortunes of a 32-year-old backstop.

Some credit should go to Hank Conger, really. Because of his exacting manager, and his own inquisitive mind, Conger has spent a lot of time reading up on the best catching techniques. Conger admitted that he’d read all about where Jason Castro said he put his butt in order to give the umpire a better look at lefties.

And Conger made sure Iannetta knew what he knew. “We talked about it a lot,” admitted Iannetta about framing and his former teammate. “We talked about it in the offseason. We texted. We talked about it all spring.”

One of the things they talked about was the positioning that Jeff Sullivan spotted. “I have wider shoulders, so I have to make sure they can see around me,” Iannetta said. “I try to angle my body, I’ve tried angling my body a little.”

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In the moment, it’s easy to focus only on the things that annoy you, on the things that you wish would be better. The greatest challenge in the world is to appreciate the moments that you get before you stop getting them, and it becomes all the more difficult when things aren’t going like you imagined. After the moment, everything shifts. The irritating bits fade into nothing, and what remains are images of the good times. In large part these are the principles driving the Angels’ sale of Josh Hamilton to the Rangers, and perhaps here more than anywhere else, it’s evident that the same thing can always be viewed in contrasting ways. The Angels see Hamilton in one way, the Rangers see him in another, and the great question concerns which side is closer to the truth. Josh Hamilton’s truth isn’t changing; it just happens to be somewhat unknown.

At its core, this really is just a baseball move. The Angels wouldn’t be paying for Josh Hamilton to go away if they thought he could still be a productive member of a contending team. And the Rangers are taking a shot because their financial risk will be laughably small, and they’re a team that could use a helpful left fielder. The Angels think they’ll be better for this, and the Rangers think they’ll be better for this. Obviously, it’s a little more complicated. It just always tends to come down to performance.

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Guess what! It’s time for my first pitch-framing post of the season. There will probably be dozens more of these. I don’t know what those ones will be about, but the purpose of this one is to highlight the early performance of Angels catcher Chris Iannetta. I know, of course, it’s super early! I know, of course, current statistical arrangements will change over the coming five and a half months. But so far, Iannetta rates as one of the top pitch-receivers in the game. He ranks very high according to Matthew Carruth’s method. He ranks very high according to the Baseball Prospectus method. And that one adjusts for a whole lot of stuff. Through these weeks, Iannetta has been getting strikes and avoiding balls.

Which some catchers do commonly. You know the guys who’re considered good at this. What makes Iannetta interesting is, this is a first for him. Not that the season is over and we’ve confirmed that he’s a good framer now, but he’s played like a good framer, and, previously, that hasn’t been him. Let’s go back four years. In all four years, by Carruth, Iannetta has rated as below-average. In all four years, by Baseball Prospectus, Iannetta has rated as below-average. As recently as 2013, Iannetta looked like one of the worst receivers in baseball, by the numbers. So you wouldn’t expect him to be where he is today.

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During the FanGraphs trip to Arizona in February, Carson remarked that I was squeezing an awful lot of juice out of the pitch-comp fruit. It’s true, I was — it was an idea I found interesting, and, more importantly, I didn’t have much else to write about. But now we’ve got a baseball season, a whole brand-new one, which means I get to resume writing about the thing I find perhaps the very most interesting: pitching to Mike Trout. I’ve probably written about this 10 times. I’ll probably write about it another 100 times. Many of you are probably sick of it. I might never grow sick of it.

Scouting reports make the rounds. At first, information is private, exchanged only within the industry. At some point, something gets leaked, or identified by an analyst. Then a report will make the rounds within analytical circles. Analysts write, so reports will be exposed to analytically-minded fans. But things can keep going, if sufficiently remarkable. Sometimes you’ll have a scouting report that makes its way into general baseball knowledge, even among people who don’t think in such granular terms. The Mike Trout scouting report is out there. I don’t even need to tell you anything about it because you’ve been hearing about it for months. Everybody knows. A few days ago I was listening to Mariners radio announcer Rick Rizzs, and he was talking about the importance of pitching Trout hard and in and up. It might be the only thing he has in his brain from within the past 12 years.

So it’s 2015 now. How is Mike Trout being pitched, given, you know, everything?

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After an arbitrator ruled ten days ago that Josh Hamilton had not violated his drug treatment program following an alleged drug relapse, it looked like the Angels would be forced to pay him the rest of the roughly $83 million he is owed over the last three years of his contract. Now, however, it appears that the Angels are determined to do whatever they can to try to escape from the rest of Hamilton’s contract.

Before the Angels’ home opener on Friday evening, the team’s owner, Arte Moreno, spoke with the media. As one might expect, the discussion eventually turned to Hamilton, with a reporter asking Moreno whether the Angels would welcome Hamilton back to the team when he had recovered from his shoulder injury. Somewhat surprisingly, Moreno responded, “I will not say that.”

Instead, Moreno suggested that the team was exploring the possibility of cancelling the rest of Hamilton’s contract. As Moreno explained to reporters, “We have a contract with Hamilton and that contract has specific language, that he signed and that was approved, that said he could not drink or use drugs.”

The Major League Baseball Players Association quickly responded to Moreno’s comments on Friday evening:

“The MLBPA emphatically denies Los Angeles Angels owner Arte Moreno’s assertions from earlier today that the Angels had requested and received the approval of the Union to insert language into Josh Hamilton’s contract that would supersede the provisions of the Joint Drug Agreement and/or the Basic Agreement. To the contrary, the collectively bargained provisions of the JDA and the Basic Agreement supersede all other player contract provisions and explicitly prevent Clubs from exactly the type of action Mr. Moreno alluded to in his press comments today.”

So who is right? And what are the odds that the Angels could terminate the rest of Hamilton’s contract?

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Let’s play a game. I’ll show you brief excerpts from Baseball Prospectus annual Jamie Moyer summaries, and you match them with the year. This is nothing against BP, of course. Everybody was always saying the same stuff. BP just happens to put everything in one convenient place, on Jamie Moyer’s player page. Off we go.

• “There may be no coming back from this.”
• “The end is near.”
• “He lives and dies with his control, and I expect him to be on life support by the end of his contract.”
• “As long as he keeps his control, he could pitch another three or four years at this level.”

The years, scrambled:

• 2000
• 2005
• 2001
• 1999

Go nuts! And then, when you’re finished, we can have a conversation about Jered Weaver.

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This week’s nuttiest pitches might even have a point. But let’s just start with the GIFs. Because it’s fun to watch crazy pitches do crazy things.

Let’s do the uncle charlies, the yakkers, the yellow hammers — curveballs are on the menu today. As usual, we’re looking at the last three years because that’s what MLB.tv allows us, and we’re sorting PITCHF/x to find the pitches with the most extreme horizontal and vertical movement, as well as velocities.

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Yesterday, we kicked off our look at each division by going through the NL West. Today, we’ll do the AL version from the land of pitcher’s parks.

The Projected Standings

There are two pretty strong contenders at the top, two somewhat interesting teams hanging around the middle, and a likely also-ran. The top of the AL West is unlikely to be as strong this year as it was a year ago, but the low-end of the division should be somewhat better, and the race is open enough to remain interesting all year long. Let’s take a look at the teams.

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Probably should have seen this one coming. Last week, FanGraphs overlord David Appelman announced some minor improvements to the way WAR is calculated on the site, one of them being the inclusion of a double play avoidance stat (wGDP). Shortly thereafter, managing editor Dave Cameron wrote a post regarding The Thing Adam Dunn Was Surprisingly Great At (hint: it was avoiding double plays) and mentioned, in passing, that Mike Trout happened to be the very best at that particular thing last season.

As a quick refresher course, I’ve created an entirely underwhelming flowchart which I believe accurately represents the state of Major League Baseball in the year 2015. My sincerest apologies go out to Sean Dolinar, for I assume this single-handedly ruins all the hard work he’s done over the past couple months in an effort to unify and improve the site’s graphics.

Behold:

So that’s how we got here. A new stat was born, and, like clockwork, Mike Trout just so happened to be the best at it. Well, he was last year at least. In 2014, Trout led the MLB by creating an additional three runs above average by avoiding the double play. If you want take it back a bit further, here’s what a top-15 leaderboard looks like over the last three years, or since Trout has been a full-time regular:

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In the grand scheme of things, evaluating a baseball player’s current ability isn’t that difficult. If you have a sampling of their statistics and have a chance to watch a handful of their games, a reasonably informed observer will come up with a pretty good estimate of the player’s current talent level. Figuring out how good a player is right now requires some skill, but it’s nothing compared to having that same information about a player and attempting to forecast six years into the future.

That’s the job of a scout. You get a handful of looks at a 19 year old, you talk to a few people, you glance at some numbers, and then you’re asked to predict what that player is going to look like at 25. It’s a big ask and as a result, there’s a pretty big margin of error. A good scout should be more accurate than a decently competent observer, but no one would expect a scout to be right on every player. There’s just too much uncertainty involved.

One would hope that a scout doesn’t miss any Mike Trouts or bet high on many Jeff Larishs, but they’re going to miss good players and speak highly of bad one’s during the course of their careers. That’s especially true with respect to very young players.

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