Maybe it was the fact that she spent her formative years in Germany, while I spent most of mine in Jamaica and America’s South, but my mother and I have always disagreed about a fundamental thing when it comes to the weather. For her, she wants the sun. It doesn’t matter if it’s bitter cold and dry; if the sun’s out, she’s fine. I’d rather it was warm. Don’t care if there’s a drizzle or humidity or whatever.

It turns out, when we were disagreeing about these things, we were really talking about pitching. Mostly because life is pitching and pitching is life.

But also because the temperature, and the temperature alone, does not tell the story of pitching in the cold. It’ll make sense, just stick with it.

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I write a lot about player adjustments. I write so often about player adjustments I start to get a little self-conscious about it. I just do it because I love doing it, and because sometimes I forget what else there is to cover. I love it when a pitcher tries to add a new pitch. I love it when he adjusts an old pitch, or when he starts using the same pitches in different ways. It interests me when a hitter starts putting more or fewer balls in play on the ground. Or, there are the cases where hitters pull the ball more, or spray the ball more. There are so many types of adjustments. There’s one in particular we very seldom see. One we also dream about players making. Randal Grichuk, for his part, is giving it a go.

Grichuk has had a familiar hitting profile: big power, but limited by wavering control of the strike zone. He’s been the hitter equivalent of a talented pitcher with overwhelming stuff but inconsistent command. Those pitchers can still be valuable, but more often than not, they never figure out how to throw strike after strike. And, even more often than not, aggressive hitters tend to stay aggressive. It’s easy to observe when a guy is swinging too much, but it’s not an easy thing to improve.

In his last 10 games, Grichuk has drawn nine walks. He’s struck out six times. To put it another way, Grichuk has drawn a quarter of his career walks in the most recent 7% of plate appearances. Obviously, it’s too soon to say anything for certain, but it’s incredible we’re even here in the first place.

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Seung Hwan Oh has faced 25 batters this season, and thus, 25 batters in his major league career. There. You can’t say I didn’t warn you about sample sizes limitations. But sometimes, a number just sticks out at you, and you can’t ignore it. Sometimes, a number is separated so far from the pack that even when you consider the limited sample and factor in the expected regression, it still means something. Sometimes, that number looks like this:

Blink, rub your eyes, do whatever you need to do, and then look at that last column again. More than half of all swings offered against Oh pitches this year have resulted in whiffs. He’s got nearly a 20 percentage point lead over Craig Kimbrel and Ken Giles. Look at that rate of contact inside the zone. Look at it! Oh has gotten whiffs at would-be strikes like Francisco Liriano has gotten whiffs at would-be balls. He’s been completely untouchable. Through 25 batters faced.

The lowest single-season contact rate ever allowed by a qualified reliever was 56% by Aroldis Chapman, in 2014. Both Chapman and Andrew Miller checked in below 60% last year. Oh clearly won’t stay near where he is, and he might not even stay near where Kimbrel is, but his first handful of big league appearances have been about as meaningful as they possibly could be, and I think I’m already comfortable saying that, at the very least, Oh isn’t going to be an easy at-bat for anyone. It seems like the Cardinals have found themselves a real weapon. The question is, just how strong is that weapon?

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Jaime Garcia has had Tommy John surgery, rotator-cuff surgery, and thoracic-outlet surgery. Despite those setbacks — or perhaps to spite them — yesterday Garcia pitched the game of his life, throwing harder than he ever has during his career. Garcia’s afternoon was nearly perfect: a wild pitch on a strikeout, a walk that was erased by a double play, and one hard-hit single were the only blemishes on a 13-strikeout performance. Garcia’s performance was made possible by continuing to keep the Brewers hitters off balance.

Garcia’s opposition on the day often seemed dumbfounded by his arsenal, unable to figure out which pitch was coming and frequently finding themselves frozen. Twenty-six of Garcia’s pitches were taken for strikes, and these weren’t just get-ahead fastballs. Eight of the 13 Garcia strikeouts came looking. Given that so many pitches were taken, it’s probably necessary to check the strike zone and make sure Garcia was not benefiting from an expanded zone. Here was the zone against left-handers, from the catcher’s point of view.

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A hundred and fifty-four days. That’s how long we’ve been wandering in the wilderness. That’s a long time, and especially so when you remember that the wilderness isn’t acres and acres of trees but basketball and hockey. But now we have found civilization because baseball has returned and we are all happy and excited at the prospect of a new season. The dawn of a new season always brings with it questions. Who will be the best team? Who will be the best player? Who will win in the playoffs? What unlikely events will occur? We don’t know, which is why this is so fun. If you could flip to the back of the book and find the answer, you know you would, and but then, when June and July came around, you’d be forced to find something else to do with your life. It’s like that book that lists all the World Series winners from Back to the Future. Screw that book.

But that doesn’t mean we can’t take guess on how things will go. You know we love to take guesses and you love it when we take guesses. In fact, listen to any sports radio now or read any baseball article on the internet and you’ll find guesses as to what will happen this season. Because people love guesses! Some will be grounded in numerics and hard data; others will be pulled, to put it politely, from the darkest of regions. But all are, at their core, guesses. So let’s do some more guessing.

The first baseball game of the season just took place on Sunday. It featured the Pittsburgh Pirates hosting the St. Louis Cardinals. What can that game teach us about the season that is to come here?

Even More Strikeouts

Strikeouts are going up. We know this. We’ve seen graphs and pie charts and other representational forms of data showing how more and more batters are striking out. What’s more, as was pointed out by Steve Treder at The Hardball Times, this isn’t anything new. What is new is the heights to which strikeouts have ascended. Last season, there were over 15 strikeouts per game played (an average of 7.76 per team times two). That means 28% of the total outs in games during the 2015 season came by strikeout. That’s a lot.

Much has been written about this trend, what to do about it, or if it’s even a problem. Perhaps it’ll eventually even out? Not if the first game of the season had anything to say about it. The Pirates struck out just five times against Cardinal pitching including Adam Wainwright, but the Cardinals made up for it by striking out 15 times against Pirate pitching. That’s a total of 19 strikeouts. Divide that by the 51 outs in the game (the Pirates were leading at home so they didn’t bat in the ninth inning) and we can see that 37% of the outs made in the game came on strikeouts. Of course, one game doesn’t dictate an entire season and the strikeout rate in baseball has taken a dip at times over the decades. But strikeouts. Yeesh.

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It’s difficult to write about the bigger picture when there have been precisely three games played in the regular season. The picture, as it stands now, is microscopically small. So we focus on the little things. We observe, but we try not to draw conclusions. Mostly, we wonder and speculate about the upcoming year, just like we have been throughout the entire offseason, except now, we do so with a tiny bit of knowledge about what that year actually entails.

One of the things I’m interested to watch this year is the development of an eight-year trend of pitchers throwing fewer and fewer pitches in the strike zone while getting batters to chase more and more balls. Most specifically, I’m interested in watching Francisco Liriano, the leader of the “throw strikes never” movement. The last couple years, Liriano has simultaneously thrown the fewest percentage of pitches inside the zone while also generating one of the highest chase rates.

Liriano already walks a ton of batters, and knowing those two facts, the logical question one asks oneself is, “Why do batters keep swinging?” Seems it should be easy to let Liriano beat himself. Spoiler alert: nothing about baseball is easy.

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Previous editions: Arizona / Baltimore / Boston / Chicago AL / Chicago NL / Cincinnati  / Cleveland / Colorado / Detroit / Houston / Kansas City / Los Angeles (AL) / Los Angeles (NL) / Miami / Milwaukee / Minnesota / New York (AL) / New York (NL) / Philadelphia / Pittsburgh / San Diego / San Francisco / Seattle.

Earlier today, lead prospect analyst Dan Farnsworth published his excellently in-depth prospect list for the St. Louis Cardinals. In this companion piece, I look at that same St. Louis farm system through the lens of my recently refined KATOH projection system. The Cardinals have the 15th-best farm system in baseball according to KATOH, and rank second best in terms of pitching.

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The Cardinals certainly have tons of mid-level depth. If history continues to repeat itself, that means at least two above-average position players and a high-upside pitcher or two will pop up from the low minors this year, replenishing the lack of “impact” players at the high levels. They continue to target hitters with upside in the hit-tool department, trusting them to develop power or complement it with defensive or base-running value. On the pitching side, it’s like a broken record for a lot of the newer pitchers in the low levels: (Pitcher Name) came in throwing in the high-80s, and now comfortably sits in the low- to mid-90s with more physical projection left to realize.

No one will be excited by the prospects coming up through this system, but you’d be mistaken if you underestimate the player development model they have created in recent years. I had trouble putting a lot of the prospects I like in this system into the 50+ group for various reasons, but the Cardinals have one of the highest numbers of players just outside that line that could step forward this year with the right adjustments.

There are a number of players whom I rank lower than most in this organization, but in all honesty, there’s so much clustering in the middle of the list that it’s just semantics arguing over most of them. Feel free, anyway. Darren Seferina is my top pick for the Cardinals’ patented out-of-nowhere starting position player, with excellent hitting ability and base-running potential to go with potential above-average defense at second base. If you listen carefully, you’ll hear the boo birds gathering forces in the darkest corners of the internet as you read this.

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A week ago, the St. Louis Cardinals learned they were going to be without Jhonny Peralta for the first couple of months of the season, after he required surgery to repair a torn ligament in his thumb. Because the Cardinals have been participating in a multi-year experiment to see if you can win games without a viable backup shortstop on the roster, speculation immediately turned to outside acquisitions, since no one thinks running Jedd Gyorko out there on an everyday basis is a good idea. While Erick Aybar was floated as a natural fit, given that he’s in a walk year on a rebuilding team, the Braves quickly hung a high price tag on him, making a deal between the teams unlikely.

Instead, the Cardinals seem likely to make a more minor move, not wanting to create a mid-season playing time problem when Peralta does return. And on the minor acquisition spectrum, there was always one name who made a decent amount of sense: Ruben Tejada.

The signing of Asdrubal Cabrera made Tejada superfluous for the Mets, pushing him into a third-string shortstop role that probably wouldn’t have resulted in a lot of playing time. Even with Cabrera having his own health problems, the Mets still seemed perfectly content to let someone else have Tejada if they wanted him, and his availability was no secret around the league. And then today, the Mets made the speculation official, putting Tejada on waivers, and giving any team the chance to take him if they so desire. While Tejada doesn’t yet have a new uniform, his days as a Met are over, and now we simply wait for the seemingly inevitable announcement that he’ll be signing with the Cardinals.

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The biggest story of the day is probably that Jhonny Peralta is hurt. It’s his thumb — seemingly a ligament tear — and it’s an injury that threatens to keep Peralta out of action for a few months. You don’t need to do a lot of overstating to make it clear this is significant, because Peralta is an everyday shortstop, and the Cardinals are trying to go to the playoffs. Playoff teams don’t want to lose regular up-the-middle players before the season even gets started. And then, who’s to say how well Peralta performs even when he comes back?

This is a problem, to be sure. Now, however, it should be noted this ought not destroy the year. For one thing, even though Peralta is the shortstop, we give him credit for a -0.4 second-half WAR last season, and in that same second half the Cardinals went 44-29. So while the Cardinals will have to win with Peralta absent, they’ve kind of already done that. Everything is survivable.

And then there’s the matter of replacing Peralta. It’s always tempting to look around for potential external options. Trades are fun, no matter when they happen, and at first glance it’s not like the Cardinals are particularly deep. For my taste, though, I don’t think they need to hurry out to get a new player. An awful interesting player is already in camp.

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