Step one for Mike Bolsinger was throwing a unique curve.

Only eight players in 2014 had a smaller velocity difference between their fastball and curve, and his curve is two ticks faster than the average curve, which led me to highlight him in my JABO piece on what makes great curveballs. That piece helped alert the Dodgers’ front office to his viability as a starter. They acquired him and then turned to him when depth became an issue. That gave him an opportunity.

Step two for Mike Bolsinger was adding a third pitch, of course.

Most interesting about this new pitch for Bolsinger might be that it’s not very different from the other two pitches he throws. He threw a cutter and a curve and now he’s throwing a … slider. Everything breaks towards his glove, and everything averages between 80 and 88 mph. Watch him pitch, and you’ll think he’s throwing the same pitch over and over again. Actually, he might be.

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Do you like pornography? You don’t have to answer that. Just, here’s some pornography, only of the type that…well, you’re still not supposed to watch at work, but you could at least get away with watching it with your parents:

That’s Joc Pederson, either befriending Coors Field or trying to assault it. According to the ESPN Home Run Tracker, it’s the longest home run of the year, although there is that Coors-related asterisk. Also yesterday, Pederson hit a different mammoth dinger. The day before, he hit a different mammoth dinger. Among those with at least six homers, Pederson has the greatest average distance. Strong hitter. Good rookie.

These are indicators of strength. And there are some other familiar ones. For example, Pederson is tied for second in isolated power, behind only Bryce Harper. He’s barely a percentage point off the lead in home runs per fly ball. The comparisons to Adam Dunn are being made for a reason — lots of walks, lots of strikeouts, lots of power. We know that Pederson has pop. But how else might we be able to think about this? Enter Statcast. Glorious Statcast!

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Hitting and pitching may seem equally complicated, but consider this: when it comes to hitting, you have to use both of your hands in one place. By necessity, that adds a wrinkle, and can make hitting analysis difficult. In order to focus on something we can bite off and digest, let’s just ask Mike Trout, Bryce Harper, and Joc Pederson what they think about the top hand.

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It took a little while to get here, with an unexpected obstacle or two, but we’ve got a six-player trade between the Braves and the Dodgers. The youngest player involved is 26, the average age of the players is about 31, and this year they’ve all combined to be worth -1.2 WAR. Sounds to me like something worth examining in detail.

Going from Atlanta to Los Angeles:

• Alberto Callaspo
• Eric Stults
• Ian Thomas
• Juan Jaime

Going from Los Angeles to Atlanta:

• Juan Uribe
• Chris Withrow

It’s anything but a blockbuster. You could say a lot of these parts were expendable. Uribe lost playing time. Withrow’s still sidelined after surgery. Callaspo was likely to be designated for assignment. Jaime already had been designated for assignment, and cleared waivers. The Braves booted Stults from the starting rotation. Thomas has 16 big-league innings. Most likely, this isn’t a trade that’s going to make any meaningful difference, but if you look at it long enough, you can see components of certain interest. It’s kind of like a statistical Magic Eye puzzle, where the image revealed is very slightly more interesting than the immediate visual appearance of the puzzle itself. OK, good, I think I’m selling this well.

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Clayton Kershaw is in unfamiliar territory. The three-time Cy Young award winner and consensus best pitcher in baseball finds himself sporting a 4.24 ERA in mid-May, prompting questions about what might be wrong. As we’ll see, luck has largely been unkind to Kershaw, and he’s due for a big regression toward better numbers; however, he hasn’t been the Kershaw we’ve seen for the past two years in one important part of his game, and that has led to some poor results.

Pitchers can’t control everything on the baseball field. After the ball leaves their hand, control is ceded to the batter, the defense, and luck. Also chief among the factors pitchers have little control over: the rate of men they leave on base, the rate of balls in play that go for hits, and the rate of fly balls that go for home runs. Metrics like FIP (Fielding Independent Pitching) and xFIP try to take out a lot of the variability in a pitcher’s stat line influenced by things outside of their control, attempting to measure only what the pitcher is responsible for.

Kershaw has been a victim of some of those factors in 2015. First of all, there’s the rate of balls in play that have actually gone for hits. Here’s a chart of Kershaw’s batting average on balls in play against him over the course of his career compared to league average:

This year batted balls have been finding holes in the infield and gaps in the outfield, something Kershaw doesn’t have much control over. Once those batted balls start finding gloves, they’ll start getting turned into outs more often.

Kershaw’s rate of runners left on base in 2015 has been unlike years past as well. Here’s a chart of the rate at which he’s stranded runners on base over his career compared to league average:

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Did you see Giancarlo Stanton’s homer that went out of Dodger Stadium? Stanton hit and the Dodger fans went “OOOOHHH!” and then 467 feet later, when they saw it go out, they went “OOOOHHH!” again. The Marlins color guy punctuated the moment by saying, “You don’t see that every night!” which indeed is true but maybe undersells it a bit. I mean I’d go so far as to say you don’t see that even every other night! In 4,000 lifetimes you and I could never do that, but Stanton did it in this one. Amazing.

Less amazing but more pertinent to this article is what kind of effect that has on the pitcher. As a former high-school pitcher (second-team all district, baby!) I’ve given up a homer or two and, in my very limited experience, when you face that guy again one of two things happens. The first is you challenge him again because he can’t hit your best stuff and also you’re an idiot. The second is you stay the heck away from throwing him the pitch he crushed in the first at-bat and probably stay the heck away from throwing him anything hittable in general. But that’s me in high school. Are major-league pitchers like that? At least one is!

Mike Bolsinger was the starting pitcher for the Dodgers last Tuesday. It was his 86 mph cutter at the top of the strike zone that Stanton hit so hard it briefly turned the fans of Dodger Stadium from Dodger fans into Marlins fans. An inspection of the relevant at-bat reveals that Bolsinger missed his location on both pitches he threw Stanton. The first cutter was supposed to be low and away but was up at the top of the strike zone. He was lucky Stanton missed it. The next one was supposed to be belt-high inside (there was nobody on base so I’m going by where the catcher set up). Bolsinger got the height right but left the pitch just a bit further over the plate than he probably wanted, a few inches which wound up endangering the well-being of anyone walking outside the left field area of Dodger Stadium.

So how did Bolsinger react to facing Stanton a second time? So this is interesting! Bolsinger threw Stanton six straight curveballs! Common perception is that you don’t want to throw too many of the same kind of pitch consecutively for fear the batter will hone in on the specific movement of the pitch. Mike Bolsinger may have many fears — groundhogs and people who don’t use coasters potentially among them — but what he definitely isn’t afraid of is throwing the same pitch twice.

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It’s funny now to reflect on some of the things that were said over the offseason, when the Dodgers went through an almost complete roster overhaul. Granted, people have to say something, because that’s how this business works, but think of the concern expressed in some corners regarding the immediate future of the Dodgers’ offense. How were they going to make up for losing Matt Kemp? How were they going to make up for losing Hanley Ramirez? How were they going to make up for losing Dee Gordon? Two of those players, as it happens, have hit quite well this year. Hasn’t mattered to the Dodgers. After swapping so many different pieces around, the Dodgers became an early-season offensive juggernaut.

It is, of course, a big reason why the Dodgers have the second-best record in baseball, and the highest run differential. They’ve dealt with significant injuries on the pitching side, that have left them weakened, but the lineup has picked up the slack, despite some injuries of its own. The point isn’t just to say, hey, the Dodgers have hit pretty well. No, that wouldn’t be worthy of a post. The point of this is to explain to you the magnitude by which the Dodgers have out-performed everybody else. The state of things is ridiculous.

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Justin Turner isn’t Babe Ruth — mostly because only Babe Ruth is Babe Ruth. Of late, however, Turner’s numbers have been Ruthian in nature. Consider: since the beginning of 2014, only two hitters in all of baseball have been better than Turner, pound for pound. Two hitters! All this after the Mets released him. Turns out, he met someone on the 2013 Mets that changed his life.

Someone else’s life changed in 2013. This 35-year-old veteran outfielder with a little bit of power and a little bit of speed and a little bit of defense was coming off a down year and a suspension — circumstances which might otherwise be known as “the end of a career.” But he’d heard something about hitting he’d never heard before, and he’d spent the winter in Mexico putting his new philosophy to work. That year in New York, he was hitting for more power than he’d ever had before, and he was relevant once again. He thought he’d tell a red-headed backup infielder a little of what he’d learned.

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The number of innings a team’s bullpen throws over the course of the season has less to do with the performance of the bullpen than the performance of the starters. Teams with starters pitching deep into games rely less on relievers, leaving the bullpen well-rested and allowing the manager to leverage a team’s best relievers in more important situations. A great bullpen might cause a manager to pull his starter at the first sign of trouble, creating more innings for the bullpen, but for the most part, the starter will pitch as many innings as possible and the rest is left for the bullpen. Once the relievers are called upon, it is the manager’s job to divvy out appearances and prevent overuse. So far this season, the Boston and Tampa Bay rotations have put their bullpens in trouble and St. Louis also appear to be in danger of wearing out their core arms — points which I’ll address momentarily.

First, let’s consider performance. In unsurprising fashion, the Kansas City Royals’ bullpen has produced the lowest ERA among all major-league bullpens in 2015. Their relief corps was a featured strength as the team made it to the World Series last year. From 2012 to 2014, the Royals bullpen WAR of 17.7 is more than two wins greater than the second-place Atlanta Braves, and the bullpen is off to a great start in 2015 (even if their 3.35 FIP does not quite match their sterling 1.56 ERA). The graph below shows every bullpen’s ERA and FIP, sorted by the former.

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A few weeks ago I took a look at Major League Baseball players’ declining share of overall league revenues, noting that the players have gone from receiving just over 56% of MLB’s revenues in 2002 to around 38% today. That post went on to identify a variety of factors that have converged to reduce the percentage of league revenues going to the players, including increased revenue sharing, MLB’s growing television revenues, and more efficient front office decision-making.

One factor that I touched upon briefly in my prior post, but that probably merited a more extended discussion, is MLB’s luxury tax. As I explained the last time around, the luxury tax has helped dampen many of the larger market franchises’ willingness to spend on payroll, as teams will now incur a fine ranging from 17.5% to 50% – depending on how many years in a row the club has exceeded the luxury tax threshold – for every dollar they spend on player salaries over $189 million per year.

Because most clubs will only raise their payroll when they anticipate that each additional dollar spent on player salary will generate more than that in added revenue, the luxury tax provides a natural disincentive for most teams to cross the payroll threshold. Now, rather believe that an extra dollar in payroll will generate at least $1.01 in added revenue, teams must instead anticipate that any increased salary obligations above $189 million will generate anywhere from $1.18 to as much as $1.51 per dollar in new revenue in order to justify the expenditure. As a result, the luxury tax has caused most of MLB’s largest market franchises – the teams that the Major League Baseball Players Association has historically relied on to help drive the free agent market – to become more financially prudent in recent years.

But even this basic account doesn’t fully reflect the impact that the luxury tax has had on the players’ declining share of league revenues, as changes to the luxury tax structure since 2002 have increased the penalties for teams exceeding the payroll threshold, while also significantly lowering the threshold as a share of the average MLB team’s revenues.

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