When you’re active on a site like FanGraphs, it’s easy to forget the majority of baseball fans don’t consume the game the way you do. Most people don’t know nearly so much about baseball analysis; most people don’t have the foggiest about UZR. More people, though, are writing about the game in an analytical fashion — meaning more people are being exposed to such analysis. Meaning more people are taking an interest in such analysis, and more or less are just getting started. It’s daunting, because there’s a lot of information out there, but contemporary baseball analysis comes with a handful of fairly basic principles. Principles that are easy to get accustomed to, and principles that can take you most of the way.

We could probably spend several hours coming up with the starter set of analytical principles with which one should be familiar. That’s even without getting too advanced. For pitchers, probably, one would begin with DIPS, or that would at least be near the start. But there are principles for hitters, too, and there’s something convenient about the 2013 version of Raul Ibanez. On Wednesday, Ibanez slugged his 18th home run of the season. In one year — in one half of one year — Ibanez by himself can teach three important lessons. Maybe more. But here are three of them.

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In his Major League debut for the Mets, 23-year-old Zack Wheeler struck out seven hitters in his six innings of work. Of those seven strikeouts, six came on fastballs — and of those six, four came on whiffs induced by fastballs.

This got me wondering, what pitchers this year have generated the largest percentage of their strikeouts off of their fastball? And how many generated those strike outs on swings and misses on fastballs*?

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Last night in Anaheim, Josh Hamilton had a really bad game. In five trips to the plate, he hit into three double plays, and in the two at-bats where he didn’t make two outs, he struck out, including a ninth inning whiff with the winning run in scoring position. For the day, he finished with a -.48 WPA, so while he didn’t single handedly cost them the game, he was the primary reason the Angels ended up dropping a 3-2 contest to the Mariners.

But I’m not here to lament Josh Hamilton again. His terrible performance is noteworthy, but I think it’s also worth acknowledging that Hamilton was fighting an uphill battle last night, because as a left-handed hitter in a game with John Hirschbeck behind the plate, he was screwed before he ever stepped up to the plate.

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The Mariners stuck with it for 735 innings. Despite the fact that nearly everyone in baseball agreed that Jesus Montero could not catch at an acceptable level in the Major Leagues, the Mariners let him try for the equivalent of a half season spread out over eight painful months. Now, it seems like the organization is accepting the reality that Jesus Montero is not, and will never be, a Major League catcher. As of today, he isn’t even a Major League player.

The Mariners are swapping out Jesuses in their backup catcher role — Montero had already lost the starting gig to vaunted superstar Kelly Shoppach — by replacing Montero with Jesus Sucre, the polar opposite of Montero as a player. Sucre is a no-bat defensive specialist, but given Montero’s struggles on both sides of the plate, a non-prospect catch-and-throw backup is probably an upgrade at this point.

So, with Montero back in Triple-A for the foreseeable future, I figured it would be a good time to re-do an exercise we did with Montero 17 months ago, when he was first traded from New York to Seattle. At that point, we walked through a list of comparable bat-first prospects who reached the Majors at an early age, noting that players of this type have turned into superstars, but that the median forecast based on similar prospects called for Montero to turn into a good hitter, not a great one. I ended that piece with the following paragraphs:

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A true and old expression, paraphrased, is that you never know what you might see when you go to the ballpark. A similar old expression is that whenever you go to the ballpark you’ll see something you’ve never seen before. Taken completely literally, this is true — every single pitch, every single swing, every single ball in play, every single act, specifically, is unprecedented. A baseball game has infinite coordinates and infinite possible paths. Taken less literally, some games are boring and feel like games you’ve seen before, but baseball is nevertheless full of surprises. If it doesn’t always show you something you’ve never seen, it at least frequently shows you something you’ve seldom seen. This is the magic of a sport with so many repetitions. Put another way, this is the magic of baseball.

On this particular Monday, two games are in the books as of this writing. The Indians walked off against the Mariners, and the Blue Jays hosted and defeated the Rays. Both of those things have happened before, but the games themselves included a handful of rarities. I thought it’d be a good idea to show some of them off, just to remind you that this sport we watch is insane. Below, you’ll see four things that happened that very rarely happen. For all I know I missed a couple more. Not included is that Colby Rasmus went a full game without striking out, but know that I thought about it. On now to four bits of weirdness.

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There are few reversal of fortune so dramatic as the 0-2 home run. When pitchers corner a batsman into an 0-2 count, said batsman has hit .154/.160/.216 through the 2013 season. The following sample of at bats combine for an immaculate 1.000/1.000/4.000 slash.

Let’s take a look at them.
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It’s still April and the samples are still small, but we’re over 10 percent of the way into the 2013 season and a few statistics are beginning to stabilize. Approach-related statistics in particular are starting to reach the point where the regression can be a little less aggressive. Swing rate begins to tell a bit of a story after just 50 plate appearances, for instance.

It’s a pretty intuitive result — the batter’s choice to swing is less dependent on pitcher quality and independent of fielder quality. By now, qualified players are in the 75-100 plate appearance range, and so we can get an idea of who is making a big change to their approach this year.

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In a deal announced on Tuesday, the Seattle Mariners will become the majority stakeholder in ROOT Sports Northwest, the regional sports network (RSN) owned by DirecTV. ROOT Sports NW currently broadcasts Mariners games under a 1o-year rights fee contract that pays the Mariners $45 million per year. That agreement gave the Mariners an opt-out clause after the 2015 season, which led many to speculate that the team would look to match the mega deals recently struck by their American League West rivals.

In 2011, the Angels inked a new local TV deal with regional sports network Fox Sports West, valued at $2.5 billion over 17 years, plus a 25% equity stake in the RSN. The Texas Rangers kicked off this new frenzy in late 2010 with its 20-year/$1.7 billion deal with Fox Sports Southwest. After the Angels’ new deal, the Houston Astros cashed in, joining with the Houston Rockets to create a new RSN with Comcast, called Comcast SportsNet Houston. The Astros will receive $80 million a year for the next 20 years, plus income generated from its 45% equity stake.

Instead, the Mariners are headed in a different and somewhat surprising direction. The new deal — estimated by Forbes at $2 billion over 17 years — will give the Mariners broader control over the RSN’s programming. But that control may come with some financial uncertainty.

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Last night, the Tigers and Mariners squared off in a mid-week contest in front of 14,981 fans in Seattle, in a game that didn’t begin until 10:00 pm on the east coast. The Tigers are a good baseball team, and are expected to win the AL Central by a significant margin. The Mariners are a less good baseball team, and aren’t expected to be in the playoff race when the year ends. At the end of the year, there’s a pretty good chance that the outcome of this game isn’t going to have determined anything. It will get lost in the shuffle of history as just another regular season game. But, oh man, this game was not just another game. This game was amazing. Let us count the ways.

(Be warned, for there are some GIFs after the jump).

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Saturday night in Seattle, the Mariners were playing the Rangers, and the score was 1-1 going into the top of the eighth inning. Carter Capps relieved Joe Saunders, and the broadcast warned that Capps shouldn’t walk leadoff batter Craig Gentry, because Gentry is one of the quicker runners in the league. Also because you shouldn’t walk anybody if you can help it. Capps subsequently walked Gentry, and Gentry scored, and that run would prove to be the winning run in a 3-1 final. Gentry walked on seven pitches and a full count.

It was a walk not without its controversy, although it looks like a bigger deal now than it seemed at the time. With the count 2-and-2, Capps threw Gentry a fastball in the low-away quadrant that easily could’ve been called strike three. Gameday shows that the pitch was within the strike zone, and during the game other strikes were called in the area. The pitch was ruled ball three, and the next pitch was a far less controversial ball four. Hence the walk, hence the run, hence the loss. It didn’t sit very well with Carter Capps, not that the one pitch was the reason the Mariners lost the ballgame.

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