During Yu Darvish’s first eight starts, he faced eight different teams, making his first regular season start against each of them. His last four starts, however, have been repeat performances, as he’s faced the Mariners, Angels, Blue Jays, and Athletics for the second time. During those four starts, he’s been awful.

May 21st, @ SEA: 4 IP, 5 H, 4 R, 6 BB, 5 K
May 27th, vs TOR: 5 IP, 7 H, 3 R, 3 BB, 3 K
June 2nd, @LAA: 6.1 IP, 6 H, 3 R, 3 BB, 7 K
June 7th, @Oak: 5.1 IP, 6 H, 6 R, 6 BB, 4 K

You don’t need to know much about statistical analysis to know that 18 walks in 20 2/3 innings pitched is not good, and any pitcher issuing that many free passes probably isn’t going to be successful. But, is the recent failure to throw strikes related to opposing batters learning how to approach Darvish after getting an earlier look at him?

That appears to be a fairly popular theory at the moment, but let’s look and see whether the evidence supports the idea. Let’s start with the plate discipline stats, which seem like the most likely place where a change in batter approach would be the most noticeable.

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It’s been a rough few weeks for the Rangers. They got thumped by both the Mariners (21-8) and Athletics (12-1) within the last week and are just 21-22 since an eight-game winning streak in the middle of April. Texas has already lost Neftali Feliz for an extended period of time due to an elbow sprain and today they lost another young hurler, southpaw Derek Holland with left shoulder fatigue according to Jeff Wilson of The Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

The 25-year-old Holland had already been battling a stomach virus that reportedly cost him 10-15 pounds and apparently also some giddy-up on his fastball*. He allowed 18 runs in 19.1 innings across the four starts immediately prior to this shoulder issue, contributing to the team’s skid. Scott Feldman — 7.01 ERA and 5.48 FIP in five starts and five relief appearances — is already in the rotation for Feliz, and now Holland’s injury forces Alexi Ogando into the starting staff per Jeff Fletcher of Bay Bridge Baseball. Relief prospect Tanner Scheppers will come up to fill out the bullpen.

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DATA!

Let us delve once again into the numbers. The season is now two months aged and we have more stories unfolding than we have enough digital ink to cover: Will the Red Sox ever find an outfielder? Is Adam Jones the new Matt Kemp? Can the White Sox really make a playoff push in a rebuilding year? And will the 2012 Pirates really go down as one of the worst offenses in modern history?

We will not truly know the answers to these questions for some time, but we can peer into the murky mirror-mirror that is the De-Lucker! and at least get a better feel for the state of everything. Much of the offensive fluctuations in the early part of the season come from strange movements in BABIP. The De-Lucker! attempts to smooth those fluctuations and give us a better guess as to who is doing well and who is not.

And Josh Hamilton, you will see, is in both categories.
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Note: Ken Rosenthal now reporting that Oswalt’s deal is fully guaranteed for $5 million-$6 million, and will not be paid pro rata.

The Dallas Morning News is reporting that Roy Oswalt has signed with the Texas Rangers. According to Jeff Passan of Yahoo! Sports, it’s a one-year deal worth between $5 million-$6 million, depending on how much time Oswalt spends with the team. Bob Nightengale of USA Today tweets that Oswalt told the Rangers he will ready to pitch in the majors in one month.

When he is ready, Oswalt likely will replace Scott Feldman in the Rangers’ starting rotation. The Rangers moved Feldman from the bullpen after Neftali Feliz went on the disabled list with elbow inflammation. Feldman will resume his role as the long reliever for Texas. If Oswalt is successful for Texas, Feliz may very well return to the bullpen when he comes off the disabled list.

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In the 2012 season, few players have disappointed on the Texas Rangers roster: Yu Darvish is a stud (2.98 xFIP in his last six starts), Adrian Beltre apparently lied about his age (he’s 10 years younger than previously believed), and Josh Hamilton is using a Game Genie and is 7 homers away — so, like a week away — from matching his 2011 home run total.

In the Rangers Machine, the only cog slipping from the threads (if we discount Matt Harrison’s BABIP’d ERA) is the converted starter Neftali Feliz. He may have a solid ERA (3.16), but the 24-year-old has danced in and out of trouble all season, striking out a career low 21.1% of batters while walking a career high 13.1%, and on top of it all, he’s headed to the DL with a right elbow strain.

Could the injury have caused his decreasing effectiveness? Possibly, but upon closer inspection, it becomes apparent that Feliz has altered the approach that made him a successful reliever and the change has only hurt him.
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Last night, Josh Hamilton and his teammates went up against Felix Hernandez in Seattle. Hamilton came to bat four times, seeing 13 pitches in the process. He swung at eight of them. Here are the pitch locations for when Josh Hamilton decided to swing the bat last night:

One of those eight pitches is within the box that PITCHF/x defines as the strike zone, and two others are close enough that they fall well within the margin for error, and very well might have been called strikes had he not swung at them. The other five, though? There’s a slider up and way off the plate outside, two change-ups down off the plate outside, a change-up in the dirt, and a slider at his ankles.

Now, here are the pitches that Hamilton let pass.

One curveball on the outer half that was taken for a called strike, and then four pitches that weren’t particularly close that Hamilton wisely let go by, all of which were called balls.

Between these two graphs, you can see the 13 pitches that Felix Hernandez threw Josh Hamilton last night. Two of them are within the strike zone. Two of them are close to the strike zone. Josh Hamilton saw four pitches worth swinging at last night. He swung eight times. This is Josh Hamilton.

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Josh Hamilton just had himself quite a week. The Rangers’ slugger clubbed nine homers in one week, including four in one game. He hit .467/.529/1.433, for a ridiculous 1.963 OPS, and piled up 1.5 WAR, which was 0.6 more than any player in the game. As Mark Simon at ESPN showed with this heat map, Hamilton destroyed just about everything thrown his way. But just how hot was he, in a historical sense?

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As the Rangers lit up Jered Weaver and the Angels last night to extend their lead over their supposed rivals to eight games, Buster Olney asked a legitimate question on Twitter – when was the last time we saw a team that was as good as the Rangers are across the board? Below are the respective ranks in the WAR components (these are all runs above average) for the Rangers in the American League over the first six weeks of the season:

Batting: +46.3 (1st)
Fielding: +16.3 (1st)
Baserunning: -0.2 (7th)
Starting Pitching: +33.5 (3rd)
Bullpen: +15.2 (2nd)

Baseball has had its fair share of dominant teams before, but to be a top three team nearly across the board is pretty remarkable, even in a sample of just a month and a half. Josh Hamilton’s getting the attention (and deservedly so), but his teammates are pretty good themselves, and there’s a reason why the Rangers are the two time defending AL Champs, and right now, a pretty clear favorite to win the league title once again.

However, there’s an argument to be made that not only are the Rangers not the best team we’ve seen in a while, they might not even be the team playing the best baseball in 2012. Somehow, the defending World Champion St. Louis Cardinals are flying under the radar despite dominating their league in a very similar fashion.

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Source: FanGraphs

Josh Hamilton wrote his name into the history books in Baltimore tonight, becoming just the 14th player in Major League history to hit four home runs in a single game, launching two off Orioles starter Jake Arrieta, one off reliever Zach Phillips, and one off side-armer Darren O’Day.

He’s just the third player to ever record a fifth extra base hit in the game in which he also hit four homers, as he added a double to rack up 18 total bases on the night. Only Shawn Green in 2002 and Joe Adcock in 1954 added a fifth XBH to their big night, and prior to tonight, those were the only games in history where a player had accumulated at least 18 total bases in a single performance. Green actually added a single as well, so he still stands alone with 19 total bases based on his 6-6 night.

Hamilton homered in his final at-bat in last night’s game, so over the span of six plate appearances, he managed to hit five home runs and a double. It will take a little more digging to confirm, but there’s a pretty good chance that no one has ever done that before.

Hamilton now has 14 home runs on the season, two more than the San Diego Padres and just three behind the Minnesota Twins. As far as FanGraphs metrics go, Hamilton entered the night with a .474 wOBA and raised it to .536, passing Matt Kemp for the best mark in baseball. For the evening, he posted a wRC+ of 1,212. His wRC+ for the year is now 247 – Babe Ruth’s highest single season wRC+ was .235.

If you want to view the home runs, the highlights are up on MLB.com.

HR #1
HR #2
HR #3
HR #4

It’s April 26th, so it’s just too early to jump to any conclusions based on what has happened thus far in 2012. There are 140+ games still to go in the season, and as we’ve seen before, the standings at the end of April often don’t look like the standings at the end of September. Three weeks of baseball shouldn’t have changed our minds too much about what we believed to be true before the season began. That the Angels are 6-12, and that Albert Pujols has yet to hit a home run, should not lead us to believe that the Angels are a bad team or that Pujols run as an elite hitter has come to an end.

However, April counts too, and it couldn’t have gone much worse for Anaheim than it did. Not only have they struggled out of the gates, but Texas has blitzed through the American League, and currently hold an 8 1/2 game lead over the Angels in the American League West. Even if we still believe that the Angels are capable of outplaying the Rangers over the rest of the season – and we should – the hole they have to dig out of has become so large that winning their division has become significantly less likely.

For instance, here’s a few examples of what it would take for the Angels to win the AL West by a margin of one game, with all of these scenarios needing to begin immediately:

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