Pitching is an enigmatic thing. There are so many aspects to it that it can be difficult to get them straight in one’s head. A thing we all know about it, though, is the faster you throw the better you are. This is what makes Nathan Eovaldi so fascinating and yet so curious. Eovaldi has the fastest average fastball velocity of any starting pitcher in baseball at 95.8 mph. He started against the Nationals on Wednesday and hit 99 mph with his fastball in the third inning. Dude throws hard. And yet, outside of that, he’s not really anything special as a pitcher. In total value Eovaldi is Wade Miley. Miley has an impressive beard, but to paraphrase a great person, an impressive beard does not an impressive season make. The most valuable pitcher in baseball so far is Corey Kluber at 3.0 WAR. Kluber’s average fastball is 93.5 mph, 2.3 mph slower than Eovaldi’s. So clearly fastball velocity isn’t everything.

But why not? The quicker a pitch, the shorter the batter’s reaction time, and we’re talking about removing hundredths of a second. A 95 mph fastball will reach home plate in 0.4 seconds so removing those small fractions of a second you’d think would be problematic for the hitter. And they are problematic. The thing is, they’re not the whole story.

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We all know, entering the season, that the WAR leaderboards in the early part of the year reveal less about the players contained within them than those same WAR leaderboards at the end of the year. That knowledge doesn’t stop me, personally, from compulsively looking at the leaderboards just as soon as the season begins. Remember Freddy Galvis? He was tied for the National League lead among shortstops with 0.9 WAR — and “on pace” for a great season at the end of April. A month of replacement-level production has placed him considerably lower among major-league shortstops. What about Devon Travis? At the end of April, his 1.4 WAR was sixth in all of baseball. Unfortunately, an injury slowed him down and he has been unable to add to his impressive April totals.

Now that we have reached the second week of June, the leaderboards begin to look a little more familiar. Mike Trout, Josh Donaldson, and Paul Goldschmidt have continued great runs of production. Bryce Harper has emerged and Jason Kipnis has returned to form after a poor 2014 season. There are still surprises at this point, though. The production of Harper and Kipnis was not expected to reach these levels, Joc Pederson has been far more impressive than anyone could have expected, and Dee Gordon is still slapping and running his way into the top ten. We will see more changes as the season wears on, providing a more accurate depiction of player value as more games are played. However, since we are all looking at the leaderboards now, it might be worthwhile to point out a few anomalies in WAR totals due to the small sample sizes we have with defensive statistics.

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The bar is fairly low for an offensive catcher — the position has been 11% below league average since Brian McCann entered the league — and so even when the Yankee backstop hasn’t been at his best with his bat, he’s been good. Still, last year wasn’t his best year, and he noticed something he didn’t like, so he “got with Kevin Long” as he told me. Now McCann is back at career production levels, thanks to eliminating something he’s done his whole career: popping it up.

Maybe it’s unfair to call it a problem, but McCann has popped the ball up fairly regularly over the course of his career. Of the 533 qualified batters that have played since 2006, McCann has the 186th-worst pop-up rate (4.1%), which is a bit worse than the league average over that time period (3.5%).

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When I first started getting into sabermetrics, there were a lot of people writing about the stupidity of the bunt. That’s one of the first lessons everyone learns, and, not coincidentally, we’re seeing bunts on the decline, league-wide. More recently, analysts have come to celebrate the bunt. But not the sacrifice bunt — what we want to see more of are bunts against the shift. You could say the play itself is fine; it just requires a certain set of circumstances. Bunting against the shift inspired a whole recurring column at Baseball Prospectus by Ben Lindbergh. It’s a seemingly obvious tactic, that’s also seemingly under-utilized. For now.

So, there are times when it’s smart to bunt. The bunt shouldn’t be eliminated from the game entirely. Sometimes, it’s smart to bunt against the shift. Sometimes, it’s smart to bunt not against the shift, if you’re quick. Sometimes, yes, it’s smart to drop down a sacrifice. And Tuesday night, Kyle Seager demonstrated another sort of intelligent bunt. It didn’t work, but since when do we get wrapped up in the results?

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The New York Yankees haven’t been to the playoffs since 2012. In itself that’s not all that noteworthy: a two-year playoff drought when the team won 84 and 85 games over the previous two years seems more like bad luck than fundamental organizational error. Over the last two seasons, however, more teams have made the playoffs than haven’t, and the Yankees are in the minority despite their $200 million payrolls. After first planning to cut salaries and then abandoning that plan following a disappointing 2013 season, the Yankees’ spending spree couldn’t quite push them to the playoffs last year. Surprisingly, though, it’s the same collection of injury-prone, aging players from last year who have led to the club’s success over the first two months of the 2015 season.

In 2014, newcomer Jacoby Ellsbury played well, but Brian McCann disappointed on offense, and Carlos Beltran never got things going. Injuries to Michael Pineda, CC Sabathia and Masahiro Tanaka — plus the complete absence of Alex Rodriguez, a compromised Mark Teixeira, and a disappointing farewell for Derek Jeter — meant a second straight season without the playoffs. Hiroki Kuroda played well, but he didn’t return for 2015. During the offseason, the Yankees did more tinkering than make wholesale changes. They brought in Didi Gregorius to play shortstop, retained trade-acquisition Chase Headley, and signed Andrew Miller to replace the departed David Robertson. The Yankees current record of 28-25 is only one game better than their expected winning percentage at the start of the season, but their playoff odds have increased immensely, as the following graph illustrates.

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For hitters, luck can sometimes explain a poor batting average on balls in play (BABIP), especially in short time frames. Players generally reach the majors with an apparent skill at hitting the ball hard enough and far enough so that hits drop around 30% of the time. If a hitter coming up through the minors lacks this ability, it’s very difficult for him to receive the promotions necessary to reach the majors. There are 126 active players in the majors with at least 3,000 plate appearances and every single one has gotten a hit on at least 27% of the balls that were hit in play. Since the beginning of 2011, however, Mark Teixeira has nearly 2000 plate appearances and he’s a hit on just 23% of balls hit in play, the lowest figure among MLB hitters with at least 1500 plate appearances. He’s the rare hitter who can survive without a decent BABIP.

The bottom of this season’s leaderboard in BABIP is littered with players getting off to rough starts, hitters who have lost their ability to hit major-league pitching, and Mark Teixeira.

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Eight Major League Baseball teams won an initial victory on Wednesday in two federal lawsuits contesting MLB’s minor league pay practices under the minimum wage and overtime laws. At the same time, however, the judge denied the league a potentially more sweeping victory in the cases.

The two lawsuits were filed in California last year by former minor league players who allege that they received as little as $3,300 per year, without overtime, despite routinely being required to work 50 or more hours per week during the playing season (in addition to mandatory off-season training). MLB and its thirty teams responded to the suit by challenging the plaintiffs’ claims on a variety of grounds. Wednesday’s decision considered two of these defenses in particular.

First, 11 of the MLB franchises argued that they were not subject to the California court’s jurisdiction and therefore must be dismissed from the lawsuit. Second, all 30 MLB teams argued that the case should be transferred from California to a federal court in Florida, which they argued would be a more convenient location for the trial.  In its decision on Wednesday, the court granted MLB a partial victory, agreeing to dismiss eight of the MLB defendant franchises from the suit due to a lack of personal jurisdiction, but refusing to transfer the case to Florida. Read the rest of this entry »

As I check the latest version of the leaderboard, I see that Michael Pineda currently leads all pitchers in WAR. Granted, it’s by only a little. Granted, a chunk of that just happened Sunday. And granted, WAR is a rough tool, especially for pitchers. Lots of stuff going on there. But something we know for sure: higher-WAR pitchers are better than lower-WAR pitchers. The guys at the top of the leaderboard are better than the guys at the bottom. And Pineda’s got an extraordinary strikeout-and-walk differential. Not only is it really good; in terms of K% – BB%, Pineda has gotten better by 10 percentage points, relative to last season. Only Danny Salazar is showing a bigger step forward so far in the American League.

Whenever you see a bump in performance like that, you have to wonder what changed. The first place a lot of people look is repertoire. And looking at the repertoire has a few steps — people look for new pitches, or new movement on old pitches, or new pitch mixes, or changing velocities. Sometimes people also look for changed release points. So goes the search for improvement explanations. As for Michael Pineda? He’s not throwing anything new. He hasn’t changed his movements or his arm slot, and his pitch mix is fairly similar. His pitches aren’t going faster. The explanation here seems to be one of the most difficult to prove, but also the simplest to convey. Pineda, from the looks of things, just has better command.

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We have a Madison Bumgarner, right now. He just put a whole team on his shoulders and blew our minds last October, even. And with that Paul Bunyanesque workmanlike yet fiery demeanor, he seems a snowflake. Unique and alone. But maybe we have we seen pitchers like him before?

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Rehabbing a partially torn UCL with rest was an unconventional route for the Yankees and Masahiro Tanaka since the discovery of his injury last July, and there was always the possibility that it simply wouldn’t work, with the right-hander having to go under the knife at some point. While that exact situation has yet to be realized, here we are in early May with Tanaka on the indefinite-day DL due to forearm and wrist issues. As we know, forearm injuries are a big red flag, especially when your elbow is already a little balky.

Still, the Yankees have managed to cope without Tanaka so far, putting the 25-year-old Chase Whitley into the rotation: Whitley has a 0.75 ERA/1.53 FIP, 20.4 K-BB%, and 1.08 WHIP in two starts. That’s a tiny sample, and we would be remiss if we didn’t cast a lot of doubt on his ability to keep up anything near that sort of performance, but it now bears some looking into, as do the Yankees’ plans should they hit any other bumps in the road regarding their rotation (spoiler: they almost surely will).

How good has the Yankees rotation been so far this season? Great, actually. Here’s the ERA / FIP of the starters for all 30 clubs so far this season (mouse over the chart for interactivity):

The Yankees are fifth in FIP, showing how great a surprise they’ve been this year, driven mainly by Michael Pineda. As we’ll see, that level of success in the future is dependent on a lot of things lining up.

First, let’s take a look at Whitley. He couldn’t stick in the rotation last year, eventually moving to a relief role, but he has the arsenal of a starter: fastball, slider, and changeup. I’ll say this: more people would know Chase Whitley’s name if he had a fastball that matched his secondary stuff. His slider, always an average offering, is a little different this year (he’s taken almost four MPH off of it compared to 2014, and it has an inch more vertical drop), though it’s still a fly ball pitch with not a ton of depth. It’s been good this year, but the jury is still out on whether that can be sustained. His changeup is the real prize: last year, it would’ve placed in the top-10 of swinging strike rates among starters had he qualified. At its best, it looks like this:

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