As a member of UMass’s graduate-student union during a contract negotiation with that school’s administration in 2007, the present author may or may not have uttered the words “This is what democracy looks like” whilst walking in a circle and holding a picket sign. Luckily for the reader, what follows isn’t an example of what democracy — but rather of what very promising White Sox left-hander Carlos Rodon — looks like when the latter is making his major-league debut, which thing he did on Tuesday night in the sixth inning of Chicago’s game at Cleveland (box).

In terms of both of fielding-independent pitching and also just the regular kind of pitching, Rodon’s debut was not a success. He conceded three hits and two runs over 2.1 innings. He recorded a 1:3 strikeout-to-walk ratio. He entered the game with his club down 1-2. It was 1-6 when he departed.

Given Rodon’s arm speed, however, and his slider and his previously established levels, it’s unlikely that many of his future appearances will be so disappointing. In either case, what follows is a brief visual summary of Rodon from his debut.

Here, for example, is the fourth pitch of Rodon’s appearance and also the fourth ball he threw:

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When you think about it, strike zone is always a hot topic in baseball. While watching a game, there may be the odd bang-bang play at first; the occasional trap vs. catch on a sinking liner in the outfield. What is virtually a certainty is that there will be a collection of called pitches over the course of the game that cause one side to take issue. The hitter lowering his bat and starting down to first in anticipation of a walk, only to be stopped in his tracks by a strike call. The pitcher glaring in at the umpire after a close pitch fails to go his way, perhaps shaking his head in disgust. There are simply so many more of these judgment calls made in every game than any other, that they are bound to spur at least a modicum of debate.

With that said, in the 2015 season there is additional cause to pay particular attention to the way the strike zone is being called. My research has shown that the strike zone has been expanding in recent seasons, especially at the bottom of the zone. This growth has directly led to fewer runs scored around the league, which appears to be one issue that new commissioner Rob Manfred is concerned about in his efforts to improve the experience for fans of the game. Based on this information, MLB’s Playing Rules Committee is reportedly monitoring the strike zone in 2015, with an eye to potentially making a change to the rulebook definition of the strike zone as early as 2016 if it is deemed necessary.

So let’s check in and see how the strike zone has been looking so far in 2015. As with any look at two weeks’ worth of baseball, we don’t have the same richness of data to work with as we do when analyzing information collected over a full season. Using my method of breaking down the front plane of home plate into a square inch by square inch grid, the perimeter of the strike zone looks a little more jagged than it will once the season progresses and the sample of called pitches in each bin rises.

Nevertheless, there are some lessons that can be learned simply by comparing the opening weeks of 2015 to the first month of 2014. Consider both the calculated size of the strike zone as well as the size of the strike zone less than 1.75’ off the ground, the cutoff point I’ve identified where the expansion is clearly visible.

By my measurement of the strike zone, while the bottom of the zone has grown ever so slightly over April of last season, its overall size is actually smaller. Early strikeout rates are off as well, which is not surprising given the proven correlation with strike zone size.

It’s a bit of an interesting twist; the bottom of the zone still appears to be holding firm if not expanding, but the overall size is declining. It would appear the majority of the decline has occurred for left-handed hitters, mostly through shaving off part of the inside corner of their called strike zone, which is still per usual shifted about two inches toward the outside edge of the plate. The right-handed hitter zone is barely smaller than in April last year, with the few square inches of difference spread around equally.

How will the strike zone develop as the season marches on? We’ll provide regular updates here and at The Hardball Times to track its progress.

As noted in Sunday’s column, Koji Uehara has thrown 24 pitches this season, and 21 of them have been splitters. Even for a two-game sample, that’s pretty extreme. Only one other pitcher – Red Sox teammate Edward Mujica (57.6%) – has thrown a splitter with more than 50% frequency in the early going. Last year’s leader was Chicago’s Zach Putnam, at 56.1%, while Uehara was right behind him at 47.5%.

The Boston closer has fanned four of the six batters he’s faced, so you can’t argue with the results. But it’s hard not to wonder where his fastball is, and whether he trusts it right now. Uehara is 40 years old and began the season on the disabled list due to a hamstring injury.

Pitching coach Juan Nieves told me Uehara is healthy and has “one of the best fastballs in the league; an invisible fastball.” He said he’s fine with that many splitters, and if Uehara “keeps putting up zeroes, he can use it as much as he wants.”

I asked Ryan Hanigan, who was behind the plate for both appearances, if he’s ever called such a high percentage of a particular breaking pitch. He said he hadn’t. I also asked if throwing almost exclusively splitters was the plan going into each of Uehara’s outings. He told me it wasn’t.

Uehara won’t continue to throw 87.5% splitters, but he’ll certainly feature it in the months to come. According to his catcher, it’s not only effective, it’s more than one pitch.

“He can throw it for a strike and he can throw more of an action pitch to get more sink,” said Hanigan. “He can play with it and let it run a little bit. He can do different things with it, at different speeds, and he’s got real good command of it. There will be times we’ll go with the heater more often, but I’ll call the splitter at any time.”

The team behind the Steamer projections has put together a tool to better visualize the steamer split projections. Just click on the image or various links and start slicing and dicing.

“In the visualization, you will find a new output of the Steamer Projection system: Rest of season split projections. This visualization is customizable: you may select different stats to display on the graphs, and choose to only display certain teams and positions. It was designed to be a stand-alone tool, and it can even be embedded directly on your website or posted on social media. We plan to update it weekly so that our ROS projection stay up to date.”

Click to enlarge.

“In Soviet Russia, television watches you,” famous bearded dissident Yakov Smirnoff revealed in his politically charged comedy jokes of the 1980s. In the United States, meanwhile, the arrangement is different. In the United States — or at least the United States of April 16, 2015 — what happens is you watch Red Sox GM Ben Cherington watching draft-eligible Vanderbilt right-hander Carson Fulmer.

As for who is watching you — or, for that matter, whom Carson Fulmer himself is watching — it’s difficult to say. That these and other similar scenarios are depicted in an MC Escher drawing is almost certain, however.

Image courtesy a combination of Kiley McDaniel and Cespedes Family BBQ.

I told Rafael Betancourt that he hadn’t hit a batter with any of his last 10,307 pitches thrown. He laughed, and said nobody had ever told him that before. “I remember it. It was Marcus Thames. Funny thing was? It was an 0-2 count,” the Rockies reliever said. When I asked if it was the last time he ever went inside, he only laughed. He wanted to protest, I could tell, but he also knew he didn’t go inside much.

The rest of the interview didn’t produce much, other than the fact that the deception he shows in his delivery wasn’t crafted. The way Betancourt’s arm comes up behind his head is just the way he throws the ball. “That’s the way I’ve always thrown the ball, even when I was a fielder, even when I played shortstop — but I feel that the ball is always coming from the same spot,” he said of his uncommon release action.

Even though he lives on the outside corner — and admitted as much — he didn’t really want to get into specifics about the adjustments he’d made to combat hitters hanging over the outside corner. You can see that he’s gone to the slider a little more over the years, and has even used the pitchfork changeup some more, but the location hasn’t changed.

Nor has his ability to avoid the free pass… or the hit batter.

Earlier this week, the author published a post claiming to include the top players by (maybe) predictive stats from college baseball’s most competitive conferences.

What follows are the three weekend series likely to feature the greatest number of players whose names appeared within that post. MPS+ and MPS- are index metrics based on those (maybe) predictive stats and designed for batters and pitchers, respectively. In each case, 100 is average, while above 100 is better for batters and below 100 is better for pitchers. Read more about the author’s questionable methodology here.

Arkansas at Texas A&M
Who It Features
One of the best players in all the SEC. Draft-eligible sophomore and Arkansas center fielder Andrew Benintendi (160 PA, 151 MPS+) leads not merely the conference but all of Division 1 with 14 home runs. He’s also recorded a strikeout rate (12.5%) about a standard deviation better than conference average and occupies (one notes) a place on the more challenging end of the defensive spectrum. All five of the following also appear among the conference’s top-20 batters: junior right fielder Tyler Spoon (148 PA, 123 MPS+) and junior third baseman Bobby Wernes (151 PA, 115 MPS+) on Arkansas; plus sophomore right fielder Nick Banks (148 PA, 114 MPS+), sophomore third baseman Ronnie Gideon (107 PA, 118 MPS+), and junior left fielder Logan Taylor (132 PA, 128 MPS+) for Texas A&M. Among pitchers, Arkansas’ Friday night starter Grayson Long (51.0 IP, 86 MPS-) has produced the best numbers. Long features a fastball that sits in the low-90s and peaks at 93 mph, according to Perfect Game.

When It’s On (ET)
Friday at 7:30pm
Saturday at 8:30pm
Sunday at 4:00pm

How to Watch It
SEC Network and Watch ESPN (link).

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It’s not very often you see Andrew McCutchen making a mistake, but it happened yesterday in Pittsburgh’s 1-0 loss to the Tigers. A tip of the hat to Pirates broadcasters Tim Neverett and Bob Walk for pointing out this interesting wrinkle.

It was the Pirates’ half of the fourth inning, with the game tied 0-0 and Alfredo Simon on the mound for the Tigers. With two outs and nobody on, McCutchen hit a single (the Pirates’ first hit of the game) and stood on first with Neil Walker at the plate.

Walker hit a bloop single to right field. It dropped just in front of J.D. Martinez:

What the baserunner on first, in this case McCutchen, has done since the dawn of time in this instance is go to second — and go to third only if the outfielder terribly misplays the ball. Here is McCutchen at second, monitoring Martinez to see if he misplays the ball. (He doesn’t.)

The modern(ish) wrinkle here is that the Tigers were shifting against Walker. Here is their formation before the pitch (click to embiggen):

And here is what their defense looked like the moment McCutchen was rounding second. Martinez is throwing in the ball from right, and arrows are pointing at Tigers, while McCutchen is in the tiny circle:

So here’s McCutchen’s mistake: he should not be looking at Martinez, because it almost doesn’t matter how Martinez plays this ball. What’s important is that Detroit’s shift has left third base vacated. Third basemen Nick Castellanos (underneath top arrow) is near McCutchen at second base, and also facing Martinez. Castellanos is a few steps closer to third, but that doesn’t matter: he would need to turn around, beat McCutchen in a footrace, turn back towards the field (only now can the relay man deliver the throw), see and catch the ball, and finally apply the tag. Simon (underneath second arrow) is a bit closer to third base, but is also faced towards right field, and I’d take McCutchen in the race to apply the tag.

It seems like the only Tiger aware of the danger is catcher James McCann, playing in career game #13, who is moving up the third-base line while facing right field. Despite his gear, he would have been the only Tiger to have a shot at catching McCutchen. Nice.

Keep in mind, McCutchen has a great chance to beat the Tigers to third after he has decelerated to a stop, and then turned around. With a more aggressive pre-pitch strategy, I think third base could easily have been his.

We always wonder what factors could lead to the shift’s natural death — or at least a factor that would start the frequency of the shift trending downward. Perhaps enough baserunners going from first to third on well-played bloop singles would do the trick.

Vanderbilt junior right-hander Carson Fulmer entered the spring as a probable first-round selection in this June’s amateur draft. His performances, certainly, have only reinforced the likelihood of that contingency. After hovering among the conference leaders for a while, Fulmer appeared atop the (maybe) predictive leaderboard for the SEC published here earlier this week. His most recent start was his best of the season. Pitching at home against Ole Miss, Vanderbilt produced a 14:0 strikeout-to-walk ratio against 30 batters over 9.0 innings (box).

Lest there were concern about Fulmer’s endurance or his capacity to maintain velocity into the later innings, the purpose of this post is to assuage that particular concern. The other purpose is to “produce content” lest the author is “fired from his job.” The third and final purpose is to use do some work with the word lest. For practice, like.

Here, by way of example, is Fulmer’s third-to-last pitch from that start against Ole Miss — a 94 mph fastball:

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Before the start of Saturday’s game between Louisiana State and Auburn, the SEC Network revisited several decisive plays from the previous night’s contest (won 3-2 by LSU) between those same clubs. Present in a disproportionately high number of those clips was LSU junior shortstop — and possible top-10 draft selection this June — Alex Bregman.

On the one hand, this isn’t surprising: as the (maybe) predictive stats reveal, Bregman is among the SEC’s top-10 hitters. Notably, though, none of the footage depicted Bregman’s hitting — but rather only his fielding — exploits from that same game.

The purpose of this post is (first) to steal the aforementioned footage from the SEC Network and then (second) to disseminate it to the FanGraphs readership so that they might experience undue optimism regarding the future of the Pastime.

Here, first of all, is Bregman making a play from the hole:

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