Pitchers learn and develop different pitches, and they do so at varying stages of their lives. It might be a curveball in high school, a cutter in college, or a changeup in A-ball. Sometimes the addition or refinement is a natural progression — graduating from Pitching 101 to advanced course work — and often it’s a matter of necessity. In order to get hitters out as the quality of competition improves, a pitcher needs to optimize his repertoire.

In the eighth installment of this series, we’ll hear from three pitchers — Sean Manaea, Blake Treinen, and Steven Wright — on how they learned and/or developed a specific pitch.

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Sean Manaea (Athletics) on His Changeup

“My college roommate, Tyler Pazik, showed me his changeup before the last start of my sophomore year [at Indiana State]. Three days later I took it to our regional game against Austin Peay and threw it pretty well. It was one of those things where I could just pick it up and throw it, and not have to think about it. Then I took it to the Cape and had a good summer there. Then I took it to my junior year.

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In a bit of surprise, even in the year of almost no-hitters, Jordan Lyles took a perfect game into the eighth inning on Tuesday. Shortly after Trevor Story hit a single to end that particular quest, Lyles was removed, having gone 7.1 innings with one hit, one walk, and 10 strikeouts.

This start comes on the heels of a five-inning, six-strikeout, one-walk, one-earned-run performance in his first start of the season last week. Yesterday was the first time since April 2016 that Lyles pitched at least five innings and yielded no earned runs. It was the first time since June 2013 that Lyles pitched consecutive games of at least five innings and allowed one or zero earned runs. The Padres right-hander was just 22 years old at that time. He’s 27 now, and it is fair to say not a great many people have spent a lot of time thinking about Lyles in the interim.

While Lyles might not have garnered a lot of attention, he was actually a decent starter as recently as 2015. After his trade from the Astros to the Rockies in the winter ahead of the 2014 season, Lyles made 32 starts across the next two seasons, pitching 175.2 innings with a decent 4.10 FIP and 2.1 WAR. He was basically an average pitcher with a slightly elevated 4.56 ERA. He didn’t strike out a lot of hitters, but he got a lot of ground balls and kept the ball in the park.

His 2015 season ended with a sprained toe, and he got off to a poor start in 2016 that included multiple trips to the minors and an eventual bullpen stay. That reliever role continued into 2017, but he didn’t perform well and the Rockies released him. The Padres picked him up and let him start a handful of games, but those didn’t really go well, either. Lyles opened this season in the Padres bullpen and pitched well enough to get back in the rotation. Thus ends the recent history of Jordan Lyles and brings us to today.

Lyles is no longer the contact-oriented sinker pitcher of his Rockies days. To illustrate the changes Lyles has made, let’s run through his first batter faced yesterday, David Dahl.

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The Rockies advanced to the postseason last year (albeit only for a brief stay) for the fourth time in club history, and they did it in a manner uncommon for them: through pitching.

The Rockies ranked eighth in pitching WAR (18.6) in the majors last season and seventh in ERA- (90). The mark tied the 2007 club, which advanced to the World Series, for the best ERA- in their history, and it was just the eighth time the club has been better than average off the mound when adjusting for park and league run-scoring environments.

The Rockies, 23-20 entering play Wednesday, are following a similar path this year, ranking seventh in pitching WAR (4.8) and fourth in the NL. They have a 96 ERA-.

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This is Jake Mailhot’s second post as part of his May Residency at FanGraphs. A lifelong Mariners fan, Jake now lives in Bellingham, Washington, just a little too far away from Seattle to make it to games regularly, which is sometimes for the best. He is a staff editor at Mariners blog Lookout Landing. He can be found on Twitter at @jakemailhot.

Fastball velocity is one of the main factors at which analysts look when attempting to predict pitcher injuries. When a pitcher suddenly starts throwing slower than before, alarm bells start ringing. Sometimes it’s nothing; more often than not, though, it’s a pretty bad sign. Having said that, let me present — without any other context — a velocity chart for a starting pitcher from 2016 through this season.

That’s a pretty disturbing downward trend. But as far as we know, this pitcher isn’t injured. In fact, he might be the healthiest he’s been in his major league career — and he’s thrown a no-hitter this year as proof. If you haven’t guessed already, the pitcher in question is Sean Manaea. He’s throwing slower than ever before and thriving.

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Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Colorado Rockies. Scouting reports are compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as from our own (both Eric Longenhagen’s and Kiley McDaniel’s) observations. For more information on the 20-80 scouting scale by which all of our prospect content is governed you can click here. For further explanation of the merits and drawbacks of Future Value, read this.

All the numbered prospects here also appear on THE BOARD, a new feature at the site that offers sortable scouting information for every organization. Click here to visit THE BOARD.

60 FV Prospects

After demolishing the Cal League last year (as was expected), Rodgers had a solid 38-game run at Double-A. He turned 21 in August. He’s hit everywhere he’s been since high school and continues to look fine, if unspectacular, at shortstop. He’s above average in every way at the plate (the bat control, power, feel for opposite-field contact, ability to punish mistakes), which means he’s got a good chance to be an All-Star if he stays at shortstop, and it looks like he’s going to.

50 FV Prospects

Pint was identified as a potential high-first-round pick as a high school underclassman, showing mid-90s velocity and a long, lanky, athletic frame in tournaments. He remained an elite arm over the next few years, going fourth overall in 2016 and continuing to show some of the best stuff on the planet, including two 70s and two 60s on some days.

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Last week, I examined whether baseball’s pace changes were having an effect through the first quarter of the major-league season. The results of that investigation? That pace measures are melting some time from the game.

By limiting mound visits, by reducing time between innings — with some teams even employing bullpen carts — the average time of game has been reduced by five minutes. Starting pitchers have cut their average time between pitches by half a second to 23.1 seconds this year. The average time between pitches for a reliever is also down half a second to 23.8.

The changes are having an effect, albeit modest. Perhaps the change will be enough to reduce MLB commissioner Rob Manfred’s desire to implement a pitch clock, a device which he was close to unilaterally adding to the game this season.

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Back in March, I wrote about a pending case before the U.S. Supreme Court concerning the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992 (“PASPA”). PASPA is a federal law which makes sports betting illegal — or, more precisely, requires states to make sports betting illegal. The Supreme Court weighed in on Monday, and we have an answer.

From Justice Alito’s opinion:

The PASPA provision at issue here—prohibiting state authorization of sports gambling—violates the anticommandeering rule. That provision unequivocally dictates what a state legislature may and may not do. And this is true under either our interpretation or that advocated by respondents and the United States. In either event, state legislatures are put under the direct control of Congress. It is as if federal officers were installed in state legislative chambers and were armed with the authority to stop legislators from voting on any offending proposals. A more direct affront to state sovereignty is not easy to imagine.

This “anticommandeering” rule is what I mostly addressed back in March. Remember that the United States is, basically, 50 separate sovereign entities (the states) which ceded power to a unifying government (the federal government) for important matters — things like a military, a common currency, social-welfare programs. But the federal government has (in theory, anyway) limits on its power: it can only do what the Constitution says it can do. And the Constitution says that the federal government can’t order the states to pass, or not pass, laws. To the Supreme Court, telling the states they couldn’t legalize sports gambling was a bridge too far.

Perhaps most importantly, however, the Supreme Court went one step farther:

[W]e hold that no provision of PASPA is severable from the provision directly at issue in these cases.

Let me explain that. When the court declares a law unconstitutional, it is, in essence, nullifying that law. That’s a principle that goes back to a 19th-century case called Marbury v. Madison. But nullifying statutes is something courts typically do very reluctantly — and so they try, whenever possible, to separate the acceptable parts of laws from unconstitutional ones. In other words, a law with both a constitutional provision and unconstitutional provision would be split in two, with the unconstitutional part nullified and the other part remaining in effect. That’s called “severing” the law. But by saying PASPA wasn’t severable, the Court decided that all of PASPA is unconstitutional, and so all of PASPA is void. That’s actually a really big deal, because part of PASPA concerned prohibiting the advertising of sports gambling, and now that prohibition is gone.

Naturally, this has caused a variety of reactions.

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Heading into the season, the Angels announced that they’d be using a six-man rotation to help accommodate the arrival of Shohei Ohtani. Back in February, while noting that Angels personnel seemed well suited to an extra pitcher in the rotation, I nevertheless expressed some skepticism about the team’s capacity to pull it off.

So there is some kind of road map for a six-man rotation in Anaheim. Probability still suggests, however, that the experiment is doomed to fail. The Angels have only seven decent starting pitching options in their organization, and all of them have injury concerns. The odds that the Angels even make it to Opening Day with six MLB-caliber starting pitchers isn’t great. Once the ravages of hurling an object at high speed over and over take their toll, the team will be forced to use replacement-level pitchers.

We’re are now one-fourth of the way through the season, and the Angels have had to contend with some injuries. They’ve lost JC Ramirez for the year while also navigating around trips to the DL both for Parker Bridwell and Matt Shoemaker as well.

In spite of those injuries, the six-man rotation has been an unqualified success, unless you want to qualify whether they have actually had a six-man rotation. The team’s 3.2 WAR from its rotation ranks 11th in baseball, and the team is in the top half of baseball in ERA and FIP. Ohtani has been great, striking out one-third of the batters he’s faced with a 3.53 FIP that is nearly 20% better than league average. Presumed ace Garrett Richards has been the team’s fourth-best starter, but that isn’t a bad thing, as he’s striking out a ton of batters with an above-average ERA and FIP. Tyler Skaggs has been the club’s best pitcher, repeating his good start from early last year but without the injury that would sideline him for three months. Right behind Skaggs has been Andrew Heaney — who just struck out 10 batters last night — coming off of two injury-plagued seasons but has a superb 2.88 FIP in the early going this year.

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According to expected wOBA, which is not perfect, but which is pretty good, the most improved hitter in the major leagues is Mookie Betts. The second-most improved hitter is Leonys Martin, and the third-most improved hitter is Matt Davidson. Since xwOBA is only one measure, that means we can have a conversation. And that means there’s an argument for each of those three players, along with some others. I’ll lay out the case for Davidson here. It’s every bit as simple as it is impressive.

At this writing, Davidson is tied for the seventh-highest xwOBA overall. He’s right there with Kris Bryant. No one in baseball has a higher xwOBA on batted balls alone. If you prefer something a little more familiar, Davidson has bumped his wRC+ from 83 to 161, the second number being almost double the first. For anyone who knows anything about Davidson, the power has always been present. The improvement has taken place elsewhere. It’s maybe the most difficult improvement to make, but the easiest one to explain.

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