Over the winter, the Cardinals talked a lot about upgrading their defense and getting more athletic in the outfield ,in particular. They let longtime Cardinal Matt Holliday go become a DH in the American League, preferring not to put his glove in left field any longer. After trying to trade for Adam Eaton, they eventually signed Dexter Fowler to play center field, allowing them to move last year’s center fielder (Randal Grichuk) back to left field.

Fowler’s not a great defender, but Grichuk is a better athlete than most left fielders, and Piscotty appears to be a decent right fielder, so this group looked like a solid-enough group of gloves. It’s not the Rays or the Red Sox, but the new Cardinals outfield looked capable of running down enough balls in the gap that outfield defense wouldn’t be a huge problem.

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Week: 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 7.

Over the last couple years, the author has published a periodic statistical report designed to serve as a mostly responsible shorthand for people who, like the author, possess more enthusiasm for collegiate baseball than expert knowledge of it. Those reports integrated concepts central to much of the analysis found at FanGraphs — regarding sample size and regression, for example — to provide something not unlike a “true talent” leaderboard for hitters and pitchers in select conferences.

What follows represents the most current such report for the 2017 college campaign.

As in the original edition of this same thing, what I’ve done here is to utilize principles introduced by Chris Mitchell on forecasting future major-league performance with minor-league stats.

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Remember when we used to write for Fox? A few Septembers ago, I published an article for Fox, titled “The Attempted Reinvention of Elvis Andrus.” At that point, Andrus was not a very good hitter. What he was was a changing hitter, a hitter in progress. There was enough there to get my attention, although we hadn’t yet entered the era where people are constantly talking about swing-changers. Andrus, back then, was a curiosity.

After last night, he’s got three home runs in 2017. Another player with three home runs is Mike Trout. Andrus also has three doubles and a triple, so he’s slugging .800. Those numbers don’t really matter, but when you look at them, you also look at what Andrus pulled off a season ago. There’s no longer just an attempted reinvention. The reinvention is effectively complete. Elvis Andrus is somehow still just 28 years old, and now he’s an offensive threat.

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Last fall, Andrew Miller pitched 19.1 innings in 15 postseason games. Extrapolated out to a full 162-game season, that would equal 209 innings. That is basically an impossible load for the modern reliever. Consider, for context, that the only relief pitcher since World War II to top 170 innings is Mike Marshall, who did it twice, including 208.1 innings in 1974. The last major-league reliever to top 150 innings was Mark Eichhorn in 1986. Since the strike in 1994, Scott Sullivan’s 113.2 reliever innings in 1999 represents the majors’ highest mark. No reliever has crossed the 100-inning threshold in the last decade.

All indications suggest that, if a bullpen revolution is really to occur in baseball, it isn’t simply going to be a matter of a single pitcher recording a ton of innings. Exhibit A in an argument against the reality of an Andrew Miller Revolution is that Andrew Miller himself is only on pace for around 88 innings this season. What Miller did in the postseason last year is likely to remain a product of the postseason.

There might be a different sort of bullpen revolution occurring in Ohio, though. Only, this one isn’t happening in Cleveland. Rather, it’s unfolding about four hours southwest on I-71. If there is a bullpen revolution brewing, it’s happening in Cincinnati.

Consider: if a team were starting a bullpen from scratch and trying to create an ideal bullpen, they would likely abide by three basic principles.

1. Put the best pitchers in the most important situations.
2. Ignore the save statistic.
3. Use the best pitchers for multiple innings.

Let’s evaluate the Reds’ bullpen usage this season so far by each of these three principles.

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There’s no shortage of disappointing teams in the early going. The playoff-hopeful Cardinals are 3-6. The playoff-hopeful Rangers are 3-5. The playoff-hopeful Giants are 4-6. Scoot all the way to the bottom of the standings, though, and two teams stand out. The Blue Jays are a terrible 1-7, and Dave just wrote about the decision they could shortly be facing. And the Mariners are a hardly-better 2-8, already multiple games behind every team in the division. Based on the calendar, it remains too early for anyone to panic. Yet no one should doubt that a challenging start can result in significant damage.

It’s not too hard to put a semi-positive spin on things. While the Mariners have wound up losers in eight games, they’ve had a lead at some point in seven. Last night, they lost a game they led 5-0. Over the weekend, they lost a game they led 8-1. Games like that are fluky. A week ago, they lost a game they led in the bottom of the 13th, because they had to use a pitcher who was replacing another pitcher whose wife was having a baby. Tough losses always feel like unfortunate losses. But, they are losses, and they all count just the same. It feels like we just reached the end of spring training, but life comes at you fast.

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The commissioner’s office, as we know, is interested in quickening a game that continues to slow, a trend recently revisited here by Jeff Sullivan.

While the intentional walk no longer requires four actual pitches to be thrown, while limits have been placed upon the length of instant-replay decisions, and while pitch clocks might be on their way to the major leagues after having been present in the minors for a couple years, there’s been less discussion about another pace-of-play variable currently under inspection: mound visits.

Mound visits undoubtedly slow the game. Part of the problem with regulating them, however, is that we don’t know how much (if any) value they provide for the pitchers and coaches meeting in the middle of the infield. While there must certainly be occasions when they benefit a club, does that occur often enough to warrant the frequency of the meetings?

Consider an extreme case from Monday night’s game in Pittsburgh. Talented but erratic Pirates starting pitcher Tyler Glasnow was having a rough go of it in his first start of the the season.

After he issued back-to-back walks to load the bases in the first, Ray Searage did what has been done for as long as there have been pitching coaches and struggling pitchers. He went out to have a word, to press pause, to change focus, to hopefully hit a sort of reset button with Glasnow.

Searage appeared to implore Glasnow to “Go after these guys.”

It didn’t work.

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Last April, I interviewed Baltimore Orioles slugger Mark Trumbo about his hitting approach. As he explained, it’s unapologetically aggressive — and geared toward power. The numbers bear that out. Trumbo hit 47 bombs last year — the most in either league — and he walked just 51 times in 667 plate appearances. For better or for worse, that’s who he is.

Belying Trumbo’s free-swinging ways is the fact that he is studious. He’s put a lot of thought into what works for him, and once the offseason rolls around, he’ll tinker with technology-driven tools. Terms like “exit velocity” and “launch angle” aren’t part of his everyday vernacular, but he knows exactly what they mean. Trumbo’s job is to bash baseballs, which necessitates his need to understand how baseballs are best-bashed.

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Trumbo on launch angles: “I’m not, by any means, hyper-obsessed with some of these pop terms that are being thrown around. Especially launch angle. In practice, my goal is usually timing more than anything. When I am trying to drive the ball, I’m more or less trying to knock the fence down. It’s not to hit the ball as high and far as possible. If that happens in a game, great, but there’s a happy medium between a ground ball and a high fly ball. What’s most productive for me are those line drives that just continue to carry.

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This is Joe Sheehan’s’s second piece as part of his April residency at FanGraphs. A founding member of Baseball Prospectus, Joe currently publishes an eponymous Baseball Newsletter. You can find him on Twitter, as well. Read all our residency posts here.

Two pieces ran at FanGraphs earlier this week that addressed critical issues facing Major League Baseball. Dave Cameron pointed out that, with walk rates ticking back up in the season’s early days, that the Three True Outcomes (walks, strikeouts, home runs) accounted for over a third of all plate appearances. Jeff Sullivan then wrote that early-season games were averaging a snappy 3:11, with lag time between pitches jumping by more than a second.

Scores of smart people have taken aim at both issues raised by the Wonder Twins of FanGraphs. Pace of play has replaced PEDs as Baseball’s Big Issue. What I’m not sure we’ve discussed sufficiently is how those two things — TTO baseball and lag time between pitches — are correlated, and how the style of baseball being played in 2017 directly affects the pace at which baseball is being played in 2017.

Let’s back up. Baseball, as evolved from various stick-and-ball games in the 19th century, was originally a contest in which the pitcher’s role was similar to that of a slow-pitch softball hurler. His job was to kick things off by offering up a ball that the batter could whack into the field of play, where the real business of playing baseball happened: running and throwing and fielding and even throwing the ball at a baserunner to record an out. The pitcher was the least important player on the field in the game’s early days. There were, in fact, no mechanisms to force the pitcher to give the batter hittable pitches; it was just considered his job to do so. Batters were even able to request high or low pitches, the better to fit their swing.

As the game became professionalized and more competitive at the highest levels, pitchers started trying to exercise more control over their deliveries so as to keep the batter from making solid, or even any, contact. This led to the creation of the strike zone and, subsequently, walks. Pitchers pushed the rules that mandated underhand deliveries, so as to generate more speed on the ball, and pushed them some more, until the game gave up and let pitchers throw overhand in 1884. This was a key moment in the evolution of baseball, the moment the game stopped being a battle between the batter and the defense, and became a battle between the pitcher and the batter. It also gave us this graph:

It’s not a perfectly clean line, as the deadball era saw a jump in whiffs that disappeared during World War I, but the long-term trend is clear: strikeout rates have risen throughout baseball history, and you can trace it all back to 1884, when baseball turned pitchers into the most important players in the game. So now, 133 years later, in a 7-1 game in the ninth, you have to watch some 27-year-old failed starter huff and puff for 23 seconds, catching his breath while deciding between his fastball and his fastball, all because Pud Galvin and his ilk cheated so effectively that the game gave up trying to stop them.

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