The worry is always the same whenever an Asian hitter comes over. The hitter wouldn’t be getting the chance in the first place were it not for an outstanding performance, but there’s always the question of how the hitter is going to handle major-league fastballs. In part, this might just come from arrogance, but it’s not without its legitimacy. Many Asian hitters have high leg kicks that work as timing mechanisms, and more importantly, there just isn’t a lot of big velocity in South Korea or Japan. The hitters are mostly unproven against the stuff you find in almost every big-league bullpen. So, it’s fair to wonder how a player might adjust.

What we already knew from last season: Overall, Jung Ho Kang adjusted. Kang was so successful, in fact, opportunities have been given to other Korean hitters. Because Kang did so well, it won’t surprise you to learn he did well against fastballs. I’m only writing this because of how Kang has been pitched this year since coming back from injury. Kang has worked beyond the fastball test. Pitchers would rather let him see almost anything else.

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Ben and Sam banter about Matt Albers’ double and a Stompers success, then discuss the privacy/performance implications of new tracking technology employed by big league teams.

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The Mariners started James Paxton on Wednesday because they had to put Felix Hernandez on the disabled list with a hurt leg. That’s bad! Paxton proceeded to get lit up, by literally the San Diego Padres. That’s worse! Here, watch Paxton give up an opposite-field dinger to Wil Myers:

Familiar enough. Here’s last year’s Paxton giving up a dinger to Eduardo Escobar:

There’s nothing good about giving up eight runs in less than four innings. It’s even worse when that happens in a pitcher-friendly environment, against a pitcher-friendly opponent. Paxton was so ineffective the Mariners won’t commit to giving him another go, even though Felix is down a few weeks. By results, Wednesday was a nightmare.

By process? By process, it was less nightmarish. There were actually positive signs. Based on everything but the results, Paxton showed promising skills, and the Mariners should want for him to get another opportunity.

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Another page has been ripped off of the calendar, and sample sizes are finally getting to a point where they actually matter. This, then, represents a good occasion to take a first look at starting-pitcher contact-management trends. Today, it’s the National League.

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When you think of Clayton Kershaw, you probably think of some of the best pitchers in baseball history. He’s certainly earned the right to be talked about among guys like Randy Johnson, Pedro Martinez, and Sandy Koufax, even if he still has a long way to go before he matches them in career value. At the very least, you probably think of the game’s other aces, like Jake Arrieta, Noah Syndergaard, Chris Sale, and David Price. You should also think of Kyle Hendricks.

Kyle Hendricks?! I can hear you say through the internet’s system of tubes. Why would we think of Kyle Hendricks when we think of Clayton Kershaw? Well, they have something in common other than being major-league starting pitchers in the 2010s. Kershaw is having an amazing run due in large part to his otherworldly strikeout and walk numbers. Hendricks can’t compete with those marks, but he’s doing something else extremely Kershawian lately. He’s mixing a low fly-ball rate with a very high infield-fly rate.

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Yesterday, MLB announced that Marlon Byrd has been suspended 162 games for failing a second PED test, which will effectively end his big league career. As a guy who turns 39 in a few months, he was already nearing the end of his days as a productive player anyway, and with a chunk of the suspension carrying over to next season, it’s unlikely any team will offer him a contract this winter. So this is probably it for Marlon Byrd.

But having his career end like this isn’t much solace for the pitchers that Byrd faced, or the teams that lost games in which the Indians gained an advantage from having him on the field. For instance, here’s Dan Haren’s comments in the wake of the news coming out yesterday.

@Ken_Rosenthal can I get back all the home runs he hit off me please? Thanks

— dan haren (@ithrow88) June 1, 2016

Also last year magically returned from a broken wrist in 16 days, at age 38. Proceeded to homer off me that day. https://t.co/7ubQOpskCk

— dan haren (@ithrow88) June 1, 2016

This is one of the issues the current system can’t really address. Sure, Byrd’s career is likely over, but maybe it would have been over four years ago had he not started looking for chemical assistance, and so what did he really lose by taking the banned substances? For players in his position, on the bubble of the major leagues, the incentive to use will always be larger than the costs of getting caught as long as one doesn’t care too terribly much about their reputation.

So every time a player fails a test and gets suspended, there’s a push for a different set of punishments, ones that would try to reduce the financial incentive to take PEDs, or at least increase the cost of getting caught. The most common suggestion is to allow teams to void the contracts of players who fail drug tests, so that players can’t use the money to secure a large financial commitment, then benefit from that commitment even after the suspension ends. Unfortunately, this suggestion is highly problematic.

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Just as much as we’ve trained ourselves not to take Spring Training stats at face value, we should also by now have trained ourselves not to take player and manager Spring Training quotes at face value. Words are words, and until those words become actions, they’re not super fun to consume or analyze. Like, here’s a few examples pulled from a preseason story by the excellent Clark Spencer, with expectations for the upcoming season inferred from comments by star pitcher Jose Fernandez and manager Don Mattingly.

Spring Training Report #1

• Expectation: “He just might not resort to his fastball quite as much…”
• Reality: Fernandez’s fastball rate is mostly unchanged, and in fact is slightly above (52%) his previous career-high (51%).

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