The Angels lost to the Cubs 9-0 on Monday. Garrett Richards didn’t allow all of those runs, but he did allow more than zero runs, so he took the loss. He needed 97 pitches to go five innings, and he allowed six hits and three walks, so it’s not like Richards just had the game of his life. If I were most people, I’d probably take this opportunity to write some happy words about Jake Arrieta. But I’m not most people, and I’m particularly enthusiastic about Richards’ changeup. Yesterday kicked off the slate of games that matter, and Richards threw nine changeups. Why is that important? Last season, Richards threw one changeup. The season before, he threw all of 15. This is a legitimate thing, now. Richards is going to try to throw changeups. Now we’re going to watch all of Monday’s.

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Ben and Sam talk to Yahoo! Sports columnist Jeff Passan about his new book, The Arm: Inside the Billion-Dollar Mystery of the Most Valuable Commodity in Sports.

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The Orioles had to wait through a rainless rain delay, and then later through a more rainful rain delay, but in the end, they did walk off to victory over the Twins, on a Matt Wieters RBI single. Ordinarily you’d think the win was the most important thing. Every individual win matters — the Orioles’ playoff odds have now gone up — so it’s nice to have that to celebrate after a day that simply dragged on. It was a well-earned win, following a game that in no way went according to plan.

Yet for my taste, it’s not the win that’s most encouraging. One win is the result of one game. There was a positive sign in there that could mean something over another 30-odd games. There are questions everywhere in the Orioles’ rotation, and their Monday starter faced just six batters before rain forced him out, but Chris Tillman showed something before his appearance was over. He whiffed five of the six batters, but even more importantly, there’s significance in what he was pitching.

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11:54

BRING IT JASO:

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Moments before the season’s first pitch, ESPN’s Tim Kurkjian giddily exclaimed something to the effect of, “Baseball season is about to start, and we have no idea what’s going to happen!” Kurkjian, 59, said this with a sense of childlike wonder. The kind of wonder that can only come from experiencing something for the first time, or the anticipation of a first-time experience. The kind of wonder that baseball renews annually.

Well, all the teams — with the exception of Detroit and Miami — have now either played a game or at least had a game postponed, and baseball hasn’t disappointed. Baseball never disappoints. We’ve missed this for so long, and now it’s back, so let’s celebrate it. Let’s take in all the weird baseball things that have already happened this season, just two days in. Something weird and fun has happened in every game! This is a post all about fun facts. Fun facts are great. And fun.

Pirates vs. Cardinals

We’ll begin with this one not only because it was the first game, but because I’ve already written this fun fact here. Francisco Liriano made the start for the Pirates, and his final pitching line was six innings, three hits, no runs, five walks, and 10 strikeouts. No pitcher since at least 1913 (and, presumably, before then, too, since pitchers didn’t strike out 10 batters in a game then) has ever finished a game with that pitching line. The first pitching line of the season was one that’s never happened before.

Blue Jays vs. Rays

These two clubs are the only teams to have played two games this season, and in that second game, Josh Thole hit a home run. Josh Thole’s only job in major-league baseball is to catch R.A. Dickey’s knuckleball. When he hits a home run, it happens on accident. We he does anything else besides catch a knuckleball, it happens on accident. Josh Thole hadn’t homered in almost three years. The last game in which Josh Thole hit a home run, Mariano Rivera got the save. A Josh Thole home run isn’t quite a Ben Revere home run, but it is a Josh Thole home run.
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Late last summer, Scooter Gennett talked about how improving his plate discipline would make him a more productive hitter. He echoed those words when I spoke to him a few weeks ago. The 25-year-old Brewers second baseman feels better selectivity will result in a higher one-base percentage and, hopefully, more extra-base hits.

Yesterday, Gennett went 2 for 3 with a home run — off Madison Bumgarner, no less — and a walk in Milwaukee’s opener. It was only one game, but it was a nice start and a step in the right direction. The left-handed hitter has a .287 batting average in three MLB seasons, but his .318 OBP and 4.0% walk rate are poor, while his .424 SLG is pedestrian. His track record against same-sided pitchers has left a lot to be desired, making Monday’s blast even more notable.

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Gennett on his all-fields approach: “Basically, I hit the ball where it’s pitched. On a pitch right down the middle, ideally I hit it straight up the middle. If it’s outside corner, I should hit it from the left fielder to the line. Middle away, left center-field gap. Middle in, right center. Inside corner, right-field line. That’s my approach.

“Normally, if I don’t hit the ball where it’s pitched, it’s because of the speed of the pitch. Your timing isn’t going to be perfect every time. If you’re late, you don’t want your normal swing. You got jammed and your bat will break. If I’m late on a pitch that’s middle in, I’ll try to keep my hands inside the ball and maybe punch it to the left side.”

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Episode 643
Jeff Passan is a contributor — or probably even some type of editor — at Yahoo Sports and also author of the entirely new book The Arm: Inside the Billion-Dollar Mystery of the Most Valuable Commodity in Sports. He is, furthermore, the self-interested guest on this edition of FanGraphs Audio.

This episode of the program is sponsored by SeatGeek, which site removes both the work and also the hassle from the process of shopping for tickets.

Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @cistulli on Twitter.

You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or other feeder things.

Audio after the jump. (Approximately 53 min play time.)

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A hundred and fifty-four days. That’s how long we’ve been wandering in the wilderness. That’s a long time, and especially so when you remember that the wilderness isn’t acres and acres of trees but basketball and hockey. But now we have found civilization because baseball has returned and we are all happy and excited at the prospect of a new season. The dawn of a new season always brings with it questions. Who will be the best team? Who will be the best player? Who will win in the playoffs? What unlikely events will occur? We don’t know, which is why this is so fun. If you could flip to the back of the book and find the answer, you know you would, and but then, when June and July came around, you’d be forced to find something else to do with your life. It’s like that book that lists all the World Series winners from Back to the Future. Screw that book.

But that doesn’t mean we can’t take guess on how things will go. You know we love to take guesses and you love it when we take guesses. In fact, listen to any sports radio now or read any baseball article on the internet and you’ll find guesses as to what will happen this season. Because people love guesses! Some will be grounded in numerics and hard data; others will be pulled, to put it politely, from the darkest of regions. But all are, at their core, guesses. So let’s do some more guessing.

The first baseball game of the season just took place on Sunday. It featured the Pittsburgh Pirates hosting the St. Louis Cardinals. What can that game teach us about the season that is to come here?

Even More Strikeouts

Strikeouts are going up. We know this. We’ve seen graphs and pie charts and other representational forms of data showing how more and more batters are striking out. What’s more, as was pointed out by Steve Treder at The Hardball Times, this isn’t anything new. What is new is the heights to which strikeouts have ascended. Last season, there were over 15 strikeouts per game played (an average of 7.76 per team times two). That means 28% of the total outs in games during the 2015 season came by strikeout. That’s a lot.

Much has been written about this trend, what to do about it, or if it’s even a problem. Perhaps it’ll eventually even out? Not if the first game of the season had anything to say about it. The Pirates struck out just five times against Cardinal pitching including Adam Wainwright, but the Cardinals made up for it by striking out 15 times against Pirate pitching. That’s a total of 19 strikeouts. Divide that by the 51 outs in the game (the Pirates were leading at home so they didn’t bat in the ninth inning) and we can see that 37% of the outs made in the game came on strikeouts. Of course, one game doesn’t dictate an entire season and the strikeout rate in baseball has taken a dip at times over the decades. But strikeouts. Yeesh.

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Meaningful baseball! The world is right again. Full stadiums, actual numbers in the win-loss columns, Curt Schilling in the booth, all of it. Except, as we saw yesterday in our three games during “Soft Opening Day,” the first few games of the season can feel a bit like an extension of spring training — at least performance-wise. Sure, there was Chris Archer and Marcus Stroman dueling in Tampa (even though Archer might not have had the trademark control of his slider at times), and the Royals doing many Royals things, but there were also things like this, in the first game of the day:

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