Two years ago, Bronson Arroyo was the very worst pitcher in Major League Baseball. Despite pitching in the DH-free National League, Arroyo led the Majors by allowing 46 home runs, 11 more than the next highest guy, who just happened to pitched in Texas, an offensive haven in the AL, where pitchers don’t get to face other pitchers. Arroyo gave up 15 more home runs than the next highest NL starter. By FanGraphs version of Wins Above Replacement, Arroyo was worth -1.4 wins, meaning the Reds would have been better had they just swapped him out for some dude from Triple-A.

At that point, Arroyo was a 34-year-old with a batting practice fastball who had just taken a run at the Major League record for home runs allowed in a season. He’d had a good reason as a big league pitcher, experiencing more success than anyone ever expected, but this looked like the end. Hitters had figured him out. Whatever magic he had used to get hitters out with his 87 mph heater had been used up.

Well, two years later, Arroyo is not only still around, he’s having one of his best seasons to date. The 36-year-old Arroyo has remade himself once again, and the pitcher the Cardinals will face on Sunday Night is not the same guy who was throwing BP back in 2011.

While he still throws the same basic assortment of pitches — four seam fastballl, two seam fastball, curveball, and change-up — as he always has, Arroyo’s variation on his arm angles and velocities have always made it seem like he’s throwing 10 different pitches. As he told David Laurila back in March:

I really don’t throw that many pitches, but I throw a lot of variations of my pitches. I throw a four-seam fastball, a two-seam fastball, a sinker, a curveball and a changeup. I cut the ball once in a blue moon.

[Pitch/FX] is reading a lot of different things, but what’s happening is that I’m taking my breaking ball and changing angles on it. I’m changing velocities on it. A lot of times, if I bring it more sweepy, they’re going to calculate it as a slider. If I throw it a little differently, they’re going to calculate it as a curveball. It’s the same pitch, I’m just changing arm angles.

I also might throw a four-seam fastball to start the game, at 80 mph. They might chalk that up as a changeup. There’s a lot of give and take in my game. I’m adding and subtracting a lot of velocities on different pitches that aren’t moving a ton. Sometimes if you throw an 80 mph little cutter, they might think it’s a changeup.

Other guys are a little more straightforward. It’s whap, whap, whap: Two-seamer, four-seamer, 93, 94, good breaking ball, and once in awhile, a changeup. That’s all there is. No variation. I could never get away with that. If I pitched like that, I’d get beat around the ballpark every night.

Back in 2011, Arroyo’s pitch mix looked like one giant cluster. He hit nearly every single velocity between 67 and 92, and all those pitches started to blend together. Here’s a PITCHF/x plot of every pitch Arroyo threw in 2011.

Most pitchers have distinct clusters. Their fastball is separate from their change-up, and their breaking ball often goes the opposite direction. Arroyo, though, through the kitchen sink at opposing hitters, and a lot of those pitches ended up over the fence.

This year, though, Arroyo has been a bit more conventional, giving some separation to the types of pitches he throws. Here’s that same plot, just for 2013.

The four seam fastball has been almost entirely replaced by his sinker, and he’s stopped throwing the flat breaking ball that doesn’t move that much, instead dropping his curve with more consistent movement while still varying the velocity. The result? He’s not hanging meatballs over the heart of the plate anymore.

According to his Brooks Baseball Pitcher Profile card, which shows the locations of each pitch as recorded by PITCHF/x, 8.6% of the pitches Arroyo threw in 2011 were middle-middle, right where hitters can barrel up the baseball. And it wasn’t just get-over fastballs in 3-0 counts when Arroyo knew the hitter wouldn’t swing either, these were low velocity breaking balls just floating down the middle of the strike zone. That year, 11.4% of his breaking balls were located in the most central part of the strike zone.

This year, that rate is down to 8.1%, and it’s made all the difference in the world. This year, he’s thrown 622 change-ups and curveballs, allowing just five home runs on those off-speed pitches, a rate of one HR every 124 pitches. In 2011, he allowed 25 home runs on 1,404 change-ups and curveballs, a rate of one HR ever 56 pitches.

Arroyo depends on deception and location to get batters out, and in the past, he was willing to experiment with so many different arm angles and velocities that some of them just ended up spinning in the middle of the plate. By streamlining the variations on his pitches, Arroyo has managed to eliminate most of the pitches that opposing hitters jumped all over. By becoming somewhat more predictable in what he throws, Arroyo has become harder to hit, because the extra variations on his velocity and movement were leading to hanging breaking balls in the heart of the plate.

Sometimes, less really is more. For Arroyo, scrapping the four-seam fastball and giving his breaking ball more consistent movement has helped him get his home run rate back under control, and now Arroyo again looks like a guy who very well might just pitch in his forties.

During March, there was one story you heard repeatedly; the Yankees are screwed. Coming off a winter in which they let Nick Swisher, Russell Martin, Rafael Soriano, and Eric Chavez go elsewhere in free agency, the team looked old and thin. Then the injuries started mounting. Derek Jeter’s ankle didn’t heal properly. Curtis Granderson had his forearm broken by an errant pitch. Mark Teixeira’s wrist hurt. Kevin Youkilis achy back started acting up again. They were eventually joined on the DL by Andy Pettitte, Francisco Cervelli, and Eduardo Nunez, and that doesn’t even include perpetual rehabbers Alex Rodriguez and Michael Pineda.

And yet, two months into the season, the Yankees are 30-22, currently standing with the third best record in the American League. Despite all the big names missing from the line-up, the Yankees have just kept winning, and it has spawned some suggestion that maybe the Yankees didn’t need all those high priced veterans to begin with. Maybe they’d be better off with the young kids who no one has ever heard of and who didn’t have enough money to buy a small island, or in A-Rod’s case, a big island.

Don’t believe it. The Yankees 30-22 record is a mirage, and their underlying performance suggests that the team needs Youkilis, Teixeira, Jeter, and the rest to keep the Yankees in the playoff race.

The offense, specifically, has been a huge problem. The line-up has combined for a .312 wOBA, just 10th best in the American League, and that doesn’t even account for the fact that they play in a ballpark that increases offensive performance. By using a park adjusted metric like wRC+, which does account for Yankee Stadium’s short porch in right field, their offensive production has been eight percent below the league average. For context, that puts them squarely between the Astros (10 percent below average) and the Mariners (five percent below average), neither of whom are going anywhere near the playoffs this year.

So, how have the Yankees managed to keep winning with an ineffective offense? Their pitching has been absurdly great when it matters. Here is how stingy the Yankees have been at run prevention by situation:

Bases Empty: .261/.315/.420, .321 wOBA (#8 in AL)
Men On Base: .241/.303/.393, .302 wOBA (#4 in AL)
RISP: .207/.285/.339, .272 wOBA (#1 in AL)

With no one on, the Yankees pitching staff has basically been pretty average. Put a guy on base, they’ve gotten pretty good. Put a guy in scoring position, they’ve been unhittable. To give you an idea of how dominant allowing just a .272 wOBA is, Clayton Kershaw has allowed hitters to post a .268 wOBA against him in his career. The average Yankee pitching performance when under threat of allowing runs has been about equal one of the game’s best pitchers.

Yes, some of this is because they have two of the game’s great bullpen arms in Mariano Rivera and David Robertson at the back end, able to come in and put out any fires that might arise in close situations. But, this isn’t all just the bullpen bailing out the starters. Hiroki Kuroda has allowed a .179 wOBA with runners in scoring position, while Andy Pettitte is at .233. Even the back-end guys have been pretty good under duress, as Phil Hughes (.297) and David Phelps (.304) have pitched better with runners in scoring position than they have with the bases empty.

This is not normal, by the way. Pitchers perform best out of the wind-up, when they can align their defense in a normal way and don’t have the distraction of opponents dancing around on the base paths. The league average pitcher in 2013 has allowed a .312 wOBA with the bases empty, .319 with men on base, and .317 with runners in scoring position. The Yankees are the clear outlier here, performing far better in clutch pitching situations than they have with the bases cleared.

Some may look at those numbers and laud the heart and mental toughness of New York’s pitchers, but history says that it’s mostly just random variation that won’t last. Teams with good bullpens like New York’s can do a bit better than average in these situations, but there’s just no way the Yankees keep limiting opposing hitters to a .272 wOBA with men in scoring position. That can’t last, and when the pitchers stop bending and start breaking, the Yankees lack of run scoring is going to look like a much bigger problem.

Vernon Wells hot streak in April was a nice story, and Lyle Overbay hasn’t been awful filling in at first base, but the Yankees simply have to score more runs if they want to keep pace in the American League East. Robinson Cano and Travis Hafner cannot carry this team to the playoffs. Granderson, Teixeira, and Jeter might not be as young or as healthy as they once were, but they’re still much better than the alternatives that New York has on the roster. If the Yankees want to keep winning, they’ll need their high priced players to get healthy and start hitting the ball over the fence.

The Yankees clutch pitching kept them in the race while they survived the injury bug, but their context neutral performance suggests they’ve performed more like a team that should be around .500. While the narrative about the Yankees having no hope to win with this aging, injury prone roster was overblown, the overall assessment of this group not being good enough to contend was correct. The Yankees need their star hitters back.

While Jon Lester and Clay Buchholz have been the focus of the turnaround among Boston’s starting pitchers, their success shouldn’t be that surprising, as both are in the primes of their careers and always had the stuff to be frontline starters. However, there is one Red Sox pitcher enjoying a career rejuvenation that wasn’t so easy to see coming; the beleaguered John Lackey is pitching like it’s 2005 all over again.

Lackey’s first three years in Boston couldn’t have gone much worse. Signed to an $82.5 million contract after the 2009 season, Lackey came to Boston in 2010 and started throwing batting practice. By the time he finally told everyone his elbow hurt in mid-2011, he had accumulated a 5.25 ERA in 375 innings, and then spent the next year and a half recovering from Tommy John surgery. The first three years of Lackey’s Red Sox career were basically a total loss, and his personality didn’t exactly endear him to the Red Sox Nation.

However, they do say that absence makes the heart grow fonder, and after being away from the team for 18 months, Lackey showed up in 2013 determined to get his career back on track. It’s only six starts so far, but not only is he pitching like the John Lackey of old, but he’s actually pitching better than he did in his heyday in Anaheim.

Through his first 33 innings of 2013, Lackey has a 22.9% strikeout rate, which if he sustained it all year, would be the highest of his career. The league average strikeout rate has been trending upwards for a while now, so relative to league average, his 22.3% K% of 2005 would be slightly better, but that was one of only two seasons where Lackey has ever struck out more than 20% of the batters he faced.

He was a good pitcher in Anaheim because he was durable, he didn’t walk anyone, and he kept the ball in the yard. Strikeouts weren’t really a huge part of his game. Before this season, his Boston-era strikeout rate was just 16%. A 23% strikeout rate is a huge jump over what Lackey was doing to opposing hitters before the surgery.

Interestingly enough, though, Lackey’s stuff appears to be almost exactly the same as it was before he went under the knife. This isn’t a case where his velocity has jumped up following surgery. Here are Lackey’s average fastball velocities for the last three years he’s been on the mound:

2010: 91.1 mph
2011: 91.5 mph
2013: 90.9 mph

And, no, he hasn’t really added a new pitch either. Lackey still throws two fastballs (four-seam and two-seam), a slider, a curve, and a change-up, just like he always has. He’s throwing his curveball a little less than in the past, but not dramatically so, and usually increasing your fastball rate at the expense of your breaking ball will reduce your strikeout rate, not increase it. So, how is Lackey getting all these strikeouts with the same stuff he’s always had?

It starts with strike one. Lackey has thrown a first pitch strike 67% of the time this season, ranking him third in the American League behind only Phil Hughes and Jake Peavy. Hughes’ presence on top of the list should tell you that this isn’t a foolproof magic plan to striking everyone out, but Lackey’s ability to consistently get ahead of major league hitters has given him control of the at-bat in ways he he didn’t have before.

Here are the splits for hitters against Lackey depending on the type of count that the at-bat ends in:

Batter ahead: 38 PA, .241/.395/.448
Even count: 52 PA, .333/.346/.529
Pitcher ahead: 50 PA, .160/.160/.160

36% of the batters who have faced Lackey this year have ended up in a pitcher friendly count before either putting the ball in play or striking out, and Lackey has just dominated hitters who aren’t able to look for one pitch in one location. Lackey has taken full advantage of the expanded strike zone that comes from hitters having to swing defensively.

Compare that with what he did in his first year in Boston, in those same situations.

Batter ahead: 311 PA, .277/.447/.430
Even count: 330 PA, .297/.300/.446
Pitcher ahead: 289 PA, .255/.267/.401

Only 31% of his 2010 opponents had to end their at-bats in a pitcher’s count, and even when Lackey was able to get ahead of them, he didn’t really take advantage. Opponents put up a .600 OPS against Lackey in two strike counts back in 2010, the situation where the hitter should be at his most vulnerable. This year? Opponents have a .268 OPS against Lackey with two strikes.

While some still advocate pitching to contact in order to save your arm and reduce the amount of pitches thrown, Lackey has brought his career back to life by going the other way entirely. By getting ahead of hitters and then putting them away when he gets into strikeout situations, Lackey has given the Red Sox six starts that would fit in well at the peak of his career. If he keeps pounding the zone and getting hitters to chase when behind in the count, the second half of his career in Boston could be a resounding success.

While most teams have now played around 25% of their 2013 schedule, the reality is that taking a player’s stats at face value is still generally a mistake. Six weeks of baseball is not enough for the normal ups and downs to have evened out, and the leaderboards of mid-May will not resemble the numbers at the end of the season. At this point in the year, you are almost always better off looking at a player’s track record than you are looking at his 2013 performance.

However, there is an exception that proves the rule. There are some cases where a player is showing a pretty dramatic change in skills, and that change should cause you to discount their performance and put a little more faith in what they’re doing right now. Cliff Lee in 2008 is perhaps the most extreme example of this effect, as he showed up to camp with more velocity, a new cut fastball, and the ability to throw the ball wherever he wanted, which turned him from a back-end starter into a legitimate Cy Young contender. There’s no one having quite that dramatic of a conversion, but here are three players who have made a distinctive shift that should give us some reason to think they might just keep this up.

Kyle Kendrick, SP, Phillies

Kyle Kendrick has been a big league pitcher since 2007, and over the last six years, he’d thrown over 750 mediocre innings. Heading into the 2013 season, he had a career strikeout rate of just 12% and had an ERA- of 104, meaning he’d given up runs at a rate four percent higher than the league average. He was the quintessential pitch-to-contact swingman, capable of throwing the ball over the plate but not much more.

After a miserable 2008 season, Kendrick found himself in Triple-A in 2009, where he had the fortune of being teammates with a journeyman reliever named Justin Lehr. Lehr threw a change-up with a split-finger grip, and given that Kendrick was in need of a better off-speed pitch, Lehr taught Kendrick how to throw it. It didn’t come immediately, but he’s been steadily working it in as part of his repertoire ever since, throwing it 23% of the time this year. Here is how left-handed hitters have fared against Kendrick for each Major League season of his career (2009 excluded, since he spent most of it in Triple-A):

2007: 54.1 IP, .317/.374/.549, .394 wOBA
2008: 78.1 IP, .327/.404/.541, .408 wOBA
2010: 85.0 IP, .308/.367/.535, .389 wOBA
2011: 49.0 IP, .232/.327/.436, .330 wOBA
2012: 78.2 IP, .236/.318/.383, .308 wOBA
2013: 28.2 IP, .225/.265/.373, .277 wOBA

Kendrick has actually posted a higher K% against LHBs (19.7%) than RHBs (15.4%) this year, which would have been unheard of back when he was just a sinker/slider pitcher who belonged in the bullpen. The evolution of Kendrick’s change-up has allowed him to get to the point where he can go right after left-handed hitters, and he now has an out pitch he can throw against line-ups stacked with hitters from the left side. His sinking fastball still gets right-handers to hit a ton of ground balls, but now that his change-up has progressed to the point where he can actually get left-handed hitters out, Kendrick looks like a solid rotation option for the Phillies.

Josh Donaldson, 3B, Oakland

Last year, the Oakland A’s were planning on having Scott Sizemore as their starting third baseman, but he tore his ACL in spring training and would miss the entire season. The A’s didn’t have a lot of infield depth, so they turned to converted catcher Josh Donaldson as part of the solution coming out of spring training. He was, by any measure you want to use, absolutely awful.

From opening day to June 21st — when he was mercifully optioned to the minors — Donaldson came to the plate 100 times; he hit .153/.160/.235 with a 26/1 K/BB ratio, the kind of thing that just doesn’t fly in the land of Moneyball. Just as one walk in 100 plate appearances might suggest, Donaldson was a free swinging hack. He swung at 51.4% of the pitches he was thrown, including 37.0% of the pitches that were out of the strike zone. Hitters didn’t need to throw Donaldson a strike, as he would simply get himself out without requiring any effort on their part.

He came back to the big leagues a different hitter, showing a more disciplined approach, and hit .290/.356/.489 in 194 plate appearances after his August return. He still didn’t walk a lot, but he wasn’t chasing so many awful pitches, and he was forcing pitchers to throw him pitches in the strike zone.

This year, he’s taken that selective approach to a whole new level. In the first six weeks of the season, Donaldson has only swung at 43.5% of the pitches he’s been thrown, and more importantly, only 24.3% of the pitches he’s seen out of the strike zone. As a result, Donaldson has already drawn 19 walks, and his 11% walk rate is now above the league average. He already had decent contact skills, but laying off pitches out of the strike zone has allowed him to improve that as well, and now Donaldson has blossomed into one of the A’s best hitters. Essentially, Donaldson made the changes that everyone in Anaheim is begging Josh Hamilton to make. You don’t often see a player revamp his approach at age 27, but Donaldson has done just that, and it’s turned him into a legitimate Major League third baseman.

Roberto Hernandez, SP, Tampa Bay

The former Fausto Carmona’s change in approach can be summed up in one fairly simple chart.

Carmona was an extreme groundball pitcher in Cleveland, using his “tubro sinker” to force hitters to put the ball in play, but his emphasis on throwing hittable fastballs at bottom of the strike zone never really worked out the way he had hoped. Now a member of the Rays, Tampa has convinced him to become a strikeout pitcher, relying much more heavily on his slider and his change-up.

As Bradley Woodrum noted several weeks back, Hernandez had gone from throwing 13% change-ups to left-handed hitters in 2008 to 36% in the first few weeks of 2013, but he also was throwing change-ups to right-handed batters as well. For the first time in his life, Hernandez isn’t simply pounding fastballs at the bottom of the strike zone, and it turns out that his off-speed stuff is good enough to get hitters to swing and miss.

With a 113 ERA-, the conversion hasn’t turned him into an ace just yet, but the fact that Hernandez has nearly doubled his career strikeout rate without issuing more walks or allowing fewer ground balls spells good things for his future. Once his obscene 20.6% HR/FB ratio comes back more towards normal levels, Hernandez is going to look like a pretty good pitcher, and not at all like the one who used to go by his old name.

The Detroit Tigers rotation is underrated. Yes, the group headlined by Justin Verlander, the one that helped carry the Tigers to the World Series last year, do not receive enough attention. You probably know that the Tigers have good starting pitching. You may not know that they have one of the best rotations any team has put together recently.

Heading into the second month of the 2013 season, here are the four best starters in the American League by Fielding Independent Pitching (FIP), which evaluates a pitcher based on their walks, strikeouts, and home runs allowed and is scaled to expected ERA.

1. Anibal Sanchez, 1.34
2. Yu Darvish, 1.60
3. Max Scherzer, 1.69
4. Justin Verlander, 2.11

That’s right – by FIP, the Tigers have three of the league’s top four pitchers through the first month of the season. Doug Fister, who takes the mound against the Astros on Friday, rates 14th at 3.14. Combined, those four pitchers have thrown 144 innings while posting a 2.06 FIP, which is 49 percent better than league average. To put that in some context, Pedro Martinez in 2000 — in what some consider the best single season pitching performance of all time — posted a FIP 54 percent better than league average in 217 innings. For the first month of the season, the average of the Tigers top four starters have been almost as good as Pedro Martinez at his absolute peak.

They can’t keep this up, because no one can keep this level of performance going for any sustained period of time. In particular, they’re due to give up some home runs, as they’ve only allowed four long balls between them in 22 starts. Only 3.5% of their fly balls have gone for home runs, when the league average is around 11%. Eventually, they’re going to give up some long balls.

But, even accounting for the expected rise in home run rates, these guys are on another level. By xFIP, which replaces home run rate with expected home run rate based on number of fly balls allowed, they still come out 29 percent better than average as a group, with Scherzer taking the top spot and Sanchez falling all the way to #3.

In fact, the Tigers are the poster child for why using ERA to evaluate a starting pitcher can lead to mistakes. Detroit’s rotation ranks just 6th best in the majors by ERA this year, but that’s because the defense behind them is simply not up to par. The Tigers made a conscious decision to trade defense for offense by moving Miguel Cabrera to third base to make room for Prince Fielder, and while it improved the offense, the Tigers defense simply doesn’t convert that many opportunities into outs when given the chance.

This year, the Tigers starters have allowed a .328 batting average on balls in play, third highest of any starting rotation in baseball. By Ultimate Zone Rating, the Tigers rank 26th in baseball in fielding, and it’s not like it’s just Rick Porcello — the weak link in the rotation at the moment — giving up all the hits; Sanchez (.316), Verlander (.324), and Scherzer (.380) have all given up more hits on balls in play than the league average.

If you rely on ERA to evaluate the Tigers pitchers, you’re going to end up penalizing them for the team’s decision to prioritize offense over defense among position players, and we shouldn’t hold Miguel Cabrera’s lack of range against anyone besides Miguel Cabrera. FIP focuses on solely the events where the defenders behind a pitcher are not involved, and can give us a better view of how they’ve performed on their own, without the impact of their defense clouding the picture.

So, how does this fearsome foursome stack up against other great pitching staffs of recent years? Well, the best rotation (by FIP) any team has put together in the last 20 years belongs to the 2011 Phillies, barely edging out those mid-90s Braves teams that featured Greg Maddux. As a group, the Phillies posted a 2.98 FIP, which was 23 percent better than league average. This Tigers rotation would destroy that mark at their current pace, but of course it’s easier to beat a single season record in a month’s time than to do it over a full six months of baseball.

However, their ridiculous April performance has given them a pretty good shot at besting the Phillies 2011 mark. Because their first 162 innings are already in the books, they only need to post an ERA just 19 percent better than league average over the remainder of the season in order to match the Phillies mark. Last year, Detroit’s starters FIP was 15 percent better than average, and they only had Anibal Sanchez for the final two months of the season. With Sanchez in Detroit for the entire season, the Tigers rotation this year is certainly better than last year’s, and might even be as good as that Phillies staff that led Philadelphia to 102 victories.

Cabrera and Fielder might be the two biggest guys on the team, but the starting rotation is the foundation of this Tigers team. No team has a better group of starters this year, and few teams have put together this kind of group in recent history.

After winning the off-season by acquiring stars like Jose Reyes and R.A. Dickey, the Blue Jays came into the season with high hopes. The AL East was as open a race as it has been in years, and Toronto looked poised to make the leap into being a strong contender. However, with the first month of the season nearly in the books, the Blue Jays are in last place, and at 9-14, they’re already 6 1/2 games behind the division leading Red Sox.

Even with the struggles by R.A. Dickey, Mark Buehrle, and Josh Johnson, the biggest letdown has been on offense. The Blue Jays rank 28th in the majors in wRC+, ahead of only the lowly Marlins and equally struggling White Sox. It might be tempting to look at the ridiculous number of strikeouts that Colby Rasmus (42.9% K%), J.P. Arencibia (38.6% K%), and Brett Lawrie (32.5% K%), especially because all three are posting an on base percentage below .290 — but a deeper dive into the numbers suggests that the whiffs are not the problem.

Overall, the Blue Jays are striking out in 21.2% of their plate appearances, the eighth highest total for an MLB team (with pitcher’s excluded so as not to bias the list towards NL clubs). However, before you go blaming those strikeouts for the team’s offensive problems, look at the combined offense totals for the league’s 10 highest strikeout clubs, and then the 10 lowest strikeout clubs.

10 Highest K% teams: .244 BA, .314 OBP, .411 SLG, .317 wOBA, 100 wRC+, 894 runs
10 Lowest K% teams: .259 BA, .324 OBP, .395 SLG, .316 wOBA, 99 wRC+, 880 runs

The teams that strike out less hit for a higher average and get on base more often because of those extra balls in play turning into hits, but the higher contact rates come at the cost of less power, so the teams making lots of contact are actually slightly less productive overall. While we tend to think of strikeouts as a sign of offensive ineptitude, the reality is the Blue Jays are striking out less than the Braves, and Atlanta currently has the #1 offense in baseball by wRC+. The Indians, Mets, Reds, and Red Sox are also in the top 10 for strikeout rate by their hitters, and they aren’t having any problems scoring runs.

In fact, despite the notion that more contact means more productive outs that advance runners, there isn’t even much evidence to suggest that the high strikeout teams have been less efficient at scoring runs than the lower strikeout teams. As I wrote about on FanGraphs on Thursday, we can use the difference between a team’s performance in a couple of different metrics to determine how well they’ve done at turning their hits into runs. I’ll spare you all the nerdy details — you can click the link if you want to see how this efficiency metric is created — but, as the table below shows, Toronto has been the second worst team at turning their baserunners into runs, which many could attribute to their hacktastic ways.

Team Missing Runs
Indians (7.2)
Padres (8.7)
Dodgers (10.1)
Blue Jays (11.5)
Angels (13.6)

However, the larger picture doesn’t support the notion that it’s the strikeouts causing the team to strand all those runners. Again, using the top 10 teams in K%, we find that the high strikeout offenses are producing almost exactly as many runs as expected based on their raw batting lines. While the Blue Jays have dramatically underachieved, the Reds and Mets are #2 and #3 overall — St. Louis is first, if you were curious — in extra runs added through offensive efficiency, and both Cincinnati and New York are in the top 10 in team strikeout rate.

So, if it’s not the strikeouts and the low batting average, why are the Blue Jays struggling to score? The simple answer — and I know it won’t be a very popular one for those looking to point the finger at someone or something — is that balls just aren’t falling in. The Blue Jays team batting average on balls in play of .253 is last in the majors, 41 points below the league average for position players. While the Blue Jays do employ guys like Jose Bautista who regularly post low BABIPs because of his extreme fly ball tendencies, the Jays rank just 14th in fly ball percentage overall.

After their off-season makeover, the Toronto now has a number of slap hitting speed guys who are the kinds of players who usually post higher than average BABIPs. Emilio Bonifacio has a career .334 BABIP, but right now, he’s at .244. Brett Lawrie has a .308 BABIP for his career, but is at .217 for 2013. Maicer Izturis is a .294 career BABIP guy, but has just a .148 mark this season. While it’s tough to see guys make outs for weeks on end and think things are likely to improve, these guys all have established track records as significantly better offensive performers than they’ve been to date, and the primary driver of their 2013 struggles have been a lack of balls falling in for hits when they do make contact.

A single month sample of a player’s BABIP has little predictive value, so there’s no real reason to think Toronto’s going to spend the rest of the year hitting balls right at people. They might not reach full offensive potential until Jose Reyes returns, but there’s reasons for optimism surrounding the Blue Jays offense. When the hits start falling in, the runs will follow.

Stephen Strasburg had his workload managed for him last year, and he wasn’t particularly thrilled about it. This year, Strasburg is attempting to manage his own workload, adopting a pitch-to-contact approach to getting batters out in an attempt to keep his pitch counts down and help him stay fresh for September and October. The only problem is that it might not actually make things any better.

In the 251 innings Strasburg pitched from 2010 to 2012, opposing batters made contact just 74% of the time they swung the bat, the third lowest rate in the Majors for a starting pitcher. The lack of contact translated into a 31% strikeout rate, easily the highest K% of any starter, and it wasn’t even close. Clayton Kershaw, the pitcher with the next highest strikeout rate, checked in at 25.9%. The gap between Strasburg and Kershaw was as large as the gap between Kershaw and Anibal Sanchez.

Through his first three starts of 2013, Strasburg hasn’t looked anything like the Strasburg of old, at least in terms of contact. Opposing hitters are making contact on 80% of their swings, and his strikeout rate has fallen to just 19%, slightly below the league average. Meanwhile, his ground ball rate has spiked from 44.5% to 56.9%. Strasburg has essentially traded strikeouts for ground balls. Crash Davis would be proud.

However, despite the change, Strasburg hasn’t actually become that much more efficient. During the last three years, he averaged 3.92 pitches per batter faced while racking up a ton of strikeouts. As a pitch-to-contact groundball guy, he’s averaged 3.87 pitches per batter faced this season. Even if he stays on the mound for 220 innings this year, he’d face approximately 900 batters over the course of the season. At his current rate, that would take him 3,486 pitches. With his 2010-2012 numbers, 900 batters would take 3,526 pitches. That’s 40 fewer pitches over the entire year. One fewer pitch per start.

Even if we think that there’s some kind of learning curve, and that Strasburg will become more efficient as he gets more comfortable trying to get ground balls, the data shows that there just isn’t a big difference between the number of pitches thrown by groundball pitchers or strikeout pitchers.

The 25 starting pitchers with the highest ground ball rates in the majors last year — minimum 100 innings pitched — combined to average 3.69 pitches per batter faced. The 25 starting pitchers with the highest strikeout rates averaged 3.89 pitches per batter faced, so the groundball pitchers were more efficient on a per batter basis. However, because groundball pitchers have to rely on their defense to help them make outs, and there are more opportunities for batters to reach on a ground ball, the pitch-to-contact guys also faced more batters each inning. Here are the total comparisons for both groups.

Over 220 innings pitched, the total difference in pitches per inning amounts to 92 fewer pitches thrown by the ground ball group. That’s basically three fewer pitches per game, which might be enough to earn Strasburg one extra batter over the course of each start. However, in exchange for that marginal gain in pitch efficiency, there’s a trade-off in performance.

The strikeout pitchers combined to post an ERA- of 87 last year, which means that as a group, they prevented runs at a rate 13 percent better than the league average. Meanwhile, the ground ball pitchers posted an ERA- of 102, so they gave up two percent more runs than league average while they were on the mound. Put simply, strikeout pitchers are more effective than ground ball pitchers, because strikeouts are outs and ground balls are only sometimes outs.

This doesn’t mean that ground balls are evil and that Strasburg should go for a strikeout of every batter, of course. There is a balance to be struck between complete domination and efficiency, and pitchers like Roy Halladay — at least, the healthy version we used to see — have shown that you can use both ground balls and strikeouts to great success. Strasburg doesn’t need to maintain a 30% strikeout rate to be a great pitcher.

But, he should aim higher than the 19% he’s struck out during his first three starts. If he keeps pitching to contact at this same rate, he’s going to give up more hits and more runs, and the cost to the team won’t be worth having him save a few extra pitches per start. Pitching to contact sounds like a good idea in practice, and there are times when it makes sense to just fire the ball down the middle and dare the opponent to do something with it, but more often than not, a pitcher’s best option is to just dispatch the opposing hitter himself. Leaving the defense out of the equation might be fascist, but it’s also more effective, and it doesn’t actually run up your pitch count in a meaningful way.

With the Houston Astros move to the American League West, the American League and National League both have 15 teams again. In one sense, this makes things more equitable, as now each team has to overcome four division rivals to guarantee themselves a spot in the playoffs. Under the old system, NL Central clubs had to beat out five other contenders, while AL West clubs only had to best three of their opponents. The more teams you have fighting for the same playoff spot, the less likely each one is to come away the victor, so shipping an NL Central team to the AL West could be seen as a move to make things more fair.

However, there’s an unintended consequence to having 15 teams in both leagues; mandatory interleague match-ups nearly every day. Under the old 14/16 arrangement, MLB would confine interleague match-ups to several distinct periods, where nearly every game was an interleague match-up for a week or two. Now, each team has to deal with randomly dispersed interleague match-ups, and this change puts several NL teams at a real disadvantage.

With random interleague match-ups, NL teams no longer have the luxury of adjusting their rosters to prepare for road trips to AL cities. Previously, an NL club could stash a decent hitting first baseman in Triple-A, call him up for the week or two of the season where a DH was going to be necessary, and then go back to having their regular DH-less roster for the games against their NL opponents. This format puts three game trips to AL parks in the middle of otherwise normal parts of the schedule, leaving the senior circuit teams to wage interleague warfare with their NL rosters.

There are a few National League clubs who will do just fine. The St. Louis Cardinals, for instance, have a roster that is perfectly adaptable to American League baseball. With power hitting Matt Adams (a career 114 wRC+ in his limited major league time) sitting on the bench behind starting first baseman Allan Craig, they have a classic DH already on their roster. Or, if they wanted, they could simply shift Matt Carpenter — who is transitioning to second base simply because the Cardinals have too many good hitters and he needs somewhere to play — to the DH spot, upgrading the team’s infield defense without taking one of their regular bats out of the line-up. In fact, the Cardinals may be a better team in AL parks than they are in NL parks, simply because of the extra flexibility that having a DH would give them.

Likewise, the Washington Nationals will be just fine when they they swap out their pitcher for another bat, as they have 26-year-old Tyler Moore and his .256/.320/.500 career line to insert into the batting order. 19 of Moore’s 41 hits went for extra base hits in his rookie season last year, so he’ll provide another source of power when the Nationals head for American League cities. As if the Nationals didn’t already have enough offense already.

However, there are other NL clubs who don’t have ready made Designated Hitters, and are going to be at a real disadvantage when they have to make a decision on how to use their bench to replace the pitcher in AL parks. The Atlanta Braves, for instance, have two games in Toronto at the end of the month, and if Brian McCann’s shoulder isn’t ready for him to come off the DL by that point, they’re going to have to make some interesting decisions.

Their bench currently consists of a catcher (Gerald Laird), two utility infielders (Blake DeWitt and Ramiro Pena), and a pair of reserve outfielders (Reed Johnson and Jordan Schafer) who would have a hard time scaring a child into handing over their candy, much less intimidating a big league pitcher. The guys on the Braves roster who fit the DH profile are currently needed to play the field, and so Atlanta’s sole option may be to use those games as a day of rest for their defensively challenged starters, while Toronto gets to roll Edwin Encarnacion out there in the middle of their line-up.

The DH issue has long given American League teams an advantage in head to head match-ups, which is one of the reasons AL clubs have won 52.4% of all the interleague games played since 1997. Now, though, the everyday interleague game means that NL teams will have even less of a chance to adjust for their excursions to the lands where pitchers don’t hit. The pain won’t be felt evenly, and NL clubs who happen to be carrying an extra bat to begin with will have a more significant leg up during those games than their NL foes. The difference might not seem all that meaningful, but when division races are decided by a single game, every little margin matters. If the Cardinals or Nationals end up squeezing out a division title on the last day, it might just be due to the fact that they have a roster built for a fair fight in American League ballparks.

In 2012, youth was served. Mike Trout was the game’s best performer at age 20, while Bryce Harper had perhaps the best age-19 season in baseball history. Buster Posey won his first MVP at 25, while David Price became a Cy Young winner at 26. The A’s and Orioles both rode very young rosters into surprising playoff berths. It was a good year for the young.

There’s still some great young talent in baseball, and as Harper showed on Opening Day, he’s just getting started. However, this year, there are some interesting players to pay attention to on the other end of the spectrum. If 2012 was the year of the youngster, 2013 might just be the year of the reclamation project.

Scott Kazmir is the most high profile comeback story of the spring, as the Indians gave him a non-roster invite to camp after he showed some improved velocity during winter ball, and he ended up winning a spot in their rotation. Kazmir hasn’t pitched in the Majors since 2011, and he only faced 14 batters — retiring just five of them — that year. In 2010, Kazmir’s last full year in the big leagues, he posted a -1.1 WAR, making him one of the worst pitchers in baseball that season.

Formerly a power pitcher, Kazmir was last seen throwing 87 MPH fastballs to the few batters he got to face in 2011, and his early decline was easily traced to his drop in velocity. Thanks to the fact that PITCHF/x cameras are installed in a few Cactus League ballparks, we can note that Kazmir’s fastball averaged 92 MPH this spring, and his slider was coming in around 81, the kind of velocity he hasn’t shown on his breaking ball since 2007. That year, Kazmir struck out 27% of the batters he faced and posted a +5 WAR season.

Getting the snap back on his slider is perhaps even more important than his fastball velocity, though the increase in both suggest that Kazmir’s arm may be healthier now than it has been in years. While spring training numbers aren’t usually worth the pixels they take to display, Kazmir’s 13/1 K/BB ratio in Cactus League action is also quite encouraging. It’s one thing to just throw hard again, but Broken Kazmir also couldn’t throw strikes with any regularity. The combination of velocity and missing bats while pitching within the strike zone suggests that there might actually be something to Kazmir’s return story.

Of course, the abdominal injury he suffered on Monday might slow his return, and is even threatening to land him back on the Disabled List, a reminder that durability is still a major question mark. For Kazmir, though, he has to at least be encouraged that it isn’t his arm that’s hurting this time, and a ribcage injury isn’t likely to shelve him for the entire season. If Kazmir is able to stay off the DL and make his return to the big leagues as scheduled on Saturday, don’t be too shocked if he looks more like he did in Tampa Bay than in Anaheim. Kazmir’s command has never been good enough to let him get by without his velocity, but now that he seemingly has it back, he could be a favorite for Comeback Player of the Year.

He won’t be the only one in the running, though. The AL features a pair of former hitting stars trying to get back to their prior glory, and both ended up as veteran reserves on young teams – Miguel Tejada in Kansas City and Jason Bay in Seattle. While Bay probably shouldn’t have beaten out Casper Wells for the final outfield job with the Mariners, there are some reasons to think that he might have something left to offer in a part-time role.

Even as his career fell apart with the Mets, Bay has still shown some effectiveness against left-handed pitching. In 338 plate appearances against southpaws since 2010, he’s hit .246/.355/.401. That might not look like an amazing performance, but it was good for a 112 wRC+, meaning that his overall offensive line against lefties was 12 percent better than the league average. Since he’s almost certainly going to get most of his starts when a southpaw is on the mound, Bay’s numbers could be in for a legitimate improvement simply due to the way he’s likely to be used. Now, given his lack of defensive value, Bay’s not going to be a great player even as a platoon bat against southpaws, and the younger guy he replaced also whacked lefties pretty well, but just from a career rejuvenation standpoint, Bay has a decent shot at posting better numbers than he has in years, simply because the Mariners should have the ability to keep him away from right-handed pitching.

The story is somewhat the same with Tejada in Kansas City, though we don’t have any 2012 Major League data for him. However, Tejada did get 288 plate appearances against left-handed pitchers in 2010/2011, and he hit .246/.323/.449 against southpaws in those opportunities, good for a 108 wRC+. With left-handed hitting starters ahead of him on the depth chart at both second and third base, the Royals should be able to spell their starters against some LHPs and give Tejada a majority of his at-bats against opposite handed pitchers. While his bat might not be able to catch up to tough right-handers anymore, giving him a steady diet of lefties might just give him the career renaissance he’s looking for.

Over in the National League, the big reclamation project is Marlon Byrd, but unlike Bay and Tejada, he’s not getting protected in a reserve role. The Mets outfield experiment led them to give Byrd a starting job after a decent spring, so the 35-year-old is going to have to hit all comers to get his career back on track. With his aggressive approach at the plate, Byrd’s offensive value essentially has to come through hitting for power, which he didn’t do at all last year — only 3 of his 30 hits went for extra bases — before he was released by the Cubs.

However, while he was miserable for Chicago last year, it was barely more than a month’s worthy of playing time, and Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections expect his Isolated Slugging, basically in line with what he did back in 2011 when he was a solid role player for Chicago. If he finds his doubles power again, Byrd’s contact skills and athleticism should allow him to be a useful player for the Mets, and give him a better career sendoff than the ignominious ending he had last season.

Last August, I wrote a post at FanGraphs that labeled Giants center fielder Angel Pagan as The Most Underrated Player in Baseball. He then went on to fame in October and fortune in free agency, so coming off a World Series title and a $40 million contract, it’s probably time for him to pass the torch. There are a few pretty good players who don’t get enough respect, but given that he just placed 175th in the BBTN 500, I don’t think anyone in the game is currently more underrated than Erick Aybar.

Aybar seems to fly under the radar for many of the same reasons as Pagan. He’s a good hitter relative to his peers at an up the middle position, but he’s not the kind of dynamic offensive player who shows up on Sportscenter a lot. Rather than being excellent at any one thing, he’s solid at a number of things, and excels in areas that people pay little attention to, such as running the bases. And, of course, he’s been overshadowed by more famous teammates for practically his entire career, and given that he’s now on the same team as Mike Trout, that’s not likely to change any time soon.

But just because Aybar isn’t the most famous member of the Angels line-up doesn’t mean that we should continue to overlook his contributions. Over the last four years, Aybar has posted a 99 wRC+ (league average is 100, and league average for shortstops is 86), and as most teams in baseball can attest, it is not easy to find a guy who can hold his own with the bat while also defending the shortstop position. For Aybar, though, what he does at the plate is just the start of his offensive value.

Over the last four years, Aybar has accrued 16 runs of baserunning value, according to the metrics we use on FanGraphs to evaluate base stealing and advancing when a teammate puts the ball in play. That’s good for 18th best in baseball during that stretch, and has added nearly two wins of value to the Angels during that stretch. And using the last four years of data might actually underrate Aybar’s current baserunning skills — in 2009/2010, he was just 36 for 51 in stealing bases, but he’s 50 for 60 over the last two years. As his base stealing has improved, so has his overall value, and he’s been worth +7.6 WAR over the last two seasons alone, putting him 5th overall among shortstops during that stretch.

Still not convinced? Here’s Aybar’s performance — in batting, fielding, and baserunning — over the last two years compared to Derek Jeter:

Jeter’s been a slightly better hitter even after you account for their home parks, but Aybar wipes out the entire offensive advantage just through the difference in baserunning, meaning that they’ve essentially been equals in terms of producing runs over the last two seasons. When it comes to saving them, Aybar is clearly superior, and though he’ll never The Captain, he’s pretty clearly a better shortstop now than the Yankees superstar.

This isn’t intended as a knock against Jeter, who is still a very good player in his own right, but simply serves to show that Aybar’s performance is nothing to sneeze at. He might not be a big time power hitter, but then again, neither is Jeter. Shortstops who make a lot of contact, get a bunch of doubles, and can run when they get on base can produce a lot of value even if they aren’t pulling the ball into the stands on a regular basis.

And yet, Aybar remains underappreciated. He’s never been named to an All-Star team, nor has ever even received a single down ballot MVP vote. Last spring, he signed a four year contract extension that kept him off the free agent market for the grand total of $36 million, giving him the same average annual value in salary that Cody Ross got this winter.

The Angels have just announced that Aybar is going to hit second in the order this year, putting him in between Trout and Pujols, so he might get more attention than he has in previous years, and don’t be too shocked if he takes another step forward offensively with Trout opening up the right side of the infield for him on a regular basis. Of course, any step forward offensively now would just elevate him from good player to a legitimate star, so perhaps we can start giving him credit for being a key part of the Angels success now?

Oh, and if you were wondering, my other two finalists for the title also play in the West – David Murphy of the Rangers and Trevor Cahill of the Diamondbacks. Murphy’s been tagged with the fourth outfielder label but is more than capable of playing everyday on a good Texas team, and with Hamilton gone to Anaheim, he’s going to get his chance to prove it in 2013. Cahill hasn’t been able to repeat his flukey 2.74 ERA from 2010 again, and might be seen as something of a letdown for those who thought that was sustainable, but he’s still been an above average starter and increased both his strikeout rate and ground ball rate last year — it’s not easy to move both of those things up at the same time, suggesting that Cahill might be in line for even more improvement headed into his age-25 season.

But while Murphy and Cahill are good players, they’re still not as good as Aybar. And that’s why, at the end of the day, he’s now the most underrated player in baseball.