Marcus Semien and Jonathan Schoop have similar strikeout rates. They did *not* get there the same way. Which is good, because otherwise I would have had to link these two just by saying that they sometimes play second base and are young, which is not a great intro. Not saying this intro is A+, but a little bit better than that intro at least. I hope.

Navel gazing aside, it’s sort of fascinating how different players can find their way to a strikeout. The patient one that doesn’t swing much can find his way into bad counts while still making good contact. The free-swinger can hack his way into a strikeout. The slugger that never chokes up can whiff at pitches that scrappier guys would take the other way.

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Contract year. He got skinny. He’s 27 years old. This will be the Panda’s year. This will be the year Pablo Sandoval puts it all together.

So far, so not good. Sandoval’s power is down, his strikeout rate is up, his swing metrics are all messed up, and his owners are considering dropping him in mixed leagues. What’s up with this skinny sad Panda?

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You’ll hear us talk about statistical stabilization here, and link to pieces like Russell Carleton’s or Derek Carty’s. The basic idea is that there are thresholds at which a stat moves into a decent sample and becomes more meaningful.

Maybe you’ll come away thinking that we’ve said that ‘x stat is stable so that’s what you’ll get the rest of the way,’ and if so, that’s on us. That’s not what stabilization means in this context.

What it means is that the r-squared number that correlates a player’s past stats with his future stats in that category has passed .50. That’s a mouthful, here’s another try: if you were to try and predict future work in a category, you’d regress their current work against the league average. At the stabilization point, you can use half their own number plus half the league average in your calculations.

One more try, in the most colloquial language possible: Stabilization is the point at which a number in a category tells us more about their future work than the league average.

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We have some fancy tools here at FanGraphs, but sometimes brute force works just as well. In fact, Glenn DuPaul found once that strikeouts minus walks beat the ERA predictors at their own game.

Maybe it’s no surprise. That’s the heart of the game, getting outs and keeping people off the basepaths. And maybe sometimes this other stuff is just pyrite. Just because you get a lot of ground balls doesn’t mean you won’t give up home runs. Even if you have a limited arsenal, if you can get strikeouts and limit the walks, you can have success. So focus in on the Ks and the BBs.

Let’s make a list.

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I asked twitter if I should write about Dallas Keuchel, Marcus Semien and Jonathan Schoop, or Brad Miller, and they spoke definitively: what’s going on with Brad Miller? So I wrote up Brad Miller and then I discovered that Blake Murphy had done the same. So he might include some of my charts and analysis, he might not, but we were too similar.

And I start again, with the second-most requested topic: Dallas Keuchel, come on down!

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Sometimes, you’re just way out in front. So when I called Lucas Duda “an okay flier in the deepest of leagues” in late 2011, and then made the bold prediction that Duda would outpace Logan Morrison in 2013, I was just a little early.

As an aside — It’s surprising that your bed can be made with such tepid endorsement. I became the Duda guy because I said he was a good dollar sleeper, an “okay flier” and made a bold prediction that he would be better than a bad first baseman. Lukewarm love if you ask me, but maybe Duda has only inspired hate.

Now that he’s the every day first baseman in New York, what emotions should Duda be inspiring? Other than the self-satisfaction of redemption, in my case, of course.

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Swinging strikes are half (more than half?) the battle. But you can use pitches for grounders, too.

Take Marco Estrada, for example. By whiff rates, his change (18.4%) is plus, but his curve (9%) is not. That’s okay! By grounder rate, his curve is plus plus (60.8%). That means he has two great secondary pitches and qualifies to be a Guy I Like.

In order to help you spot good grounder pitches, I’ve run the benchmarks on each pitch type below. Should pair nicely with a Cabernet and this post which shows the benchmarks for whiff rates per pitch type.

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Tony Cingrani has one pitch, or at least that’s how our conversation started. Michael Pineda has two, or at least that’s why I’ve been skeptical of him. Maybe thinking about these two pitchers can help us understand the relative importance of each type of pitch a little better.

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Nathan Eovaldi followed up his 2014 debut — three runs, six hits, eight strikeouts, no walks in seven innings — with another strong performance Sunday. He lost the game, but eight strikeouts against no walks in seven innings is impressive, even when set against three earned runs on six hits. Is he a must-acquire suddenly? After all, he’s averaging over 96 on his fastball.

I remain skeptical, but I’m always willing to admit I’m wrong, so it is without biases that I try to appraise Eovaldi’s 2014 arsenal.

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I don’t necessarily agree with all of the conclusions that Mike Podhorzer came to about the closers in Milwaukee and Chicago earlier today, but his writeup makes sense, and it is still notable what’s happening in those cities. The fireballing favorite was passed over for a couple of veterans. That’s too bad because the only thing I’ve seen that says much about closer change is fastball velocity and strikeout rate. Neither Matt Lindstrom nor Francisco Rodriguez own real leads over Nate Jones and Jim Henderson in those categories. And yet, it’s the veterans with more service time that are closing right now.

Maybe that’s not by accident. Matt Murphy wrote a great piece about how it’s possible that teams are using veteran closers on short term contracts in order to keep their arbitration-eligible young relievers cheap. No saves means no bucks in arbitration. Whether or not teams are actually doing so on purpose, there are ready examples in Oakland, Cleveland, and Tampa Bay (and now Chicago and Milwaukee) where the arbitration kid lost out to the free agent contract vet. Should we add age to the equation when we are thinking about closer changes?

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