Over the years, I’ve made several attempts to adjust both hitter and pitcher performance statistics based on the quality of their opposition, but I’ve never settled on a method that I really like. Those failures will not stop me from trying. In this attempt, I’ve opted to use a plus/minus approach similar to those used in modern defensive statistics like Defensive Runs Saved. Here’s how it works in this case. Whenever a batter records a hit, I am giving him credit of 1.0 hits minus the batting average allowed this season by the pitcher he is facing. So if that hit comes against Clayton Kershaw, that’s 1.0 minus 0.185 or 0.815 hits over what that pitcher would be expected to allow in a typical at-bat. If instead that hit comes against Alfredo Simon, that’s 1.0 minus 0.348 or just 0.652 hits. Meanwhile, if the batter fails to get a hit, he receives 0.0 minus the pitcher’s batting average allowed, which would be -0.185 hits against Kershaw and -0.348 hits against Simon.

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Trevor Bauer’s performance in 2016 has not jumped off the page, but after nine starts and a handful of relief appearances, he is enjoying a career best 3.69 ERA and 3.70 FIP. His strikeout rate has declined somewhat from 8.7 to 7.9 per nine innings, but his walk rate has declined more significantly from 4.0 to 3.0 per nine and is palatable for fantasy owners for the first time. If this is what Bauer is now, then he can finally be a fantasy asset, even if not quite in the form that many expected from him when he struck out more than a batter per inning in the upper levels of the Diamondbacks’ farm system.

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Clayton Kershaw is ridiculously good. You know this. I know this. There is not much to say about him for fantasy owners other than you should start him every time in every format. But perhaps because I hit my dog days of summer two months early this season, I wanted to write an article about Kershaw to wrap my head around just how good he has been.

For the purposes of this article, I am going to rely on a stat called Game Score, which Bill James came up with to compare starts to one another. You can look up exactly how Game Score is calculated here. Unless you are in a format that rewards pitchers for getting outs, Game Score is not a perfect proxy for the fantasy value of a start, but it does reward pitchers for strikeouts and penalize them for earned runs, hits, and walks, all of which play into the standard rotisserie categories. Meanwhile, Game Score is a convenient way to place one number on a start that reflects its quality.

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From the day I started playing fantasy baseball, I have placed a premium on players eligible at shortstop because all of the analysis I read and performed myself suggested that the replacement level at shortstop was less productive than the replacement level at other positions. Even in the shortstop boom of the late 90s that featured exceptional fantasy shortstops like Alex Rodriguez, Nomar Garciaparra, Derek Jeter, and Barry Larkin, the cliff to non-productive replacement options happened much sooner at shortstop than other positions.

Over the last two seasons, we have entered another shortstop boom as elite prospects like Carlos Correa and Francisco Lindor have made their way to the majors. You can check out the Last 365 Days split on the leaderboards to get a taste of their fantasy potential. Over that time frame, Correa has 29 home runs and 22 steals. Lindor has 15 and 21. Xander Bogaerts has hit .335 with 14 steals, and he has projectable power growth ahead of him. Even though players like Mike Trout and Paul Goldschmidt have been projected to have better fantasy statistics, I was prepared to thrust the likes of Correa and Lindor to their rankings neighborhood because I believed that positional scarcity would bridge the gap in their production. I no longer believe that is true.

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Stolen bases require a combination of runner speed, aggressiveness, and opportunity, but all too often, we assign all of the credit or blame to runners who either increase or decrease their stolen base totals to their speed. A month and a half into the season, it’s common for runners to be well off of their stolen base pace from last season even if they have not experienced a change in their speed or willingness to steal bases. Before I make any alterations to my expectations for players, I like to take an alternative look at basestealer effectiveness based on their opportunities.

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Things do not look good for Felix Hernandez. He is striking out close to two fewer batters and walking close to two more batters per nine than he has over the course of his career. His ERA continues to be excellent at 2.27, but his declining peripherals suggest that Hernandez is no longer the elite pitcher he was over his first 11 seasons. Meanwhile, it’s hard not to believe that his diminished fastball, which at 89.7 average mph has dropped below 90.0 for the first time, is the primary culprit. I’m not telling you anything here you didn’t already know if you have been a regular FanGraphs reader over the last month.

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Matt Harvey has now made six starts this season. His strikeouts per nine are down from 8.9 last season to 6.6 this season. His walks per nine are up from 1.8 to 2.9. His ERA is up from 2.71 to 4.76, and his xFIP is up from 3.24 to 4.36. It is just six starts, but given that his most recent was on Tuesday and featured just four strikeouts and two walks against the hapless Braves, his early-season struggles seem much more alarming than they did on Monday. At the very least, he is the preseason top 10 starter who has fantasy owners the closest to panic.

At times this season, Harvey has been visibly frustrated on the mound, which I take as a sign that he is having mechanical issues. His fastball velocity is also down from 95.9 mph in 2015 to 94.1 mph so far this season. But what has intrigued me the most is his apparent unease in pitching from the stretch, something his pitching coach Dan Warthen has mentioned as an area that Harvey has had difficulty in his career. I had never noticed his issues with men on base prior to this season, but I’m sure that Harvey’s declining performance has me looking for problems that I could easily have ignored before.

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WAR might tell you otherwise, and won-lost record certainly does, but so far this season, the ace of the Red Sox’s staff has been knuckleballer Steven Wright. Last night, Wright allowed just three hits while striking out seven batters in seven innings. Sure, it was against the Braves, so that might not count, but even before that start, Wright had a 1.40 ERA and had faced the Blue Jays twice and the Astros once in Houston. With all of the problems the Red Sox have elsewhere in their rotation, Wright seems to be earning himself a job for the rest of this season.

This post isn’t about Wright. It’s about the batters who will face Wright. Earlier this week, ESPN’s Eric Karabell wondered on his podcast whether hitters experience a hangover effect in the days after they face a knuckleballer, a question I thought would be fun to try to answer.

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In a continued effort to not overreact to the first month of games, I’m circling back to an idea I meant to investigate over the offseason, which is hitters who crush certain pitch types. I have a pair of theories related to this research. The first and most obvious one is that hitters who have success against certain pitch types should perform better against pitchers who either rely more heavily on or are most successful when using that same pitch type. The second is that hitters who are more balanced in their performances against various pitch types should be better hitters long term because it prevents pitchers from discovering a hitter’s weakness against a pitch type and throwing more of that type of pitch to him.

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Juan Nicasio has been the fantasy headline of spring among pitchers, and despite a rough outing on Tuesday that inflated both his ERA and walks per nine to 5.00 through a pair of starts, his 11.0 strikeouts per nine will keep us interested for at least a month or two. Many have speculated that Pirates’ pitching coach Ray Searage may have fixed Nicasio, and Paul Sporer yesterday shared evidence of Searage’s mythical powers. It will take some time to learn whether Nicasio’s control has really improved, but his ERA and strikeout rate with the Dodgers last year suggest that getting out of Coors Field had at least a hand in the healing process.

Weirdly, it’s not even Nicasio that inspired me to write this column. It’s Jhoulys Chacin. Chacin was thoroughly off my fantasy radar well before he left Colorado. I had to turn to our stats pages to remember that he made four starts for the Diamondbacks in 2015 after spending the bulk of the year in Triple-A and dealing with shoulder injuries. But on Tuesday, Chacin made a start for the Braves against the Nationals in which he struck out eight batters, walked none, and did not allow a run. More than likely, that start means nothing. For one, it was a spot start. He could be back in the minors if the team calls on one of their starter prospects like Mike Foltynewicz or Aaron Blair. For another, it was one game, and bad pitchers have good games all the time. But Chacin’s success coupled with the excitement about Nicasio got me thinking about pitchers who leave Colorado.

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