Today’s edition is really short. I was working on a detailed analysis to see how Kershaw may produced with a fastball around the 89 to 91 mph range. Basically I ran out of time. So I will finish up the analysis later tonight and write it up and we will run it tomorrow.  But the short answer is …. he looks like he will be fine.

• Clayton Kershaw’s average velocity in his last minor league start was around 90 mph

89-91, touched 92 a few times. RT @gq2scoops: Anybody know how Kershaw’s velocity was tonight?

— Dustin Nosler (@DustinNosler) May 1, 2014

With him expected to start Monday, how will the loss of velocity effect him? Wait until tomorrow for the details, but he should be fine.

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With about a month of baseball played so far, let’s take a look today at some of the players hitting into an infield shift. Some players have always been shifted like David Ortiz and Ryan Howard, but other hitters are seen the shift deployed against them for the first time. Today, I will look at some early season trends on some players and the effects they may be seeing.

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Some things are great by themselves, but together they are even better. Peanut butter and chocolate: Reese Cups. Chips and cheese: nachos. Vodka and tomato juice: Bloody Mary. Man and spouse: chicka-chicka-bow-bow. Well, today I will take two of favorite baseball topics, aging curves and injuries for hitters, and combine them in an aging curve based on injury history.

A few years ago, I found one issue with projections, they did not know if a player played through an injury during the season. If a batter played through an injury, the next season the player would, on average, exceed his projection. The player was most likely to see an improvement in the power department.

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• One item to follow for DL return dates is what the team says for timetable. Mark Trumbo predicted he will be out only six weeks, but the team expects the delay to be longer:

D-backs manager Kirk Gibson corroborated the prognosis of left fielder Mark Trumbo, specifying that the length of his absence due to a stress fracture in his left foot might be even longer than the six weeks Trumbo predicted.

“The summary I got on it confirmed six to eight weeks probably,” Gibson said. “He’s got a boot on there with something on it called a bone enhancer that sends some stimulation down there. I know that he had [an injury] previously on the other foot and that was lengthy. We don’t expect that to be that lengthy.”

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• Chris Sale finally went on the disabled list after years of people saying he would be an injury risk. He is expected to only miss the minimum 15 days. Looking at his last game data, he had no injury indications. Since he is on the White Sox and they have a great history of minimizing injuries, I see the trip a small inconvenience for better health as the season goes on.

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• Updated and complete HURT and PAIN rankings.

• Mike Reinold looked at five reasons Tommy John surgeries are on the rise:

1. Injuries Are Higher in the First Month of Season
2. Preparation for the Season
3. Velocities are Increasing
4. What Goes Around Comes Around (Youth Injuries)
5. Pushing Past Our Physiological Limits

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We always hear our not-so-favorite broadcasters mentioning a player’s stats against a certain pitcher. Well, I think we are all hopefully smart enough to not take the results of 15 meetings between a pitcher and hitter seriously. Instead, we split samples into larger groups like right-handed hitter vs. left-handed pitcher. I have decided to cut the difference and create a spreadsheet which takes a middle ground. I grouped pitchers by handedness, velocity and groundball tendencies and found how hitters performed against the different pitcher groups.

First off, I wanted to have this Excel-only spreadsheet available online before the season started. Well, I got it done and working in time. Since Visual Basic macros were used in the final view, it doesn’t have a online option which I wanted. So today, I am going to make it publicly available, but at some point I hope to have it working in all spreadsheet formats and/or online at a place like Google.docs.

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• All right, home work time. Here is a must read article by Tom Verducci from SI on Tommy John surgeries. A key point for fantasy baseball owners is this:

But in a sport in which 24.2 percent of players on Opening Day rosters grew up in Latin America, only one of the 20 Tommy John patients came from there (Detroit reliever Bruce Rondon, of Venezuela).

“Latin American pitchers are allowed to grow into their velocity,” said one international scouting director. “It’s a common story to sign a guy throwing 84, 85 [mph] who eventually winds up throwing in the 90s. Michael Pineda is one. You’re looking for someone with a good, athletic body who can throw the ball around the plate and has a feel for spinning the ball. The velocity comes in time, with training and better nutrition and physical growth. Here? The statistics don’t lie. We need to look elsewhere around the world to learn a better way. It’s time.”

Young American kids throwing hard for long time may be a major factor in tearing their UCL.

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• Alex Cobb will be out four to six weeks with a strained quad muscle.

Cobb admitted that he “felt something grab” on his final pitch Saturday to Reds leadoff man Billy Hamilton. But he thought it was just a cramp or a slight pull and went on to throw 82 more pitches over seven impressive innings, feeling more pain between pitches than during, before finally taking himself out of the game. He thought he might miss at most one start.

It does seem a little long, but he may have made the problem worse by throwing 82 more pitches after he felt the “grab”.

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• Matt Moore has a torn UCL and in the best case scenario, he will return late in the 2014 season. More likely he will under go Tommy John surgery. I had an idea the injury was pretty bad right after it happened.

Matt Moore’s in game2game velo was fine, but a 38% Zone% and late game velo plunge http://t.co/3PfqkWQjpr have me concerned about the injury

— Jeff Zimmerman (@jeffwzimmerman) April 8, 2014

Late game velocity plunges are usually not healthy for a pitcher. We will have more information on Moore in the up coming days, but for now, don’t expect any useful production from him in 2014.

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