Troy Tulowitzki has gotten a ton of press lately – rightfully so. He’s been fantastic. It’s almost hard to even see what other players have been up to thanks to the white hot blur in Colorado right now, but while looking away for a few seconds I noticed Brian Dozier. Dozier was pretty valuable last season in fantasy, and he’s on a quest to be even more valuable this season. The fact that he currently has 8 home runs and 11 steals draws most of the attention, but notice his walk rate. It’s a fantastic 16.3% – double his 2013 rate of 8.2%.

It feels like I’ve mentioned the Twins’ offense a lot in this space, but I can’t help it. I’m drawn to patience, and Dozier has had impeccable patience so far. His swing% sits at a paltry 35.4% – the seventh lowest rate in the league. He’s swinging less than he did last year, but his o-swing isn’t terribly different. It appears that Dozier is finally beginning to reap the rewards of his approach. He reaped them last year, although not nearly as much as he has so far in 2014.

ZiPS currently projects him to finish the year with 21 home runs, 27 stolen bases, and 100 runs. Those numbers – thanks to Kipnis’ injury and Cano’s slow start – might make him the best second baseman in fantasy baseball. Not bad a for mid-late round pick.

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Today is a day of returns, and one maybe significant debut. Clayton Kershaw returns from his month long DL stint. Obviously, it’s a big deal for fantasy players, but it might be an even bigger deal for the Dodgers. They’ve played well so far, but so have the Giants. The Dodgers have essentially been in survival mode due to the injuries their players have suffered. Today, they get their largest piece back.

Gavin Floyd returns from Tommy John surgery today, and the Braves will hope to catch lightning in a bottle with him the way they have with Aaron Harang this year and other pitchers in the past. Josh Tomlin also makes his return to the majors in Cleveland, delaying Trevor Bauer’s impending arrival even further. Thanks for nothing, Tomlin.

Robbie Ray and Blake Treinen square off in Washington. It’s Treinen’s first career start (3 relief appearances). The main attraction, though, is Ray. He’s making his major league debut against the Astros. Due to those reasons, neither will be featured in the chart below.

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Seriously, Jake Arrieta – fresh off the DL – struck out seven Cardinals over five and a third shutout innings. Yesterday’s stack of Matt Adams, Matt Carpenter, and Allen Craig were supposed to face off against a rusty, not very good Arrieta. They weren’t supposed to run into a buzzsaw.

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Ah, it’s Saturday again. Saturdays are awesome because: A) most of us are off from work, and B) there’s baseball for the majority of the afternoon and night. Unfortunately, Saturdays can also be a pain – although, usually less so than Sundays – because rosters lock a little earlier. So if a player or two ends up having the day off, your chances of winning any money dip a great deal. Baseball giveth, and it taketh away.

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Usually in April and early May we spend a lot of time wondering if certain fast starter’s are for real. Or we wonder aloud if player A is really in decline, or if his struggles are the by product of a small sample. Hell, maybe it’s both? Either way we have a lot of fun speculating. And speaking of speculating, many people thought Ben Zobrist was in for a rough year – rough by his standards – thanks to declines in his peripherals and age. All he’s done in 2014 is hit. Oh, and play good defense, like usual. As of this writing, he’s sixth on our leaderboard – as of this writing – in position player WAR with 1.4. That number is buoyed by his .302/.390/.434 slash line, which includes three homers and two steals already.

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I’ll be filling in for Blake this week, so you’ll have a little more of my sometimes good, mostly mediocre advice instead of his informative breakdowns of scoring.

The past few days have been a mess. Rain has wreaked havoc on a number of schedules, and on my charts I use for probable pitchers. Fortunately, forecasts look better today. Unfortunately, the solid forecasts are accompanied by a rather lax schedule. Thursdays are the worst, sometimes. They’re good for your work week, but they usually leave a little to be desired as far as baseball in concerned.

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If I were to tell you yesterday – when I originally looked at the leaderboard – that Jayson Werth has been the fourth best hitter in the major leagues over the past calendar year would you have believed me? I wouldn’t have believed me.  Despite watching Freddie Freeman on basically a nightly basis, I wouldn’t have pegged him sixth either. On the pitching side of things, it’s pretty cool to see that Scott Kazmir has been a top 20 pitcher over the past year.

I always enjoy looking back using the leaderboards, because no matter how much ball I watch I always miss something/under-appreciate someone. Onto to our task of the day.

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Let’s be honest, if you’re watching baseball tonight, you’re watching Jose Fernandez and Alex Wood square off again. If that wasn’t your plan, you should immediately make it your plan. Last week – when the two first met – it was magical, as Jeff Sullivan wrote. Even if you aren’t a huge fan of either team, tune in for the fact that the two men above are two of the quickest working staring pitchers in the game, which is always a plus.

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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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Much has been written about how well pitchers have performed the past few seasons. Or put another way, much has been written about how hitters are faring worse than they have in a long time, especially in regards to walking back to the dugout after striking out. I’m not smart enough to give you a fantastic answer in regards to why this trend is continuing. However, I am going to tell you my favorite aspect of it, at least as far as one team in concerned. Velocity.

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