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It isn’t quite fair to say that Clay Buchholz broke out because of his change-up. In fact, Colin Zarzycki found a much more reasonable explanation and wrote about it in his FanGraphs+ player cap. Buchholz also threw the pitch less than he’d ever thrown it before, so it’s kind of weird to focus on it. But the pitch is pretty excellent, and maybe it could have told us that more swinging strikes were on the way. And if it did tell us that, perhaps we can use that knowledge to spot a couple more pitchers that under-performed in the strikeout category last year.

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During the 2013 season, I created three metrics to help find possible injuries: PAIN, HURT and SLOW. So far this offseason, I have looked back at the final 2013 values for PAIN and HURT. I have put off SLOW ( Swinging Late or Whiffing) because the data was a mess a to query and work with.I finally simplified the process so the following is a look at the 2013 SLOW leaders. Also, I will examine if a SLOW bat was behind the second half struggles of Jason Kipnis and Jean Segura.

I created SLOW to see which hitters struggle with fastballs right in the heart of the strikezone. The two requirements are:

• Heart of the strike zone (almost 99% of pitches called strikes and damn you CB Bucknor).
• Fastball speed equal to or greater than 92 mph.

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So, the Pirates are good now, you guys. It’s going to take some getting used to, probably, but the 2013 Pittsburgh Pirates were really quite good at baseball. They won 94 games and made the playoffs for the first time in approximately 800 years. With that success, however, it’s important to take note of the areas in which they excelled and the areas in which the they struggled. In other words: Pittsburgh had the third best ERA in baseball last season, but was 16th in wOBA. It was an elite pitching team, but an average offensive one.

The team was successful, and it’s still good, but that doesn’t mean much to fantasy owners. And so we come to the Pirates infield, and the cast of characters there for 2014 who may (or may not) be of use to fantasy owners.

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While Nelson Cruz seems to be fouling up a half dozen of our depth chart discussions, assuming the Detroit Tigers don’t boldly go where everyone says not to, their outfield situation is pretty well sewn up. And although they may lack star power, for fantasy purposes, there are players that just might help you.

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The following is a post about the 2014 Chicago Cubs bullpen, and specifically the usefulness of players from that bullpen in a fantasy sense. It assumes (of course) that the 2014 Chicago Cubs will win a game or two, which they will (probably). It also assumes that the 2014 Chicago Cubs will have enough leads to hold and save that the members of this bullpen might provide some (any?) value for fantasy owners.

No, this post is not intended as a joke. This is a real thing.

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• Jeremy Hellickson will be out until at least mid-May after elbow surgery last week.

Rays right-hander Jeremy Hellickson had arthroscopic surgery on his right elbow last week and expected to be out until mid- to late-May, the Times has learned.

Hellickon, 26, had loose bodies removed from his elbow by Dr. Koco Eaton in what is considered a minor procedure, and is likely to miss the first 6-8 weeks of the season.

Jake Odorizzi will now get a chance in the Rays rotation.

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This much we know about the 2014 Texas Rangers rotation on a chilly January day: it’s going to feature Yu Darvish, and it’s going to contain some other guys. That’s no slight to the candidates to fill the latter category — some of them are quite good. It’s just that, at this point, we don’t know exactly who they will be.

So let’s speculate wildly, shall we!

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I’ve seen it said that bullpens win championships, but I think it’s probably just the last piece of the puzzle for a contending team. That’d be hard to tease out in the numbers, but it certainly doesn’t make sense for a team like the Astros to spend resources on their bullpen. They’ve taken it to the extreme in some cases, by trading any and every reliever that had any interest on the market.

That’s how you get an Astros bullpen that was by far the worst in the league last year. By a large margin. At 5.09, their FIP was almost a full run worse than second-worst (Cubs, 4.23). And they ‘accrued’ -5.4 wins. The other four teams with below-replacement pens lost .2 wins or less to their relievers as a group. So, yeah, it was a really bad bullpen.

Two thoughts come to mind about a bad bullpen. The first is that there’s always opportunity in situations like those. Bad teams make for sleepers, since the traditional media focuses on better teams and those players get more name recognition. So don’t ignore the team. But! Bad teams — especially those that don’t score a lot of runs and have bad bullpens around the closer — bad teams do not provide a lot of save opportunities.

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Equal parts infuriating to fantasy baseball players and exciting to forward-thinking baseball fans, this Rangers bullpen has it all. Instead of some boring free agent acquisition to fill the role, or a lucky prospect turned into dominant reliever, the Rangers have turned to a collection of quantity (all with quirks). And quantity is always the best option in the bullpen, where quality usually costs too much money. Deciding which guy saves the most games for the Rangers this year will be tough though.

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With Masahiro Tanaka officially a Yankee, it’s safe to write about the Dodgers rotation. The Dodgers were finalists in the bidding for Tanaka, but not because they needed excess pitching. the 40 man roster includes seven experienced starters, although one of those will open the season on the disabled list.

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