Mariano Rivera is the best relief pitcher of all time, and his 20 year run of greatness has mostly been fueled by throwing one pitch. The dominance of Rivera’s cut fastball has been well documented, and you likely know that when the Yankees have the lead in the 9th inning, opponents are going to see cutter after cutter after cutter.

But, now, over in St. Louis, Rivera has an odd imitator of sorts. No, the Cardinals closer is not a cutter specialist; he doesn’t even throw one. Instead, Edward Mujica — the team’s emergency fill-in closer with Jason Motte on the shelf — is closing out games using an endless supply of change-ups.

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FanGraphs is proud to be a sponsoring partner of the third Saber Seminar, a great event held each year in Boston. The two-day gathering will be held on August 17th and 18th on the campus of Boston University, and the list of 2013 speakers is pretty amazing. Along with a former Major League pitcher, current executives, scouts, and a wide range of insightful people from various industries associated with the sport, Bill Petti, Dave Allen, and myself will represent FanGraphs at the event, and you will probably find a few other FG personalities hanging around as well.

I attended the event last year, and it was one of the highlights of the year for me. There were some really great research presentations — one of the people presenting this year as a member of the Royals front office presented last year as a grad student, so I think you can guess that his presentation was pretty neat — and a lot of fascinating discussion with many of the brightest people in and around the sport. If you’re going to be in the Boston area that weekend, I highly recommend attending, and it’s probably worth traveling to Boston that weekend to take part even if you’re not a local.

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8th inning, Angels lead the White Sox 4-2. Dane de la Rosa starts the inning.

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Apparently, a memo went out to every major media organization that covers Major League Baseball, telling them that they should write about the ever increasing rise of strikeouts in the sport. Back in March, Tyler Kepner wrote this article for the New York Times. Last Thursday, Scott Miller did a piece on the topic for CBS Sports. On Monday, Joe Lemire tackled it at Sports Illustrated. On Tuesday, Anthony Castrovince weighed in at MLB.com. Pretty much all of them hit on the same general points, with a continuing focus being on the change in approach among hitters. Each writer notes that the rise of statistical analysis has taken some of the stigma away from the strikeout, to the point that a hitter who strikes out 150 or 200 times per year is no longer considered to be an offensive black hole.

There’s almost certainly something to that idea, as we even published an article yesterday explaining why the Braves historic strikeout pace hasn’t really hurt their offensive production. It’s hard to argue that the move towards more analytical approaches to team building haven’t decreased the emphasis on strikeouts as a measure of offensive contribution, and it’s likely that the modern front offices care much less about strikeout totals for their hitters than those of the previous generation.

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With all due respect to the Dillon Gee-John Gast match-up in St. Louis tonight, there’s one marquee pitching match-up on the schedule for tonight’s games: Felix Hernandez vs CC Sabathia in New York. Neither pitcher throws as hard as they used to, but they’ve both managed to adapt to life without their fastest fastball, and both remain among the best starting pitchers on earth.

Sabathia, in particular, is lethal against left-handed hitters. Witness his strikeout rate by batter handedness, in graph form.

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The first round of the Major League draft is just a little over three weeks away, and the Houston Astros will select first for the second consecutive year. Right now, the consensus belief is that there are two college pitchers — Mark Appel of Stanford and Jonathan Gray of Oklahoma — who are a step ahead of the rest, though University of San Diego third baseman Kris Bryant is putting on quite the power display and could be an option if the Astros preferred to build around bats rather than arms. However, the decision for the Astros may not be made simply on talent alone.

Last year was the first draft under the new bonus structure, which assigns a fixed amount of dollars to each team based on where they pick in the draft, with some pretty severe penalties for exceeding those limits. Now, if a team is interested in paying over the slot value for a pick, they’ll have to borrow the money for that overpayment from another pick, making the draft as much a game of cost management as it is talent acquisition.

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If you google for the phrase “pitching and defense wins championships”, the search engine returns 28.8 million results. Even if you put the statement in quotes, requiring that the exact phrase be used, there are still 99,000 pages where Google will show you that statement being written on the web.

Not all of those pages are advocating on behalf of that statement’s truth, but some of them certainly are. And, perhaps most recently, this sentiment was argued for on MLB Now, when White Sox broadcaster Hawk Harrelson lectured Brian Kenny about the merits of statistical analysis in baseball. In that conversation, Harrelson said, among other things:

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A little over a year ago, Jed Hoyer acquired Anthony Rizzo for the third time; he was an Assistant GM with Boston when the Red Sox drafted Rizzo in 2007, he was the Padres GM when they acquired Rizzo from the Red Sox in the Adrian Gonzalez deal in 2010, and then he was the GM of the Cubs when they acquired him from San Diego for Andrew Cashner in 2012. In all three cases, it looks like Hoyer came out on the winning end of the deal, as Rizzo was clearly worth a sixth round pick, is more valuable than Gonzalez by himself at this point, and is certainly a bigger building block for the Cubs future than Cashner would be.

The well traveled youngster can go buy a house now, though, as his days of getting shipped from one city to the next are likely over. Ken Rosenthal first reported that the Cubs signed Rizzo to a seven year, $41 million contract extension that includes a pair of team options, ensuring that Chicago will own his rights through his age-29 season and could retain him through his age-31 season if both options are picked up. And with that deal, it looks like Hoyer and the rest of the Cubs front office is likely to once again come out on the winning end of a deal involving Anthony Rizzo.

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On Saturday, the Washington Post published, well, I’m not sure what to call it exactly. It’s not an article. It’s part-interview, part-analysis, part-video, part-comparison. Whatever it is, it’s amazing. This is the kind of stuff that happens when you combine quality journalism with the advantages of technology. You owe it to yourself to check out this production by Adam Kilgore and friends. Even if you’re tired of the amount of coverage Bryce Harper gets, you should read this just for what it shows about what baseball journalism can be. And I, for one, am not at all tired of Bryce Harper.

The realization came to Rick Schu this spring as he sat in front of a screen, collecting baseball swings. All winter, Schu, the Washington Nationals’ hitting coordinator, had been watching “Baseball” by Ken Burns, a Christmas gift from his wife. He burned clips from the DVD and compiled classic swings — Jackie Robinson, Ted Williams, Babe Ruth. As he watched Ruth, Schu paused the video and asked himself a question: Didn’t Bryce Harper have a swing just like that?

Schu scanned through video and found film of Harper hitting. He arranged clips of Harper and Ruth side-by-side on the monitor and stopped at the moment each hitter’s bat connected with a pitch. In each still picture, he saw a stiff front leg, an uncoiling torso and a back foot lifting off the ground. “Wow,” he thought. “That’s identical.”

“They’ve got that exact same swing at contact point,” Schu said later.

Read the rest at The Washington Post.

Scott Kazmir‘s return to Major League Baseball has been pretty well documented at this point. After bottoming out by pitching in independent ball, Kazmir’s velocity started to pick back up this winter, and the Indians brought him to spring training on a non-roster invite. The velocities continued to impress and he pitched extremely well in Arizona, and with the Indians in need of useful starting pitching, they gave him a spot in their rotation, but then a strained ribcage forced him to begin the season on the DL. In his first start of the year, he gave up six runs in 3.1 innings, beating back some of the spring optimism about whether or not Kazmir could ever get back to what he used to be.

In the two starts after his debut, he was better, but neither the Royals nor the Twins are offensive juggernauts. There were encouraging signs, as his velocity was picking up and he was getting strikeouts again, but he hadn’t really put it all together yet. Until yesterday.

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You’ve probably heard that MLB umpire Angel Hernandez is in the news again, because he’s awful at his job and does embarrassing things to the sport on a too regular basis. You may also know that Hernandez has something of a reputation for drawing attention to himself, and is annually rated as one of the worst umpires by Major League players.

What you might not know, and what I didn’t know until I saw Joe Posnanski retweet something from Buffalo News writer Mike Harrington, is that Hernandez’s reputation for brutal calls and a total lack of professionalism goes back over 20 years. Harrington linked to this article written in 1991 by Bob DiCesare, covering Hernandez’s performance in a Triple-A game between the Buffalo Bisons and Iowa Cubs. The piece is brutal in its honesty, and rings true even today.

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Here at FanGraphs, we enjoy rolling out cool new things. It’s fun to be able to add stuff that we can all use on a daily basis, and David Appelman has done a great job of building some incredible tools for public consumption. Today, we’re going to introduce you to the newest additions to FanGraphs: Depth Charts and a dedicated Standings page. We’re rolling them out together because they actually go hand in hand.

We’ll start with the standings page, because that’s what you’ll see first when you visit the new section of the site. The standings table is broken into three sections: Year to Date, Projected Rest of Season, and Projected Full Season.

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Over the weekend, the Baseball Hall of Fame opened its newest exhibit, Diamond Mines, which was created to honor scouts and the history of scouting in baseball. I’m sure the exhibit itself is pretty neat, and if you’re planning on a trip to Cooperstown, you now have something else to look forward to.

But even if you’re not going to Cooperstown, this exhibit is fantastic, because in addition to the physical museum presence, they created an online searchable deposit of historical scouting reports. And it is awesome.

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According to Baseball-Reference’s Place of Birth Report, there are 13 major league players currently active who were born in either Japan, South Korea, or Taiwan. Of those 13, only four are position players — Ichiro Suzuki, Norichika Aoki, Munenori Kawasaki, and Shin-Soo Choo. Major League Baseball has historically been more willing to bringing pitchers across the Pacific, and that remains true today. However, the performance of the nine active pitchers currently working in the big leagues suggests that perhaps the discount rate being applied to pitchers from those regions might still be too high.

Here’s how those nine pitchers have done in the first five weeks of the 2013 season.

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This morning, Mike Petriello put out the following quiz on Twitter.

Here’s a list of every hitter in baseball w/ 40 PA, sorted by BB%. Dare you to guess who is #1 without clicking. fangraphs.com/leaders.aspx?p…

— Mike Petriello (@mike_petriello) May 2, 2013

Assuming you read the headline to this post, I’ve already spoiled the answer, but I’m not sure that knowing that Juan Uribe is the current leader in BB% makes it any less shocking. Juan Uribe! This Juan Uribe.

Uribe is 34-years-old. Uribe has been in the big leagues since 2001, and he’s been hacking his way through almost every at-bat since. Juan Uribe is Yuniesky Betancourt‘s hero*. What is happening here?

*I don’t know if that’s true, but it would make sense if it were true.

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Last year, Mike Trout and Bryce Harper had two of the best seasons for age-19/age-20 players in baseball history. We might not ever see anything like Trout’s 2012 season from a 20-year-old again. Those two ruined our expectations for what underaged position players are supposed to do in the big leagues. Everyone else pales in comparison to what we just saw.

That shouldn’t cause us to overlook the fact that there’s another 20-year-old putting his mark on Major League Baseball right now. In Baltimore, Manny Machado is showing the early signs of being a superstar.

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