Last Friday, I focused my weekly ESPN Insider column (which can also be read here on the site if you are a FanGraphs Plus subscriber) on the predictive power of a team getting off to a strong start in April. We know that at the individual level one month doesn’t mean much, but I wondered whether a dominating start to the season for an entire team might be more predictive of future success.

To do this, we looked at every team since 1974 that won at least 70 percent of their games in April (minimum 15 games), which gave us a sample of 45 teams. We then looked at how these teams performed from May through September to find out how predictive a strong team start actually was. I was pretty surprised at just how little it actually mattered.

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It’s April 26th, so it’s just too early to jump to any conclusions based on what has happened thus far in 2012. There are 140+ games still to go in the season, and as we’ve seen before, the standings at the end of April often don’t look like the standings at the end of September. Three weeks of baseball shouldn’t have changed our minds too much about what we believed to be true before the season began. That the Angels are 6-12, and that Albert Pujols has yet to hit a home run, should not lead us to believe that the Angels are a bad team or that Pujols run as an elite hitter has come to an end.

However, April counts too, and it couldn’t have gone much worse for Anaheim than it did. Not only have they struggled out of the gates, but Texas has blitzed through the American League, and currently hold an 8 1/2 game lead over the Angels in the American League West. Even if we still believe that the Angels are capable of outplaying the Rangers over the rest of the season – and we should – the hole they have to dig out of has become so large that winning their division has become significantly less likely.

For instance, here’s a few examples of what it would take for the Angels to win the AL West by a margin of one game, with all of these scenarios needing to begin immediately:

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According to MLB.com’s Bryan Hoch, Michael Pineda has been diagnosed with an “anterior labral tear”, and surgery is set for May 1st. Compared to elbow surgery, which has become almost routine at this point, recoveries from shoulder problems have not gone nearly as well. Since we don’t know the extent of the tear, it is impossible to say that this is the worst case scenario for the Yankees, but it’s certainly not the news the team was hoping for.

Given that he’s having shoulder surgery next week, it’s probably safe to say that Pineda is done for the season. Even a minor procedure is going to put him on the shelf for months, and it’s not clear that there would be enough time left in the minor league season for him to build his arm strength back up to get back to where he would need to be to pitch in the Major Leagues. And, of course, this might not be a minor procedure.

Given that the Yankees parted with prized prospect Jesus Montero and an interesting young arm in Hector Noesi, this is definitely a setback for the franchise, but it’s worth noting that Jose Campos – the other arm received in the deal – has been extremely impressive for class-A Charleston and offers significant value to the franchise himself.

Pitchers are always a risky investment, and any time you pay a significant price for a young arm, you know that it could blow up on any given pitch. However, the consensus at the time of the deal is that it was a smart move for the Yankees to make, and an organization can’t entirely avoid acquiring pitchers simply due to a preference for risk avoidance. If you want a good pitching staff, you’re going to have to take some gambles on some young arms. The Yankees did, and in this case, it didn’t work. That doesn’t make it a bad idea, or a move that the Yankees front office should be criticized for making.

According to the San Diego Union Tribune, the Padres are currently considering adopting an adjustment in the dimensions of their home ballpark.

“We’re open-minded and we’re seriously considering it,” Padres interim CEO Tom Garfinkel said Tuesday.

“I do believe it is too extreme right now. It will still be a pitcher’s ballpark. But a hitter should be rewarded if he crushes it. And if a team is down 4-0, they should feel there is some hope. It’s just too extreme.”

Petco is, of course, well known as the best pitcher’s park in baseball, and especially so for right-handers who benefit from the amount of space in right-center field specifically. The 400 foot distance to right-center makes it the hardest place in baseball for a left-handed hitter to pull a home run. In fact, no stadium affects any other outcome as much as Petco deflates home runs by left-handed hitters. As Garfinkel notes, the park is just too extreme, especially in that specific area. Right-handed pull hitters can survive – which was part of the reason the Padres acquired Carlos Quentin – but left-handed pull hitters just have little chance of success in San Diego.

While it’s true that the park has given the team the ability to build up quality pitching staffs without expending too many resources on premium arms, the Padres ability to develop quality left-handed bats is severely compromised by the park they play in. Bringing in the fences in right-center field is probably in the best interest of the franchise.

Last night, the Tampa Bay Rays connected for four home runs against Ervin Santana. It was the fifth time this year that a pitcher has allowed 4+ home runs in a single outing – the other notable hurlers to get bombed are Clay Buchholz (5 vs NYY), Josh Beckett (5 vs DET), Tommy Hunter (4 vs TOR), and Yovanni Gallardo (4 vs STL). Even as we head towards the third straight Year of the Pitcher, there are still nights where quality pitchers just don’t locate very well and pay the price for it.

That’s what makes what the Washington Nationals are currently doing so amazing. You’ve probably noticed that their pitching has been very good and has propelled them to a 13-4 record, the best mark in the National League. What you may not have heard is that the Nationals have a chance of establishing a new standard for home run prevention in a given month.

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The Kansas City Royals have lost 11 consecutive games, and at 3-13, they have the worst record in baseball. Even their most ardent supporters are walking away. Whatever optimism their farm system had generated before the season began has been washed away in a sea of losses, and now, the Royals just look like the same old last place team they’ve always been.

That’s the story if you just look at wins and losses, anyway. If you look a little deeper and ask why the Royals are currently 3-13, though, the story becomes a lot more interesting.

At the plate, the Royals are averaging just 3.56 runs per game – AL average is 4.47 – third worst in the American League. They are just 0.03 runs per game better than the vaunted Mariners offense. So, the offense has been a problem, right? Well, sort of, but not in the way you might think. The Royals overall line on the season is .255/.315/.413, good for a .316 wOBA. The average AL team is hitting .253/.320/.412 with a .320 wOBA, so overall, KC has been just slightly below average at the plate in their first 16 games. So, how does a team with an average batting line score nearly a run less per game than expected?

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Over the weekend, Philip Humber had the game of his life, throwing the 21st perfect game in baseball history against the Seattle Mariners. While the Mariners have a lousy offense and Safeco Field is a fantastic place to pitch, those factors shouldn’t diminish what Humber accomplished. A lot of good pitchers have faced a lot of lousy offenses over the years, and only 20 men before Humber had managed to go 27 up, 27 down. This is the apex of a single game performance in the sport, and Humber has now etched his name into the history books.

He’s also serving notice that last year’s breakout season may not have been a fluke.

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The quality of Yu Darvish‘s stuff is glaringly obvious. His fastball sits between 91-95 MPH and has serious run, while he throws a pair of breaking balls that dive differently and works in an 89 MPH cutter with late action. And, he’s got a wide enough variety of options to give hitters a lot of different looks.

As you can see, there are no distinct clumps there. He’s thrown curveballs at 66 MPH, curveballs at 80 MPH, and pretty much everything in between. His slider has been between 80 and 86, and then his three fastballs give him the ability to go anywhere between 88 and 95. This is the repertoire of a guy who should miss a lot of bats.

And yet, after three starts, Darvish just isn’t fooling anyone. 333 pitches into his big league career, and opposing batters have made contact on 81.6% of the pitches he’s thrown. Major League average for a starting pitcher in 2012 is 81.7%. For comparison, the other pitchers with contact rates between 81.0-81.9% include Doug Fister, Felix Doubront, Jake Arrieta, R.A. Dickey, Ervin Santana, Mark Buehrle, Jamie Moyer, Jaime Garcia, Ryan Vogelsong, Jonathan Sanchez, Ian Kennedy, and Freddy Garcia.

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We already talked about Cliff Lee and Matt Cain‘s pitcher’s duel for the ages last night, but that wasn’t even the most remarkable thing that took place last night. Over in Anaheim, Bartolo Colon was doing something that we might not see done again in our lifetime.

In the fifth inning of last night’s game, Colon threw a first pitch ball to Maicer Izturis. He wouldn’t throw another pitch that was called a ball until he faced Bobby Abreu in the eighth inning. Between Izturis and Abreu, he faced 11 batters and didn’t throw a single ball to any of them. His all-strikes, all-the-time approach lasted a remarkable 38 pitches. You can see all 38 of them in this video compiled by MLB.com.

How unlikely is that? Well, we can estimate the chances of an event occurring 38 times in a row using a mathematical tool called binomial distribution. Essentially, binomial distribution takes the probability of an event occurring and then extrapolates how often you’d expect that event to happen a certain number of times given a number of opportunities. In this case, the probability of Bartolo Colon throwing a strike on any given pitch is roughly 67% percent. In other words, out of every three pitches Colon throws, we’d expect two strikes and one ball.

Last night, we got 38 consecutive strikes without a ball. Binomial distribution tells us that the odds of that occurring, given what we know about Colon’s career strike percentage, is about 0.000000246. In other words, you’d expect to find one string of 38 consecutive strikes if you had a population of approximately 4.1 million strings of pitches thrown by Bartolo Colon. One in 4.1 million.

Yeah. What Lee and Cain did was downright ordinary compared to what Colon did.

Update: As pointed out in the comments, I should have clarified that the binomial distribution assumes independence of events, where the results of one test do not affect the probability of the next test. It is not clear that balls and strikes are independent from the previous pitch, as batters are more likely to chase pitches out of the zone when they are behind in the count. Of course, pitchers are also less likely to groove one down the middle when they’re ahead in the count, so these effects may cancel out to some degree, but it’s not clear that the probability of balls and strikes on each of those 38 pitches was indeed .67. So, consider this more of a rough estimate based on one model’s assumptions, which may or may not hold precisely true in an MLB game scenario.

Last night, Cliff Lee and Matt Cain put on a pitching duel for the ages. Cain threw shutout nine innings on just 91 pitches before Bruce Bochy pinch-hit for him, while Lee managed to go 10 scoreless innings and still only throw 102 pitches on the night. They combined to allow just 10 baserunners in 19 innings pitched, and after Brett Pill‘s leadoff double in the fifth, they put down 24 consecutive batters between them.

You just don’t get two dominating performances in the same game all that often. In fact, you could make a case that this was the best pair of performances in a single game in the last 10 years.

The last time two pitchers faced off and both threw nine inning shutouts was last May, when Jason Vargas and Zach Britton squared off in Baltimore. Both were extremely effective and efficient, but neither of them pitched into the 10th inning, and they only combined for nine strikeouts on the night – plus, even with the offensive struggles SF and PHI have had this year, neither of them can match the 2011 Mariners for futility at the plate, so Britton’s performance is slightly diminished due to the quality of his opponent.

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Forgoing free agency is the new hotness. After already locking up his double play partner Howie Kendrick back in January, the Angels gave Erick Aybar a reported four year, $35 million contract extension today. Aybar is under contract for 2012 at just over $5 million, so this represents a pretty nice raise in annual average value, and assuming that the contract covers 2013-2016, it will keep Aybar in Anaheim through his age 32 season.

This also represents a pretty significant commitment from the Angels towards a player whose skills aren’t generally valued all that highly on the open market. While Aybar has averaged +3.2 WAR per season over the last three years, most of that value has come from his defense and baserunning abilities, as he’s hit just .280/.327/.391. Those aren’t terrible offensive numbers from a shortstop, but they came during his expected peak years and put him in the same category as guys like Jimmy Rollins, Stephen Drew, Jhonny Peralta, J.J. Hardy, and Cliff Pennington. There’s nothing wrong with any of these guys, but this class of ballplayer has traditionally not struck it rich in free agency.

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After getting drilled for four runs in the first inning by the Phillies last night, the ever-growing worry surrounding Tim Lincecum reached a fever pitch. As Chris Cwik noted last week, his velocity continues to trend downwards in a pretty dramatic fashion, and he’s now getting hit on a regular basis while throwing 90 MPH fastballs. The combination of diminished velocity and poor performance are assumed to be signs of a larger problem. As the theory goes, they might not be conclusive by themselves, but together, they suggest that there’s something seriously wrong.

History, however, suggests that jumping to that kind of conclusion may very well be premature.

Tim Lincecum is not the first pitcher to start the season without his best fastball, and he’s not the first pitcher to get hit hard while showing reduced velocity. To look at how predictive previous situations have turned out to be, I went back to our monthly leaderboards starting in 2008 and looked for situations where a pitcher posted high BABIP and/or HR/FB rates in April while also showing significantly reduced velocity, and yet had posted BB/K/GB numbers that suggested that they were still capable of getting Major League hitters out. In other words, pitchers who were pitching like Lincecum is now. Here’s what I found.

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This morning, I did a quick story for the Wall Street Journal on pace between pitches. So far, the Cleveland Indians look like the stars of working quickly, as all five of their starters have taken less than 20 seconds between pitches. Derek Lowe and Justin Masterson actually rank second and third in baseball in pace so far this year, behind only Roy Halladay and his Two Hours Of Doom approach.

You know who the slowest working pitching staff in baseball is to this point of 2012? The Boston Red Sox, who have taken an average of 24.6 seconds between pitches this year. You know who was the slowest working pitching staff in 2011? The Red Sox. 2010? The Red Sox. 2009? The Red Sox. 2008? The Red Sox.

The last time that Boston didn’t have the slowest working pitching staff in baseball was 2007. That year, they had the second slowest staff, getting edged out by the Yankees by 0.3 seconds per pitch.

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The trend of giving out long term deals to premium young players continued today, as the Giants locked up Madison Bumgarner through at least 2017, and the deal gives them team options for both 2018 and 2019. In exchange for long term control over Bumgarner’s future, the Giants guaranteed him $35 million over the next five years, with an additional $5 million possible if it turns out he would have qualified as a Super Two after this season.

As the very useful Transaction Tracker at MLBTradeRumors shows, the five year extension for quality young pitchers has been quite popular in recent years, but in general, teams have waited until they’ve had two years of strong performance before giving them this kind of contract. This deal looks very similar to the ones signed by Jon Niese, Derek Holland, Gio Gonzalez, Trevor Cahill, Yovani Gallardo, and Jon Lester, but in each case, those pitchers had already accrued 2+ years of service time.

Bumgarner’s deal tops Ricky Romero‘s as the largest contract ever given to a pitcher with just 1+ year of service time under his belt, and reflects the fact that Bumgarner has been excellent at a young age and that prices for talent in Major League Baseball look to be going up. With the recent extensions signed by Joey Votto, Matt Cain, and Ryan Zimmerman – each of whom got over $100 million in guaranteed money despite not being free agents – teams are beginning to take steps to get cost certainty through the best years of their core players.

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Yesterday, the Dodgers and Padres played for the seventh time on the season. Just like they had done in five of the first six match-ups, the Dodgers ended up victorious. However, unlike the previous games, they got some significant assistance in coming out on top. Here’s the Win Expectancy graph of yesterday’s SD/LA match-up:

Source: FanGraphs

You’ll immediately notice a giant spike in the Dodgers’ Win Expectancy in the ninth inning, as they went from having just a 30.1% chance of winning to a 62.2% chance of winning on one play. This is how that play is described in the play log:

Jesus Guzman hit into a triple play to catcher (Grounder). Yonder Alonso out at third. Chase Headley out at second.

And this is what that play actually looked like:

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This morning, my Twitter timeline was filled with about thirty people linking to the same article – a garage sale success story from Erik Malinowski. Malinowski found an issue of Baseball Digest from 1986 that contained baseball’s 30 “unwritten rules”, and so, I thought it might be fun to break each of them down and see whether they still hold true 26 years later.

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