The Wednesday Takeaway
The traditional rules of pitching depth aren’t supposed to apply to the Tampa Bay Rays, the story goes. If one of the young homegrown arms goes down to injury or if one ceases to be affordable, you just order another part from the factory in Durham, N.C., and repeat as necessary.

That theory is really being tested this year. In April, they broke a 1,207-game streak of not using a starting pitcher signed as a major-league free agent when they needed to go scraping for Roberto Hernandez to replace James Shields.

The leader of the last Rangers pitching staff to lead the league in runs allowed was Rick Honeycutt, so you know it’s been a lean few decades. Complemented by Frank Tanana, Charlie Hough, Danny Darwin, Mike Smithson and an able bullpen, that Honeycutt-led staff allowed 609 runs in 1983—11 years before the Rangers’ move to their current, hitter-friendly ballpark.

That’s an ambitious example to follow for this Rangers team, which currently leads the league in runs allowed per game, chased by another team hardly helped by its home park, the Yankees. Ultimately the third-place Tigers may catch them, helped by the more neutral Comerica Park, but that’s not really the point here. It’s that this is so unlike the construction of any Rangers team we’ve seen in this generation of the offensive explosion and immediate aftermath. This season, Texas is living at the league median on offense, eighth in runs scored per game.

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Through the first-ballot Twitter account of Hall of Fame President Jeff Idelson and others, we’ve already seen snippets of the best of the Hall’s Diamond Mines scouting report database—an online version of the exhibit that recently opened in Cooperstown to honor scouts. We’ve been introduced to glowing reports on Moeller High School star Ken Griffey Jr. and on Auburn’s Vincent Edward Jackson, whom scout Kenneth Gonzales correctly predicted would win the 1985 Heisman trophy and would become a standard for the incomparable in baseball. We’ve seen Albert Pujols called overweight in four different sentences in one paragraph and Craig Biggio lauded as a future major-league catcher, though one whose bat might not play in the big leagues.

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On a Miami team that’s going to stand out on leaderboards for all the wrong reasons, Juan Pierre finished the weekend with 11 stolen bases, one ahead of Pittsburgh’s Starling Marte for the NL lead. The story of a 35-year-old with a .280 on-base percentage who might lead the league in steals isn’t bringing fans to the ballpark, but it is one of the most interesting stories on a Marlins team without many of them.

It’s been 12 years and six address changes since Pierre won his first stolen base crown. He was then a member of the Rockies, a team on which you wouldn’t expect to find a top basestealer, given the ease of hitting home runs in pre-humidor Coors.

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To understand why Chase Utley, a man who is not very fast or really much of a base-stealer at all, stands alone as the most efficient base-stealer in modern baseball history, you have to look a little bit farther down.

Not much farther down, usually just a spot or occasionally two in the Phillies order. Stop when you get to Ryan Howard. The big first baseman, not any left-hander’s pickoff move or any right arm behind the plate, has been the biggest deterrent to Utley’s steals.

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Something is amiss with Joey Votto. Sure, he’s getting his walks, but as the Big Bat in the lineup paid to drive in runs, he’s struggling tremendously. He has just eight runs batted in—fewer than hardly noted run producers like Yuniesky Betancourt, Brett Gardner, Marlon Byrd and notoriously light-hitting teammate Zack Cozart. Clearly, with the overly passive Votto, there’s trouble in River City.

That’s one way to look at the first 22 games of the best player on the National League Central favorite Cincinnati Reds. Maybe how we would have evaluated him in 1980.

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Apologies for the belated greetings of happy Opening Day, but the Atlantic League opener really snuck up on us last week.

It shouldn’t have. The Atlantic League, and its fellow independent circuits, are among the best things about baseball. There are guys who will be scouted and signed into the 30 major league organizations, a few of whom may even make the big leagues. There are those on the way down from major league or minor league careers. There are combinations of the two, like Scott Kazmir, who started for the Indians Saturday after salvaging his career in the Atlantic League last season.

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If baseball players really are just like us—hint: they’re not; they’re way more amused by remote control cars than any of us over age seven are—then the Upton family is just like the Levine family.

Not in the sense of anything related to baseball ability or the older brother’s badass initials, but in the way time works and an age gap that tends to be neutralized.

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Chadwick Boseman’s Jackie Robinson hit right-handed, and for preserving historical accuracy in translation to money-making film, that’s an awfully good place to start.

Where 42, the Jackie Robinson story, meanders from there in its devotion to the actual baseball events of 1945-47 is fairly close to the truth line. There are of course the controversies over some of the perhaps apocryphal tales, like whether Pee Wee Reese ever put his arm around Jackie Robinson on the field in Cincinnati.

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Ten years ago today, home became something altogether foreign. Baseball’s already bilingual bunch from la belle province, on this date back in 2003, went Caribbean, playing their first of 43 games over a two-year period in a temporary home in Puerto Rico.

A mainlander hit the first home run, if Brian Schneider’s birthplace of Florida still counts. A Japanese import got the win, as Tomo Ohka pitched eight innings of the 10-0 slaughter of David Cone and the Mets.

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Upon the Houston Rockets clinching the playoffs...

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In our haste to dismiss the small-sample-size happenings of April, or in some cases be the loudest in a group of people loudly dismissing them, sometimes there’s a small something that we forget. Those things actually did happen. What I mean by that is that while these events may not tell us much about true talent, it’s important not to dismiss their impact as quickly as we dismiss their predictive value.

Take two teams that appear to have about .500-level talent. One gets off to a 5-1 start, while the other gets off to a 1-5 start. That means nothing, you say. It’s baseball, and teams have mid-season stretches like that all the time, without us paying much attention.

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