Article originally published on Sunday, April 7.

The Angels get their first of perhaps a vitally important five or six shots at Yu Darvish this season on Sunday Night Baseball, and the task looks beyond intimidating.

Yesterday on Effectively Wild, Sam Miller and I talked about Opening Day and the power of first impressions. By the beginning of April, we’ve been so long without baseball that the first performance by a player or team assumes a significance out of proportion to its actual import. If we’ve spent the offseason dreaming on a player doing well, or fearing that he’ll fail, we’re more liable to take it as confirmation of our hopes or fears if that player performs as we expect on Opening Day than we would be if he did the same thing on, say, August 13th.

Tuesday was Opening Day for Yu Darvish, and we had high hopes. The Rangers ace recorded the second-highest strikeout rate among AL starters last season, but he also had the third-highest walk rate and struggled with mechanical consistency throughout the season. As Doug Thorburn detailed last week, Darvish’s mechanics came together down the stretch, and he also stopped nibbling and started throwing more cutters. With an evolved approach, he ended the year on an eight-start run of 66 strikeouts and 10 walks over 57 1/3 innings. Darvish is hard enough to hit when he can’t throw strikes; with good command and control, he might be as close as pitchers come to unbeatable. Both PECOTA and the Baseball Prospectus staff picked him to be the AL’s second-best pitcher in 2013, and with a weak opponent in the Astros, we expected to see a dominant Darvish last night. He didn’t disappoint.

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When a team signs a player to a nine-figure deal these days, it usually isn’t looking for the big payoff to come at the end. The end is a necessary burden—the consequence of locking in what might be a few more years of stardom in a sport where fewer and fewer stars ever hit free agency and there aren’t five—win players around every corner.

For the Giants and Barry Zito, though, there is some weight put on the end of the deal. With no rotation depth, the Giants are counting on Zito to show that even with his 2012 postseason performance exceeding his true talent, his 16 innings, three runs allowed, six walks and 13 strikeouts were at least a sign that there’s something there.

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Are you better off than you were four months ago?

According to the arbiters of all that is correct in Las Vegas, er, offshore, most of you are not. Bovada.lv released its odds for the 2013 World Series in the immediate aftermath of the 2012 World Series, and only eight teams have shorter prices now than they did then. Part of that was a noticeable drop in the house edge, as the bookmakers had to be conservative at the start, lest bettors guess right on who was going to make the big moves. (More on that phenomenon at the end of this piece from November.) Some of it is accurate, though, as accounting for the drop in house edge makes only one other team a gainer (the Cubs, whose odds stayed flat at 75/1).

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Throwing the word “bad” on a baseball team can be a difficult thing, not only in that no games have been played yet, but also because it’s such a hard word to define. Are there 15 good teams and 15 bad teams? Does it take 85 losses to be bad? Or 90 losses? Or does it depend on the team? Would an 84-78 campaign from the Giants be a bad season?

That said, heading into this year, it seems like there’s a pretty big gap where you might find some room to squeeze the line between bad and unbad. There are four teams with less than a five percent chance to make the playoffs according to our PECOTA projections.

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One of the most stunning parts about following the World Baseball Classic as a social- and other-media-connected human being was seeing how many other Americans paying attention were rooting—strongly or mostly more casually—against the United States. Part of that is probably my own state of watching sports after five years as a writer, so let me explain briefly.

It didn’t take long to stop rooting for sports teams once I started covering professional baseball. Sure, I rooted for good stories, and on plenty of occasions when there were day games looming or beers to be drunk, rooted for short games. And I occasionally found myself rooting for people, though I tried my hardest not to let that interfere with my work and believe I succeeded at that while on the beat.

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The American and National Leagues are two distinct leagues in name only. They act more like conferences than leagues, with no league presidents, relatively newfound player mobility, and now constant interleague play. But they continue to operate under a different set of rules, and to some that makes no sense. The DH debate must be settled, the argument goes. Standardize it in, say the progressives, and standardize it out, say the traditionalists, but standardize it soon.

It’s among the most difficult problems facing the union and management over the coming years, as it impacts rosters and player salaries. While the role of full-time designated hitter may someday wash away completely, the average primary designated hitter in 2011 made $8.3 million.

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Sometimes when it's your guy, it can be so hard not to believe.

You know spring training performance doesn’t matter, but just look at the guy—he’s killing everything. Never mind that he’s never faced major-league pitching when the stats counted, or that if he has, he’s been replacement level at best.

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So we won this weekend. At least I think we won. At least I think they told me we won.

It was announced that the Gold Glove Awards will add a metric component to the traditional voting of major-league managers and coaches, a presumed victory for everyone who prefers the analytical and objective over the judgment of the human eye.

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In retrospect, it was actually pretty easy to take PECOTA with me to Las Vegas over the weekend. When I heard that its guardian, our own Colin Wyers, seemed to have acute grade III avian sniffles on the Cubs season preview podcast Friday, I figured he’d be an easy target for burglary. And when I went to lift PECOTA, he’d already passed out, presumably from fake and/or real outrage over Tony Campana and/or Luis Valbuena. You can’t be sure.

Anyway, once the not-so-brazen heist was complete, PECOTA and I were off to Vegas, and let me tell you: best travel companion in the history of ever. It—actually “he” if it’s named after Bill Pecota, right?—doesn’t hog the armrest on the flight, quietly whirrs instead of snoring across the hotel room, and doubles as a tip calculator. Really, you couldn’t ask for much more.

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At the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, where an overwhelming majority of the attendees come out on the same side of the more typical intellectual divides, a less apparent divide took shape over the course of two days.

Just how much could these people loaded with ideas share?

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What if you’d been asked back in 2003—following the greatest season since 1950 for aging hitters—which position players in their prime would be the likeliest candidates to enter 2013 as the best old guys? Sure you’d have predicted Derek Jeter, but Nomar Garciaparra and Miguel Tejada would have been in the same sentence. Ichiro would have come to mind too, since he’d have seemed like someone who’d probably age okay, but Bobby Abreu, Johnny Damon, and Manny Ramirez would have been popular outfield picks as well. Even if you knew Chipper Jones would be retiring with something left in the tank, there was still a third baseman on the board. Edgardo Alfonzo, a seven-win player in 2000 and a five-win player in 2002, is even younger than Jones.

No matter whom you picked, you mostly would have been wrong, and through no fault of your own. It’s just the worst time in decades for older players. Jeter had a pretty good 2012 until he had to be carried off the field at the end, and Ichiro found a little life after the trade from the Mariners to the Yankees, but that’s really about it.

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