Brett Gardner’s approach at the plate used to be simple: bend at the knees, let lots of balls (and strikes) go by, and wait until he walked. Pitchers can’t always throw strikes, even when they’re trying to, especially when the batter doesn’t have a big zone. Gardner consistently made pitchers pay for poor control with plate appearances like this one, from April 29, 2011:

Every year, a few pitchers add a new pitch to their in-game arsenal after working on it over the winter or in spring training. Sometimes, the new pitch goes nowhere: it doesn’t produce results and is quickly abandoned, or it lingers but fails to make an appreciable impact. Other times, it helps a pitcher achieve some specific goal, like limiting opposite-handed hitters, but it doesn’t propel him to much greater heights. And every now and then, a new pitch transforms a pitcher into something far superior to what he was before, like Mike Scott’s splitter, Esteban Loaiza’s cutter, or, more recently, Jason Hammel’s sinker, which he added to great effect in 2012.

According to the custom, PITCHf/x-based pitch-type classifications provided by Harry Pavlidis of Baseball Prospectus and Brooks Baseball, five pitchers have already unveiled new offerings in 2013. It’s too soon to say for sure whether they’ll all be successes, but a small sample can often reveal more about a single pitch than it can about a player’s overall performance. Here’s an early assessment of each one.

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Each week, before we get to the rankings of the best and worse frames and the GIFs that go with them, I want to talk briefly about some general-interest aspect of framing. In the first installment of this series, I mentioned, just as an aside, that “catchers differ in their ability to get calls in certain sections of the zone in a way that persists from year to year.” Let’s look into that a little more.

We classified pitches within two inches above the strike zone as “high,” within two inches below the strike zone as “low,” and within two inches to either side of the strike zone as “side.” Then we looked at how each catcher did at getting called strikes in each area from 2010-2013. Here are the baseline called strike rates for each section:

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A few days ago, Ken Rosenthal wrote an article about the Yankees’ advanced age, entitled “Yankees working on getting younger.” “One thing we know,” Rosenthal wrote, “no matter how this season turns out—the Yankees need to get younger.” Then he went through all the ways the Yankees’ youth movement could work: young prospects panning out, good drafting, “a strategic trade or two.”

I’d like to suggest a simpler scenario: a time machine. Let’s say the Yankees are stuck with their current collection of talent—they can’t acquire anyone who isn’t already on their 40-man roster. But they can have that talent at any point in time. So if the Yankees want one of the MVP Award-winning incarnations of Alex Rodriguez instead of the 37-year-old version who can’t play baseball but looks great eating dinner, they can go get him.

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With two outs, Ben Zobrist batting, and Sean Rodriguez on first representing the tying run, Joe Nathan threw this 3-2, 82-mph curveball to end last night’s Rangers-Rays game and seal his 300th save:

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This is the start of an experiment. I hope it will be a fun experiment, and maybe even an enlightening one.

I find catcher framing fascinating. Because I find it fascinating, I write about it often. And every time I do, I get a lot of questions and comments and clicks, which reinforces my writing-about-framing behavior. Sometimes I write about bad framers, like J.P. Arencibia or Jorge Posada. But mostly I write about Jose Molina. Molina is my muse.

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Earlier this week, Marlins manager Mike Redmond told a group of Miami beat writers that third baseman Placido Polanco might bat cleanup behind Giancarlo Stanton this season. Yes, you’re allowed to laugh. Here are the relevant quotes:

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Before last season, no one would have predicted that fragile White Sox starter Jake Peavy would earn a bigger contract at the end of the year than Angels workhorse Dan Haren. Peavy, entering his age-31 season, was coming off three injury-plagued and ineffective seasons in which he’d thrown a combined 320 1/3 innings with an above-league average ERA; Haren, also entering his age-31 season, was coming off his seventh consecutive 200-plus-inning campaign, having led the AL in starts and strikeout-to-walk ratio and finished seventh in Cy Young voting the season before.

But 2012 proved pivotal in determining the size of the contract that each impending free agent could command. Peavy picked the perfect time to find his form, avoiding the DL, topping 200 innings, and making the All-Star team for the first time since 2007. Haren had back problems and saw his sinker lose speed and his stats decline across the board. As a reward for his resurgence, Peavy got a two-year, $29 million extension from the Sox, while Haren had to settle for a one-year deal with the Nats at a slightly lower annual value.

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Recently, Mariano Rivera revealed that 2013 would be his final season. It wasn’t unexpected news, in that Rivera is 43 years old and coming off a serious injury that caused him to consider retirement in 2012. But the report, however predictable, hit many fans hard. Not only is Rivera respected and beloved both inside and outside of New York (a relative rarity for a big, bad Yankee), but he’s shown so little erosion in his skills that it’s possible to picture him throwing his cutter until he turns 50. Most players go through a decline phase, which gives us time to get used to the idea that it’s about to be over. Rivera really hasn’t, except in the sense that he’s less durable than he once was.

Rivera’s announcement inspired many written responses, one of which was an email to me from a reader named David Greene. “Rivera’s true ranking among pitchers all-time,” the subject line said.

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Watching a championship game between the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico without having seen most of the previous contests between the two rival countries is a little like starting a show in its fourth-season finale. There are story arcs, plot points, and dramatic payoffs you’re only vaguely aware of, and you missed the episode where they introduced the first baseman. Fortunately, most baseball games are bottle episodes, and most of the actors have faces you’ve seen before. And from the first pitch of last night’s WBC final on, it was clear to anyone watching that both teams really, really wanted to win.

In Puerto Rico, many people were able to watch the game for free in movie theaters and public squares. In the mainland US, many people weren't able to watch the game at all, depending on their cable providers. So in case you couldn’t or didn’t see most of the tournament but clicked here to find out how it ended, let me briefly set the scene. Previously on the WBC, the Dominicans went 3-0 in the first round, 3-0 in the second round (in which the bullpen threw 12 2/3 shutout innings), and defeated the Netherlands 4-1 on Monday night to advance to the finals (with four more scoreless innings in relief). They entered the game as the tournament’s only remaining undefeated team. Puerto Rico knocked off two-time WBC winners Japan on Sunday and reached the final with a 5-3 record (but an 0-2 tally against the DR). Due to their dominance in earlier rounds, the Dominican got last licks on Tuesday.

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There were, by my count, 25 talks, panels, or presentations at last week’s SABR Analytics Conference in Phoenix. I couldn’t attend all of them, since some overlapped, but I made it to as many as possible. I’ve already written about the most interesting thing I heard, but the Indians’ sabermetric approach to marketing was just one of many intriguing topics that made me start scribbling notes during the three days I spent listening to smart people talk about baseball. (Many of those topics were brought up by Bill James, which probably isn’t surprising.)

Below I’ve listed some of the questions asked (either explicitly or indirectly) at SABR that are still on my mind a week after the conference began. I don’t have the answers to all of them, but that’s okay, because, as James said, “The key is to find the questions.” (Note: Only a few of the events are available online, there was no convenient place to put a computer, and I scribble only so fast, so I may have mixed up a detail or two.)

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