As a die-hard fantasy baseball fanatic, I am aware of the pressing decisions to be made over the next two weekends. I have been playing in a trio of leagues with my college buds that extend back over a decade, including keeper leagues in AL- and NL-only as well as mixed-league formats, and our two most critical drafts are this Sunday. At the risk of salting my own game in the event that my league-mates are reading this article, I want to address an issue that can make a big difference on draft day: pitcher blow-ups.

Paul Sporer and I discussed these players during Part Two of the Towers of Power podcast on pitchers last week, referring to them as “grenades” who can blow up a good month's worth of ratios with a single disaster start. The podcast generated a bunch of questions about the grenade concept, and I was inspired to cover it in more detail by reader C.C.:

I wrote an article last September in which I detailed the surprising pitching of the Oakland Athletics. The piece included a breakdown of four different A's pitchers, and I noted that many of the players shared specific similarities which reflected an organizational trend toward mechanical efficiency. The A's have a long history of successful pitching development, and the team's mechanical points of emphasis were apparent by looking at the tendencies of the players whom they had developed and/or acquired over the years.

I spent much of the offseason poring over pitcher mechanics and preparing over 100 mechanical report cards for the pitchers in the 2013 Starting Pitcher Guide in my first year working with Paul Sporer on his annual project. I had already watched the majority of these pitchers in the past, spread out over months or sometimes years, but the examination of so many pitchers over such a short timeframe revealed a number of other patterns that cropped up with pitchers from certain organizations.

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In last week's episode of Raising Aces, we looked at those pitchers who have increased fastball velocity over the last three seasons. The article was inspired by the general tendency for pitchers to lose velocity as they age, and with this premise in mind, I decided to flip the switch and go digging for those pitchers who have lost some speed over the past three years.

For the purposes of this analysis, I chose to utilize the same threshold as with the pitchers who were over the radar: to qualify for the study, a starting pitcher had to have thrown at least 500 fastballs (or sinkers in select cases) in both the 2012 and 2011 seasons, and the average velocity of those pitches in 2012 had to be at least 0.50 mph lower than in each of the previous two seasons. The purpose of these boundaries is to capture a sustained loss in velocity across multiple seasons.

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It has been 28 days since my last entry into the chronicles of Raising Aces, and though I did manage some vacation time during the break, my baseball schedule has been otherwise locked and loaded throughout the month.

I had a blast with our mock arbitration series in early February, in which I went toe-to-toe with Ian Miller for a couple rounds of “name that comp.” I also dropped by the Effectively Wild studios to share my thoughts about the 2013 Athletics with Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller, and behind the scenes I have been preparing more than 100 mechanical profiles for this year's Starting Pitcher Guide with Paul Sporer, which is currently in the final stages of production.

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In the first edition of Bush League, I discussed the viability of sofa-scouting high-level prospects by scouring the archives of MiLB.tv (for a modest subscription price). I also noted the advantages when evaluating pitchers as compared to position players, given the additional off-camera variables that exist for scouting hitting and defense, along with the caveat that pitchers can have volatile mechanics during their development years. The subjects of the original piece included the top two picks from the 2011 draft, Gerrit Cole and Danny Hultzen, and today we’ll take a look at another Pirate-Mariner combination of high-end pitching prospects.

Jameson Taillon and Taijuan Walker were both high-school products of the 2010 draft. Taillon was selected at number two overall by the Pirates, behind top pick Bryce Harper, and Walker was chosen 41 picks later by the Mariners during the supplemental round. I reviewed both pitchers back in July with a brief study of their back-to-back one-inning stints in the Futures Game, and the early returns were impressive. The mechanics of minor-league players are fickle and a pitcher might show different looks on any given day, especially when making a rare relief appearance in a nationally-televised showcase, so the offseason presents a great opportunity to take a deeper look into the performances of these two high-profile prospects.

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At the risk of sounding like a homer, some of the most thought-provoking articles that I have read over the last 10 years have been published right here at Baseball Prospectus. These works of analytical art have influenced and often reinforced personally-held beliefs about the sport, from Nate Silver's statistical shenanigans to Mike Fast's work with batted-ball data and Max Marchi's studies of pitch-framing. The piece that made the most lasting impression was a 2007 article by BP founder Gary Huckabay, in which he made the bold proclamation that “Baseball analysis is dead.”

Huckabay went on to qualify the statement, specifying the diminishing rate of return on the investment of performance stats and citing the marginal utility that had been offered by the latest advances in sabermetrics. He emphasized that the major lessons of statistical analysis had already been learned and postulated that the next major breakthrough would come from elsewhere. Gary's words were prescient, as the revelations that grew from the work of Fast and Marchi were made possible by the recent revolution of ball-tracking technology, including HITf/x and PITCHf/x. 

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Gio Gonzalez had a breakout season in 2012, finishing third in the Cy Young voting in his first year with the Washington Nationals. Despite the dominant campaign and a track record for success, Gonzalez had to live in the shadow cast by the spotlights surrounding teammate Stephen Strasburg, putting up with the common perception that he wasn’t the best pitcher on his own team, let alone the whole league.

The trade that brought Gonzalez to the nation's capital marked the fourth time that the southpaw had been dealt since being selected by the White Sox in the supplemental round of the 2004 draft. The Pale Hose shipped him to Philadelphia as the PTBNL in a deal that brought Jim Thome to the south side in November of 2005, only to re-acquire Gonzalez a year later (along with Gavin Floyd) in a swap that put Freddy Garcia in purple pinstripes. The Sox then broke up with Gio for a second time after just 13 months, packaging him to Oakland in a deal that brought Nick Swisher to Chicago. 

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In a Hall of Fame class that was chock full of controversy because of chemical enhancements—both proven and suspected—that helped to obfuscate baseball's sacred record book, Roger Clemens stood out as a potentially-tainted hurler in a sea of power bats. His performance record is one of the greatest of all time, with a major-league-record seven Cy Young awards spread over a 24-year career, but the PED cloud that hangs over the Rocket is blocking his ascension to baseball's highest plane. Much like batting doppelganger Barry Bonds, Clemens experienced a tremendous spike in performance at an age when most players are planning their retirement, raising suspicion as to the legitimacy of his numbers.

Clemens was drafted by the Boston Red Sox with the 19th pick of the first round in the 1983 draft, selected out of the University of Texas after having spent some time at the baseball factory of San Jacinto Community College. His minor-league numbers were unfair: an ERA of 1.47 in 208.7 total innings across three levels, with 240 strikeouts against just 38 free passes for a K-to-walk ratio better than six to one, and just five homers allowed. Less than a year after signing with Boston, the right-hander was pitching in the Show.

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The legend of Felix Hernandez is surprisingly old for an athlete so young. Signed out of Venezuela at the age of 16, King Felix flew through the Mariners system, earning his regal nickname en route to the major leagues and staking his claim to the Safeco Field throne while he was still a teenager. With his combination of elite talent and the work ethic to realize his upside, Hernandez is the ideal pitcher to profile in this first edition of a new series on pitcher development, as we trace his career path “then and now.”

The BP staffers were cautious with ranking the inexperienced right-hander when constructing the Top 50 Prospects list of 2004, eventually leaving him off the list in favor of more seasoned players, but Hernandez would earn redemption in the '05 Annual, receiving the highest pitcher ranking as the number-three overall prospect on the Top 50. King Felix's stay atop the prospect rankings was brief, as he permanently lost his eligibility with a dominant debut that cemented his status as the future of pitching in the Great Northwest. Hernandez’s talent fueled predictions of immediate stardom, as reflected in the following line from his '05 player comment: “He's going to finish in the top three in Cy Young voting in 2006…”

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The end of the year is a time for reflection, and a flip of the calendar sparks reminders of past resolutions while we take stock of our goals for the new year.

The year 2012 was my first as a contributor to Baseball Prospectus, following two years in the BP system at Baseball Daily Digest, a subsidiary of the BP brand that was founded by Joe Hamrahi and has since graduated dozens of writers to the big stage. I have learned much during my rookie season with the ballclub, and though my recent two-part series on Making the Grade was a reasonable summary of the campaign, I have found myself thinking back to those days at BDD, remembering the lessons that shaped my work into something that was palatable to the BP audience.

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Scouting grades evolve in conjunction with player development, and pitching mechanics in particular can change drastically over time. This is especially true of young players in the minor leagues, who are specifically targeting weak links in their deliveries to address before ascending to the majors. The grades that appear in my mechanics report cards are typically a snapshot of a pitcher's skills, and though some elements can be more pervasive, a player's delivery can also morph throughout the season.

Part One of “Making the Grade” dealt with the first half of the mechanics report card, using visual representations of the 20-80 grades on the scouting scale. The subjects on the report card are arranged in chronological order, following the kinetic chain from the pitcher's first movement through pitch release, and the trio of topics on today's agenda covers the final stages of a pitcher's delivery.

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The legend of Greg Maddux already has a life of its own, and he has been retired for only four years.  The widely held perception of the bespectacled right-hander centers on his reputation as “the smartest pitcher who ever lived,” and the prevailing wisdom tends to overlook the raw talents that he brought to the mound. Maybe it's the glasses, with the clichéd connection between poor vision and intelligence. It could be the K rate, which hovered around the major-league average through his career, or maybe it was the indelible impression of a 42-year old Maddux retiring massive sluggers with an 85-mph fastball, but this was not a pitcher who survived only on guile while mentally calculating triple-integrals for every pitch thrown.

Maddux's reputation for intelligence was well-earned, as he had a cerebral approach to pitching and advanced knowledge of his craft. Maddux understood the concept of Effective Velocity long before Perry Husband had conducted his extensive research on the subject, thanks to Maddux's recognition of the relationship between pitch location and batter timing. He knew that a hitter had to begin his swing earlier in order to hit the ball squarely on a pitch located up and in, but that the hitter had a longer time to react to a pitch that was low and away. He also followed the words of Warren Spahn, who said, “Hitting is timing. Pitching is upsetting timing.”

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