It’s been an incredible couple of months for the previously unheralded second-year pitcher. Corbin came into spring training having to compete for the fifth starter’s spot in the rotation, but he entered his start on Monday night at Coors Field as one of the bigger revelations in baseball in the first month and a half of the season.

And he didn’t disappoint, beating the Colorado Rockies by throwing the first complete-game of his career, giving up just three hits in a 5-1 victory, the ...

As it turns out, Livan Hernandez gave us the highest pitch count from a single game in the past ten years, throwing 150 pitches against the Florida Marlins back in 2005. A handful of pitchers have rivaled that total since 2002, including Edwin Jackson’s 149 pitch no-hitter, eight-walker from just a few years ago. Hard-nosed, flame-throwing strikeout beasts like Randy Johnson, Jason Schmidt and Kerry Wood all topped 140 pitches at one point or another in the last decade, yet remarkably it was ...

Well, we quickly have an idea of strikeout rate, ground ball and fly ball tendencies, and (somewhat less quickly), walk rate. Over a season, you can get a pretty good idea of a pitcher’s single and HBP rates. Strangely enough, singles stabilize a lot faster than the alleged “true” outcome of HR rate. Some of the classic one-number rates (OBP, SLG) can stabilize over the course of a year for a full-time starter. And yes, BABIP still needs a lot of data (roughly 2000 balls in play), but that ...

The average starter establishes the fastball early, throwing it the most the first time through the order, much like a reliever does in facing a hitter only once. This makes sense to me given that I would assume velocity could be higher at the start of the game when the pitcher is fresh, so why not make use of the extra ticks on the fastball while they are available. As starters work their way through the order the second time and beyond, we see offspeed pitch usage rise, at the expense of the ...

This was the best hope among Red Sox fans regarding the team’s fortunes in 2013: that 2012 would be an outlier for the starting rotation; that the return of John Farrell would mean the return of performance from Lester and Buchholz to their former peak; and that any projections that included any influence of 2012 would be assessing the rotation too negatively. While it’s less than one month, it’s fun to see that hope be fulfilled to date.

During spring training in 2010 as the Cardinals tried to indoctrinate fastball jockey Brad Penny into the organization’s philosophy of sink, pitching coach Dave Duncan and his staff kept a running tally for Penny’s benefit on a markerboard in the coaches’ office.
In one column, the pitching coach counted every fly ball allowed during spring, and in another all of the groundballs. Beside each was the number of extra-base hits in the air or on the ground. That number, so much higher by the ...

The Toronto Blue Jays announced that the left-hander has been optioned to single-A Dunedin of the Florida State League.

The move came shortly after Romero picked up the win in Toronto’s 6-3 victory over Pittsburgh. It was considered a make-or-break start for Romero, who had a decent outing but didn’t do enough to make up for his spring struggles.

The phrase “pitch to contact” has been deleted from the Twins lexicon. It is gone forever.

Like Mikhail Gorbachev’s birthmark in official Soviet Union portraits, it has been expunged. All traces have been removed and no one is allowed to speak of it. As far as anyone is concerned, the phrase, like the birthmark, has dissipated into thin air.

“I’m never saying it again,” Twins pitching coach Rick Anderson said.

“pitching to contact.”  We’ve always been at war with Balls in Play.

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MLB Network examines the benefits of pitcher specialization, four-man rotations and strict innings limits for starters.

It might not happen for twenty years, but anybody have any suggestions to keep games from happening where each team uses nine pitchers in a routine 5-4 game?