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NEWZ

Felix Hernandez comes to camp packing seventeen extra pounds, tight, as in.  In the immortal words of Keith Hodge:  You ever seen 17 pounds of hamburger, dude?

About 8 times out of 10, a player's fitness on report is noiz.  Not always.  There are a fair share of pitchers who did good because of their physical condition, such as Jamie Moyer, and usually that fair share was not the guys who gained +1 MPH.  It was the guys who sharpened their command a little bit.  Felix was out of shape his first two years in the majors period, and his command suffered.  Personally allow some chance that Felix' condition will push him towards an UP season.

Photo by (the awesome) Jen Mueller on Twitter.

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NOIZ

Tony Zych throwing a little earlier than expected.  Ya, you betcha.  Call us when he's free and easy from 60'.

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NEWZ

Nice scouting-style rundown from Jason on the M's relievers.  My Universal Stat Cards on my Beholder Collectors Set looked kinda like these.  Particularly like his take on keeping Scribner in the swing man slot as opposed to bringing him in to hold games, his lack of glee over Rzepczynski, and ... let's hold this link till two sections on.

Also intriguing that Jason has James Paxos and Jean Machi in the Prospect Insider mix.  Dr. D will run a 30-second Google search and pass judgment on PI's work momentarily.

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NOIZ

Cishek's hip injury was way more serious than we heard at first.  Best wishes to him, but how should I put this nicely ... if I'm a left hand major league hitter I'm rather more pleased at the sight of him on the mound than either Altavilla or Simmons.  No fanpain here if Cishek rehabs it out through June and cashes his $500,000/mo checks.

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NEWZ

Jeff Sullivan points out that Nick Vincent has run the 2nd-most unhittable fastball in the game since 2008.   Yep.  Aroldis Chapman, Nick Vincent, and then later on Craig Kimbrel is in there somewhere.

Prince Fielder is also one of the greatest hitters in the game since 2008.  Jim Thome.  Ichiro.  ... no, Vincent is still throwing a lot of balls "past" Planet Earth's choicest athletes.  He might not be quite as good as three years ago but it's still much the same shtick.

It's baffling.  It looks for all the world to me like Vincent cuts the ball every pitch, and I'm not talking about spin.  I'm talking about the sharpened buckle on Zunino's leg protector.  Actually scuffballs are supposed to be pretty much obsolete, they tell us, but this is what these guys used to look like.  Lukewarm fastballs, lukewarm location, batters swing weirdly through it.  Very seriously, when Vincent gets ready to throw, I enjoy pretending that he stomped the ball several times with his cleats to resin it up.  31.4% of the time I get what I was looking for.

Am sure that Jerry Dipoto could tell us why Nick Vincent "happens," but we couldn't tell you here.  Hey, sabermetrics isn't supposed to care whether you're throwing 89 MPH letter high.  So apparently you and I don't either.

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NOIZ

Competition for Utility Role Should Be Fierce.  In other minor news, Jurassic World shouldn't have been set up so that random help could topple into the velociraptor cage.  But there has to be background scenery for the important stuff, right.

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NEWZ

There is video of people throwing the ball and catching it on Bob Dutton's twitter feed.

Play Ball,

Dr D