After a roller-coaster start to the 2013 season, the Indians enter this Lazy Sunday with a very appropriate record of 5 wins and 5 losses. It could be better, but it could also be worse. The new outfield has come as advertised, with Brantley, Bourn and Stubbs running down flyballs all over the outfield. Mark Reynolds has hit some titanic shots, and struck out a few times as well. Nick Swisher’s excitement and leadership has been infectious, and his walk-off single on Friday helped secure Masterson a victory in a lights-out pitching performance. And the starting rotation, which came in to the season with question marks, has also both lived up to and pitched down to preseason expectations. The Indians have already used six starting pitchers this year, and only back-to-back rain delays prevented them from using a seventh. The performance of those six starters has ranged from great (Masterson) to terrible (Brett Myers), and one has been Carlos Carrasco, whose outing against the Yankees must be considered in a classification all of its own. As Anthony Castrovice summed up expertly earlier this week, the Indians start has been nothing if not interesting. It’s still awfully early, but we can take the information we have to make some judgments about the starting rotation based on our expectations going into the 2013 season. So with that, let’s set off on a pitching-centric Lazy Sunday here in early April…

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Last week, I mentioned how Ubaldo Jimenez became more of a pitcher than a thrower and that was successful for him against the Blue Jays. On Monday, he morphed back into the pitcher we remember from 2012. The guy who makes coitus with a wood chipper somehow seem more pleasant than watching him pitch.  It took him all of four hitters to zap the Home Opener energy out of a crowd of 41,000-plus. Following that start, the Indians turned on the spin cycle and created Ubaldogate.

One of my favorite baseball people on the internet, Kyle Boddy, has been covering the Ubaldo saga from every angle. I’ve mentioned him before, but Boddy runs a baseball training academy in Seattle that focuses on teaching the proper mechanics of hitting and pitching through physiological science. It’s about staying healthy. Pitchers lose velocity and lose command when they’re pitching hurt or with bad mechanics.

The day after Jimenez’s first start against Toronto, Boddy was skeptical. In his well-trained eyes, Jimenez’s mechanics were not going to increase velocity and they were going to put additional strain on his elbow. Boddy’s last line read, “Ubaldo Jimenez will never be that guy again if he continues to throw the way he does——and I believe he will continue to lose velocity throughout the season if these mechanics keep up.”

As it turned out, “throughout the season” became “in his second start”. Jimenez’s velocity was down so much that PITCHf/x data classified 51 of Jimenez’s 91 pitches as changeups. PITCHf/x data classifies pitches by speed and by movement. The system was incorrectly classifying his fastballs as changeups. Of course, saying “incorrectly” is debatable, since the pitch had the speed and movement of a changeup.

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The Indians only played half of the four games scheduled for this week’s series against the Yankees because even Mother Nature was tired of watching the Tribe’s starting pitching. Maybe it was just Bob Feller doing a lot of crying. In any event, rain washed out the final two games of the series against the Bronx Bombers, who are still bombing away despite the losses of Derek Jeter, Mark Teixeira, Alex Rodriguez, and Curtis Granderson to injury. There was still some small semblance of good, a lot of bad, and a s-ton of ugly.

We’ll start with the good, because it will take the shortest amount of time to write. Although it was not enjoyable to have two days without baseball, the Indians really needed that first night off. The second night off due to rain seemed a little superfluous, but the team needed a day to take a break. Without the services of Carlos Santana and the team slated to use their seventh starter in nine games on Wednesday, the rain was a blessing.

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So there were only two games played in the system yesterday, as the Aeros and Captains were both washed out by the same storm that caused the Indians game to be postponed. Normally I'd skip the ATF recap in this case, but with every player in the Mudcats starting lineup recording a hit in a 12-1 thrashing of Wilmington and the Clippers bullpen combining on a 4-hit shutout last night, there's still plenty to talk about in the organization from yesterday.

Bryson Myles, LF-CAR: 3-5, HR (1), 2B, 5 RBI, 2 R, SB.

Myles was just a triple short of the cycle yesterday, and the home run he launched reportedly hit halfway up the scoreboard in LF at Five County Stadium. He's as hot as anyone in the organization to start off the season, going 6-19 in his five starts for Carolina to post a .421/.500/.684 line. He's driven in 7 runs already, and the speedy LF has swiped a pair of bases. I didn't have Myles ranked as highly as others did on my prospect countdown this spring, and there's nothing I like more than being proven wrong in this fashion. I still have some questions about Myles' eventual ceiling with the bat and if he can hit enough to be a first-division starter in LF, but if he can keep up anything resembling this pace in the Carolina League this season, those questions will have been answered in a big way. Myles is a fundamentally sound hard-working player who is a lot of fun to watch on the diamond, and it's great to see him get off to such a hot start for the Mudcats. He hit .290/.355/.379 with 3 HR for the Captains last year, so it will be interesting to see if Myles can maintain his newfound power in 2013.

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