Morning Mound Visit: sabermetrics news - 3/15/19

FanGraphs | Rian Watt: Kyle Seager injured his thumb so badly that he needed surgery on the tendon, and that means he’ll miss six weeks and the start of the season. This will definitely hurt the Mariners, even though they’re rebuilding, and it’ll maybe give Seager some time to think about how he can adjust against the shift, which has been successfully been deployed against him.

Baseball Prospectus | Rob Arthur ($): MLB is moving the mound back in the Atlantic League, and as I’ve mentioned but Arhur shows, there could be unintended consequences. It’s not just adjusting a dial called “batting average,” it’s specifically hurting fastball pitchers and helping those who pitch backwards. Pitchers like Kyle Gibson, though, could be positively impacted; it’s impossible to know the effects until it happens.

Tangotiger Blog | Tom Tango: Baseball Savant has rolled out an app for pitch similarity scores, which could be incredibly useful. It’s already interesting on first glance that Jacob deGrom’s most similar pitchers are: Noah Syndergaard and Zack Wheeler.