Tommy Rancel got some quotes from Chaim Bloom about Jake Odorizzi's mound presence, and his "lack of an out pitch." Specifically, Bloom talks about how having a bunch of different pitches can help make up for not having a blazing fastball. "Is that actually how it works, or is it just another baseball truism?" I can hear all your little skeptical voices saying. "How much does having a lot of pitches matter?" Luckily Robert Arthur, as a guest on Baseball Prospectus, wrote about and quantified the exact thing Bloom was talking about.
Jason Hanselman reviewed the processes and results of Jeremy Hellickson and Alex Cobb.
GWR, on the FanGraphs community pages, quantifies the park effects due to differences in gravity in different stadiums. The Trop has the second lowest gravity of any major league park.
As you already know, the Mariners (in who's stadium gravity pulls strongest) signed Fernando Rodney to be their closer. It's a boring refrain, but Jeff Sullivan says it well. It doesn't really matter that they're replacing a competent closer in Danny Farquahar. It's better to have Farquahar and Rodney, because they're both good relief pitchers, and two good releivers are better than one.
We've entered the years of the pitcher, it seems, with offense down around the league, so Evan Kendall tries to decide, are pitchers getting better?
Also at BP, Sam Miller looks at young hitters like Yaisel Puig (and like Wil Myers), and their ability to hit the fastball compared to offspeed and breaking pitchtes ($$). The skinny: beware of assuming storylines. Also, Myers's whiff profile is pretty common for a young hitter (Puig's was weird).