Horsehide Chronicles

Ah, to be lucky.

They say it's preferable to being good.

When it comes to Major League Baseball pitchers, it's best to be both.

So let's take a statistical stroll through the land of the lucky—a happy place filled with the starting pitchers who have been fortunate in one way or another so far this season.

FIP

With the one-quarter mark of the 2013 season in the rear-view mirror and June just on the horizon, we have a pretty good idea of which youngsters are Rookie of the Year contenders.

The picture is a bit more exciting on the National League side, as the NL is overrun with exciting young players like Shelby Miller, Didi Gregorius and Jose Fernandez. It's looking like the Rookie of the Year race in the Senior Circuit is going to be a Royal Rumble affair all season long. 

We're just about two months into the 2013 Major League Baseball season, and so far, pitchers are doing their world-domination thing again.

Mariano Rivera has many awards in his collection, but he doesn't have an American League Cy Young Award yet.

Maybe you missed it tacked onto the end there, but the key word in that lead-in would be "yet." He still has this year to win one, and his chances are looking pretty good.

In Major League Baseball, how a free agent-to-be finishes the season is much more important than how he starts. The player's agent can chalk it up to a mechanical adjustment or a player getting back to full health or just finally "figuring it out" to explain why things didn't click until the second half.

In any case, agents will try to sell interested teams on the player that ended the season on a roll as opposed to the player who struggled early on. The other way around would be a much tougher sell. 

The designated hitter has been in the American League since 1973, and it probably won't be much longer before it's in the National League, too. Now that interleague play is an everyday thing, it's just not practical for MLB's two leagues to play by different sets of rules.

Last week, the case was made for WAR as baseball's best statistic. Now it's time to dig a little deeper to find out if some of the early-season leaders in Wins Above Replacement are for real.

Who needs peace when we've got WAR?

Wins Above Replacement, that is.

With sites like Baseball Reference, FanGraphs and Baseball Prospectus making all sorts of statistics easily accessible and readily available, there's no shortage of interesting, intriguing, intelligent—even fun—metrics to consider.

But in the battle to be baseball's best stat, WAR wins.

It’s not too early for a team to have buyer’s remorse after spending good money on a free agent who has yet to produce. I’m looking at you, Josh Hamilton, Melky Cabrera, B.J. Upton and Jeff Keppinger.

But how about those players who signed elsewhere and are having big years? Their new team is certainly happy. The team that let them walk as a free agent or was just outbid? Not so much.

There's a certain type of hitter that you just don't see all that much in Major League Baseball anymore. 

Remember pure contact hitters? You know, guys like Rod Carew, Wade Boggs and Tony Gwynn?