BDD Offers -

New Article: The Return of Facts...Johan-Style, by Craig Brown
New Series: The Baseball Research Project - Baseball Historians and HRs, by Dave Rouleau

Detailed Pitch Analysis: Part II - The Curve Ball, by Jonathan Hale
Round 2: The Roger Clemens Saga Continues, by Gordon Berger
Beyond the Diamond: January 31, 2008, by Pete Toms
The Perfect Organization, by Eric SanInocencio
Johan Santana: Risk or Reward?, by Brandon Heikoop
Out of the Spolight, by Dave Rouleau
Fathers Playing Catch With Their Sons, by Benito Vila
The Most Productive Hitting Streaks Since 1957, by Dave Rouleau
The Bloggers Roundtable - Cincinnati Reds  (the Cleveland Indians are the next in line)

Visit BDD's Big League Futures, our minor league department, who has been redesigned recently.  Original material is produced by Jim Pratt, Koby Schellenger and Dave Rouleau.

You can hear the latest edition of the BDD Radio Show, with the Nationals' Mike Rizzo on the show, by going on our home page and listening to the show with the Blog Talk Radio player.

Join the Baseball Digest Daily Facebook group!

- Brian McNamee's lawyer is set to present physical evidence that he injected Roger Clemens with performance-enhancing drugs.

"McNamee, Clemens's former trainer, will produce "corroborative physical evidence" for congressional investigators that he injected Clemens with performance-enhancing drugs, the trainer's lawyers said Wednesday.

The lawyers would not characterize the evidence further but promised to release it publicly after McNamee gives a deposition to the House Oversight committee on Thursday.

Clemens gave a sworn deposition Tuesday denying he had ever used steroids or human-growth hormone.

"This will totally corroborate that Brian has been telling the truth from the beginning," Earl Ward, McNamee's lead lawyer, said in a telephone interview. "It takes it out of the category of he-said, he-said."

- Tom Verducci looks at pitchers who should watch their workload in 2008 if his Year After Effect theory is any indication of injuries to come.

"Why can't they throw 200 innings? Simply put, they're not conditioned for it yet. It's like training for a marathon. You need to build stamina incrementally. The unofficial industry standard is that no young pitcher should throw more than 30 more innings than he did the previous season. It's a general rule of thumb, and one I've been tracking for about a decade. When teams violate the incremental safeguard, it's amazing how often they pay for it.

Pitchers generally feel the effects of abusive increases in workload the next year, not the season in which they were pushed. In other words, you might be able to finish that marathon for which you didn't properly train, but your body will have hell to pay for it. I call it the Year After Effect.

Here's the way I track it: Find major league pitchers 25-and-under who broke the 30-inning rule. In some cases a pitcher's innings the previous season may have been artificially depressed, such as by injury, so I'll use his professional high for the baseline, or, in the case of a recent draftee like Kennedy, his college workload. All innings count (minors, majors, postseason).

In 2005 and '06 I found 17 pitchers I defined as at-risk of the YAE. None made it through the next year without an injury or a higher ERA. Ten of them broke down, the most seriously hurt being Francisco Liriano, Gustavo Chacin, Adam Loewen, Scott Mathieson and Anibel Sanchez. Eleven of them had worse ERAs, by an average of about a run and a half. Remember, it's a general rule; there are exceptions, the superlative Justin Verlander being one."

- Alex Rios won't be going to arbitration hearings after all, signing a one-year deal for $4.835 M.  BDD offers a look at what happened in their State of the Franchise address yesterday for the season-ticket holders, with two of our reporters on site.