Something happened the other day that hadn’t happened in nearly 17 years, and had only happened twice in the last 50. Not counting Little League, I mean. It happens all the time in Little League. It happens in Little League because catchers aren’t great at catching the baseball, relatively speaking. Little League catchers aren’t great at catching the baseball, and there’s a (bizarre?) rule where batters can attempt to advance on dropped third strikes, and so we’ve all seen plenty of batters reach on strikeouts while we sigh from our positions on the field and wonder how we’re going to sneak out of our friend Gabe’s house to hang out with the girls across the street once Gabe’s parents go to sleep later that night. And then we hope our team’s pitcher strikes out the rest of the guys, too, because striking out more batters than there are outs in an inning is fun.

But it doesn’t happen as often in the big leagues, because, y’know, catchers are good. When it does happen, it’s usually because the pitcher’s stuff is so nasty that it becomes difficult to catch, even for the catcher. When it does happen, it’s also usually four batters in one inning. It’s rare, but it happens. Using the Baseball-Reference Play Index, I ran a search spanning the expansion era, looking for relief outings of exactly one inning with at least four strikeouts.

The results of that search:

Dating back to at least 1985, there are 19 instances of a pitcher whose entire outing consisted of one inning, and four strikeouts. There are plenty more instances of four-strikeout innings, of course, mixed in with the rest of a relief outing, but these are the only guys with one, clean, four-strikeout inning. Nineteen different guys, although two of them are named Mike Stanton.

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Byron Buxton’s demotion to Triple-A Rochester on Sunday brings the tally to four demotions to Triple-A Rochester more than fans of the Minnesota Twins hoped to witness their top prospect endure once he made his major-league debut on June 14, 2015. Buxton is headed to the minors to do one thing, and one thing only: fine-tune his swing. It’s what every demotion’s been about thus far.

Buxton’s got the tools. Stop me if you’ve heard that one before. Few players in the game have more speed. The defense certainly isn’t a question; he’s been something close to a +10 defender in center field. Already, he’s shown just how far his athleticism alone can take him, so long as the bat can do enough to stick in the lineup. If Buxton could manage a batting line just 20% below league average, as his current ZiPS projection forecasts, he could be something like a 2.5-win player at the age of 22. Even a league-average batting line would turn him into a borderline star. He would seem so close to that reality, if only his numbers didn’t make him appear so far away.

Buxton’s career batting line through 356 plate appearances sits at .199/.248/.319, the batting average being one point below the Mendoza Line embodying the tantalizing frustration of his being simultaneously so close and yet so far away. Among 363 batters who have batted at least 300 times since the beginning of last season, just three have a lower wRC+ than Buxton’s mark of 49. And so now, he returns to Rochester to diagnose what in that swing is keeping him from success at the major-league level, as we at home attempt to diagnose just how we got to this point.

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It’s still sort of hard to fathom how quickly the league-wide strikeout spike snuck up on us. And after a one-year plateau between 2014 and 2015, they’re back on the rise again. On the one hand, a statement like, “Present-day Robbie Ray would’ve been baseball’s strikeout leader as recently as 2010” speaks volumes toward the current state of baseball and how much has changed just in the last five years. It also speaks volumes toward Robbie Ray, because era be damned, what he’s doing is impressive, and it seems like it’s flying under the radar. Funny how quickly we’ve come to take strikeouts for granted.

Robbie Ray has struck out 28% of all the batters he’s faced this season. That’s more than Jake Arrieta last year, higher than Danny Salazar’s current total. It’s higher than almost anyone, in fact, even in our strikeout-laden era. What follows is a complete list of pitchers who, this season, have (a) as many or more innings thrown, and (b) a higher strikeout rate than Ray:

• Jose Fernandez
• Clayton Kershaw
• Max Scherzer
• Stephen Strasburg
• Noah Syndergaard

That completes the list. Just five pitchers in baseball have ran a higher strikeout rate over as many innings as Robbie Ray, and they might just be the five best. Over his last eight starts, the strikeout rate’s up to 33%. It seems time to start paying some real attention to Robbie Ray, who suddenly looks like the second-hand man to Zack Greinke in Arizona.

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When a top prospect completes his ascension through the minor leagues and begins to carve out the early stages of a big-league career, a little war wages in all our heads, whether we know it or not. It’s the battle between our pre-debut perception of that player and our post-debut perception. Really, it’s just a variation of the age-old debate of scouts vs. stats.

When a player debuts, our knowledge of his skill set and abilities is limited almost entirely to the information found in public scouting reports. Sure, there’s minor-league numbers, too, but those can often be misleading or difficult to translate. Early on in a player’s career, the scouting report trumps all.

The more we see of the player in the majors, though, the more data we collect, and the balance of power regarding what informs our perception begins to shift from the scouting reports to the stats. The major-league stats become not only the more recent information but the more detailed. Sometimes, the data aligns with what the scouts reported. Other times, the two are at odds. It’s up to the individual to decide how much weight to give to either side, and why.

Twins rookie Max Kepler hit three homers against the Indians the other day, and has been among baseball’s best hitters since the All-Star Break. Digging through his scouting reports recently, something stuck out. Any emphasis that follows is mine.

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Brandon Guyer is currently baseball’s Hit-by-Pitch King. You could take that to mean this year, as Guyer leads all batters with 23 hit by pitches this season. Or you could take it to mean lately, as Guyer leads all batters over the last two years with 47 hit by pitches, and his 58 over the last three leaves him just one behind Anthony Rizzo’s league-leading total, despite Guyer having half the plate appearances over that stretch. Or, you could even take it to mean all-time, because if you set a career plate appearance minimum of 500 and search the entire history of modern baseball dating back to 1921, no one’s been hit more frequently than our recently anointed Hit-by-Pitch King.

HBP%, 1921-present, min. 500 PA

1. Brandon Guyer, 5.9%
2. Derek Dietrich, 4.7%
3. F.P. Santangelo, 4.0%
4. Ron Hunt, 3.9%
5. Carlos Quentin, 3.9%

The gap is remarkable. Throughout the entire history of modern baseball, at this particular skill, Brandon Guyer is truly a one-of-a-kind. And make no mistakes, it is a skill. Maybe “skill” isn’t the word you’d immediately think to use, but another way to think about a skill is the ability to repeatedly do something others can’t as a means to gain an advantage over the opponent. Most often, we see that manifested in a batter consistently getting hits, or stealing bases, or drawing walks. Oh, Guyer can hit, too, but where he really gains his edge is the being hit.

Eno Sarris wrote about this a bit when the Indians acquired Guyer at the deadline for low-level prospects Nathan Lukes and Jhonleider Salinas. The reason the Indians went out and got Guyer is because he can play all three outfield positions with what appears to be above-average ability, and mostly because he’s been one of baseball’s very best bats against left-handed pitching since he began receiving regular playing time in 2014. As Eno put it, Guyer improves the Indians’ ability to both hit lefties, and be hit by lefties. But plenty of batters have been able to hit lefties. Nobody in the history of the sport’s been hit like Guyer, so that’s where our focus turns.

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The trade of reliever Mark Melancon by the Pittsburgh Pirates to the Washington Nationals sent a clear message: the Pirates are in retool mode. Not rebuild mode — they’re too good for that. And certainly not go-for-it mode — the Pirates barely had a 1-in-10 shot of making the playoffs, and you don’t go for it by trading away one of the best relievers in the game. No, the Pirates were retooling, selling from the immediate future to improve in the very short-term future, and, to a lesser extent, the long-term future. The crux of the return, left-handed reliever Felipe Rivero, will contribute for the Pirates both immediately and moving forward. That’s the difference between he and Melancon — he’ll be sticking around for more than one season. Prospect Taylor Hearn is the longer-term play; small-market teams like the Pirates live for long-term plays.

Which is what makes Monday’s last-minute deal for broken pitching prospect Drew Hutchison — one which allowed them to dump Francisco Liriano’s salary on the Toronto Blue Jays but also cost them prospects Reese McGuire and Harold Ramirez — so puzzling on the surface. While neither prospect cracked Baseball America’s recent top-100 update, McGuire and Ramirez are both legitimate prospects, the type of pieces that can be essential to a franchise like the Pirates by providing cheap value, allowing them to continue chugging along at an affordable operating cost while retaining the pieces that really matter. McGuire is regarded as one of the best defensive catching prospects in the minors, one whose receiving ability alone gives him a near-certain path to the majors. Ramirez is an athletic bat-to-ball outfielder with a plus hit tool who’s playing center in the minors even if he’s likely to move to a corner.

In Hutchison, the Pirates get back a Ray Searage reclamation project, and little more. Hutchison’s still just 25 with some former prospect shine, but the career ERA in more than 400 innings is nearly 5.00, and he’s got a serious home-run problem. Maybe Searage can coax some ground balls out of him.

But Hutchison’s not so much what this deal was about. The motivation behind this deal was clear. It was a straight salary dump. The Blue Jays are taking on the entirety of Liriano’s salary, which amounts to roughly $17 million through the end of next season. They had the space available to take on the money — though it is interesting to wonder how this could impact their ability to re-sign Jose Bautista or Edwin Encarnacion in the offseason — and they were willing to do so for the price of the prospects.

To rationalize this deal from the Pirates’ perspective, you’ve got to believe the organization thinks it can do more with the $17 million and Hutchison to help it win next year and moving forward than it could with Liriano and the prospects. It may be a tough sell, but it is what it is. And to believe that, you’ve got to believe the organization views Liriano as broken.

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The Baltimore Orioles’ vision from 2012 is almost fully formed. In 2011, they selected Dylan Bundy with the fourth-overall pick in the draft, and the following year, they did the same with Kevin Gausman. In 2013, Bundy was the No. 2 overall prospect in the game, according to Baseball America. He was Lucas Giolito. Gausman was No. 26 — he was Jose Berrios. Now, three years later, it’s 2016, and the club is in first place. It’s all going to plan. The Orioles are leading the American League East, and it’s all thanks to their dominant starting rotation, led by workhorse aces Bundy and Gausman — among the most dominant one-two punches in the league.

I’m sorry, what’s that? Everything’s true except for the last part? You’re telling me the Orioles are in first place, but their rotation has a 5.00 ERA? They just traded for Wade Miley? Gausman’s never thrown more than 115 innings in a season and has a career-worst 4.45 FIP and Bundy’s only made three major-league starts? Three?

So, maybe the vision from 2012 isn’t fully realized. But the Orioles are winning, and, despite a bit of a circuitous route in getting there, this is the closest that vision’s ever come to being a reality. Because Dylan Bundy is a starter now. Alongside Gausman in the major leagues, and for the first time in their careers, finally. We’ve been waiting for this for years. And, at the risk of delving too deep into sports talk radio host jargon, Bundy feels like he could be a massively important piece for an Orioles club that badly needs a shot in the arm if it wants to make a deep postseason run. I swear I’m not going to use the phrase “X-Factor.”

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The recipe goes like this. Take an American League-best 59-42 record and sauté it in a 67-year World Series drought. Chop up a recently revamped, sneakily excellent farm system and add it to the pan, along with some league-worst catcher production and a relatively thin bullpen. Let cook for one trade deadline, pour over the long-term perils of building a team around starting pitching, and season with a touch of championship envy from your neighbors across the street. It’s the perfect recipe for pushing all-in, pulled straight out of the Cleveland Indians cookbook.

Let’s get the details out of the way now. Late last night, Ken Rosenthal broke the Jonathan Lucroy news, which has now fallen apart and is a story all of its own. This morning, Rosenthal broke some more news, as he’s wont to do, regarding Andrew Miller. The Miller news is official — no take-backs! — and the details are as follows:

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The Washington Nationals started with their sights on Aroldis Chapman. They’d deemed their bullpen to be in need of an upgrade, and Chapman was the most obvious candidate. Obviously, that didn’t happen. And not only did it not happen, but the return for Chapman was so high that clubs still interested in Andrew Miller could be seen as effectively priced out. From Washington, the Yankees reportedly asked for top prospect Lucas Giolito in exchange for Miller, and no matter what the tweets say, that was never going to happen.

So the Nationals had to lower their sights a bit. But they didn’t have to lower them far, because after Chapman and Miller, they might have gone out and gotten the next-best thing:

Mark Melancon traded to #Nats for Felipe Rivero and Taylor Hearn, sources confirm @Ken_Rosenthal report. #Pirates @MLB

— Jon Morosi (@jonmorosi) July 30, 2016

It’s a trade that makes sense for both teams, as they all should. The Pirates may not be strong current contenders, but they remain future contenders, if that makes sense. We’ve got their playoff odds at 16%, which is still very much in the race, but makes them a longshot. What the Pirates have beyond this year, though, is a strong core coupled with a handful of promising, near-ready prospects that ought to keep the club’s contention window open for years to come. They’re not going away anytime soon, but they’ve been largely done in this season by uncharacteristically poor starting pitching.

So they moved an expiring piece. Mark Melancon’s been a fixture of Pittsburgh’s recent revival, but he’s gotten expensive, and he’ll be a free agent at year’s end. Teams like the Pirates typically don’t retain relievers like Melancon when they hit the market, so they got what they could. That means Felipe Rivero, a lefty reliever who touches the high-90’s in the majors right now, and that means Taylor Hearn, a lefty (future) reliever who stands 6-foot-5 and touches the high-90’s in the minors right now. They’ve got Rivero for five more years. They’ve got complete control of Hearns. The Pirates sold, but not really. They made this year’s team slightly worse in going from Melancon from Rivero, but they’ve made future year’s teams better by adding Rivero (and Hearns) for a player who was set to be gone anyway. It’s the perfect kind of retooling move for a small-market team operating within a window of contention.

And yet, it’s hard not to view this return as relatively light, at least up against what the Yankees just received for Chapman. The Yankees got a top-25 prospect in Gleyber Torres, a fringe-100 prospect in Billy McKinney, a pitcher capable of starting with major league success under his belt in Adam Warren, and then some. Speculation around a Melancon-to-Washington trade invoked names like right-handed starter Erick Fedde, who ranked 61st in Baseball America’s midseason update. The actual return featured a pair of lefty relievers. Exciting lefty relievers, but lefty relievers nonetheless; one of whom has already had his clock started, the other of whom didn’t crack top-10 prospect lists in the Nationals’ system at the start of the season.

Of course, Chapman throws 105 and because of that, is Aroldis Chapman. Melancon isn’t that. But he’s closer than one might think! Like, for instance, since joining the Pirates in 2013, Melancon’s 1.80 ERA is the lowest among all 255 pitchers with at least 200 innings thrown. He’s been better at preventing runs than literally everyone over the last three-plus years. And while he might not do it with the sort of eye-popping stuff to which we’re accustomed from seeing of the game’s top relievers, there’s no arguing with the results:

Again, the style is a bit different, but when we’ve talked about the Chapman’s and Jansen’s and Davis’ of the world, Melancon’s been right there all along. Here’s another way to view things, if you’re not as keen on using WAR to evaluate relievers:

Win Probability Added, all relievers, 2013-Present

1. Mark Melancon, +11.74
2. Tony Watson, +10.63
3. Zach Britton, +10.55
4. Wade Davis, +10.42
5. Dellin Betances, +10.07

By WPA, no reliever’s been more valuable than Melancon during his time in Pittsburgh. By WAR, it’s only Chapman, Betances, and Jansen. You see the second name there on the WPA leaderboard also plays for the Pirates, so it’s not like they’re suddenly hurting for high-leverage relief options, and Watson will still be there next year, too. But the Nationals just added one of the game’s elite to an already great bullpen.

Not that there aren’t flags with Melancon. I’m hesitant to call them red flags, but they’re orange or maroon, maybe. His walk rate is still great, but it’s also the highest it’s been during his Pittsburgh tenure. The curveball’s being spotted less often at the bottom edge of the zone, and is more often winding up in the dirt, and batters are laying off:

Fewer swings against the curve explains the slight uptick in walks, and it explains the downtick in ground balls — the curve has always been Melancon’s big ground ball pitch. Melancon doesn’t possess top-shelf raw stuff, so he’s thrived by limiting walks and homers. Limiting walks and homers are predicated on elite command, and there’s some evidence that the command could be starting to slip. For now, though, the command still looks great. And those maroon flags can be the next team’s concern, anyway; the Nationals only care about the next three months.

Funny thing about the Nationals bullpen is, before the Melancon trade, they were projected for 1.8 rest-of-season WAR, and after  they’re Melancon trade, they’re projected for… 1.8 rest-of-season WAR. But what they’ve done is shift their leverage, the sort of thing that a WAR projection might struggle to grasp. Melancon is now clearly the best option in Washington’s bullpen, and he’ll receive the most important innings. Less important innings are to follow for Jonathon Papelbon, as should be the case. Shawn Kelley remains elite. It’s the kind of 1-2-3 punch we’ve become accustomed to seeing in the late innings of playoff games.

And while I’ve referred to the cost as a bargain within this post, it’s really only a bargain relative to Chapman. Really, it’s the kind of return we should expect for three-plus months of an elite reliever. The kind of return we might’ve expected, say, a week ago. The Chapman move was just an outlier, for whatever reason. Take that how you will. The Pirates retooled, as they should have. The Nationals improved their high-leverage innings for the stretch run by acquiring one of the game’s best run preventers. It looks like a win for both clubs, and yet somehow it also feels like something of a steal by Washington, based on what we’ve recently seen. Maybe the Pirates could have done better for Melancon. Or maybe the Cubs just gave up a ton for Chapman.