Last week, the bell tolled for the 2018 season of the Diamondbacks’ Taijuan Walker. The week before that, it tolled for the Padres’ Dinelson Lamet, and before him, the Angels’ JC Ramirez and the A’s A.J. Puk. If it feels like March and April are particularly full of Tommy John surgery casualties, that’s because they are, at least when it comes to recent history. In early March, just after Rays righty Jose De Leon discovered that he had torn his ulnar collateral ligament, I noted some recent trends regarding everyone’s favorite (?) reconstructive elbow procedure, including the extent to which those early-season injuries are rather predictive of the season-long trend. With April now in the books, and with my nose still in Jon Roegele’s Tommy John Surgery Database, the situation is worth a closer look.

Via the data I published in the De Leon piece, just under 28% of all Tommy John surgeries done on major- or minor-league pitchers (not position players) from 2014-17 took place in March or April, with the figure varying only from 24.8 % to 30.0% in that span. Even expanding the scope to include February as well, which doesn’t increase the total number of surgeries by much but does capture significant ones such as that of Alex Reyes last year — gut punches that run counter to the optimism that reigns when pitchers and catchers report — the range is narrow, with 27.5% to 33.0% of pitcher surgeries taking place in that span.

After my piece was published, a reader pointed out that The Ringer’s Ben Lindbergh took an in-depth look at the phenomenon, but intuitively, it’s not hard to understand. Not only do pitchers’ activity levels ramp up dramatically once spring training begins, as they move from lighter offseason throwing programs to facing major-league hitters and therefore place far more stress on their arms, but many pitchers are finally forced to reckon with injuries that did not heal over the winter.

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The Dodgers’ 2018 season has already seen its share of insult and injury, but Monday brought the coup de grâce: Corey Seager will miss the remainder of the year due to Tommy John surgery on his right elbow. His loss means that the defending NL champions, who have limped through March and April with a 12-16 record, will never get a chance to field their best lineup, with Seager alongside third baseman Justin Turner, who’s been sidelined by a broken left wrist since March 19.

Seager has had elbow problems since late August of last season, when inflammation limited him to pinch-hitting duty during an 11-game span that was part of the team’s dreadful 1-16 tailspin. Though he said that the injury bothered him more while throwing than while batting, he struggled at the plate for the remainder of the season and into the postseason; his absence from the team’s NLCS roster was due to a back strain, not the elbow. In the wake of an MRI taken at the beginning of the offseason, TJ surgery wasn’t considered as an option, and Seager spent the winter working on rehabbing and strengthening the elbow. He didn’t play shortstop in a spring-training game until March 7.

Seager aggravated his elbow making a pair of relay throws in a loss to the Giants, and an MRI taken on Monday revealed “a much worse” injury than before. “There was no gray area as to what the right decision was,” he told reporters. Given the typical nine- to 12-month rehab period for a position player undergoing TJ, Seager might have missed the entire 2018 season anyway if his November MRI had been more conclusive.

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On the same night that top prospect Ronald Acuña made his made his major-league debut, a former Brave had his own memorable moment. In Wednesday night’s Rays-Orioles game at Camden Yards, in the bottom of the sixth inning, 33-year-old Rays lefty Jonny Venters made his first major-league appearance since October 5, 2012. He faced just one hitter, Chris Davis, and needed just four pitches to retire him on a routine grounder to shortstop, but in doing so he became the rare pitcher to return to the majors after a third Tommy John surgery.

Exactly how rare is in dispute, which I’ll examine in greater depth below, but first, let’s appreciate the man and his moment. A 30th-round draft-and-follow pick in 2003 out of a Florida high school, Venters was such an obscure prospect that his name was misspelled “Benters” on some draft lists according to John Sickels. He began his professional career in 2004, but by the end of 2005, when he was 20, he had already gone under the knife of Dr. James Andrews for his first Tommy John surgery. That cost him all of the 2006 season. Working primarily as a starter, he reached Double-A in late 2008 and Triple-A in 2009. Though he didn’t make the Braves the following spring, he was soon called up and debuted against the Rockies on April 17, 2010 with three shutout innings.

Able to Bring It with rare velocity for a southpaw (95.1 mph average according to Pitch Info), Venters proved effective against righties as well as lefties and quickly gained the trust of manager Bobby Cox; by June, he was working in high-leverage duty. In 79 appearances as a rookie, he threw 83 innings and struck out 93, finishing with an ERA of 1.93, a FIP of 2.69, and 1.5 WAR. The next year, he made an NL-high 85 appearances and turned in similarly strong numbers in 88 innings, making the All-Star team along the way. The heavy usage was a bit much for his elbow to take, however. By mid-2012, a season during which he made a comparatively meager 66 appearances, he was briefly sidelined by elbow impingement. He began the 2013 season on the disabled list due to lingering elbow pain and soon received a platelet-rich plasma injection to promote healing. On May 16, he underwent his second TJ surgery, also by Dr. Andrews. To that point, he owned a 2.23 ERA, 3.00 FIP, and 26.6% K rate in 229.2 major-league innings.

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The Ronald Acuña era has begun, and in impressive fashion. Called up by the Braves on Wednesday after his service clock had been sufficiently gamed, the 20-year-old five-tool phenom made his debut against the Reds in Cincinnati, showing off his speed and his aggressive approach at the plate. He sparked a game-tying rally with his first major-league hit, and the Braves ultimately snapped a two-game losing streak against the Reds with a 5-4 win.

Acuña, who turned 20 on December 18, spent 2017 rocketing up the organizational ladder and the prospect rankings, beginning the season at High-A Florida and finishing it at Triple-A Gwinnett, hitting a combined .325/.374/.522 with 21 homers and 44 steals along the way. After ranking anywhere from 31st to 67th on major prospect lists last year, he topped those of Baseball America, Baseball Prospectus, and ESPN this spring, taking a back seat only to Shohei Ohtani on those of MLB.com and FanGraphs. Though he tore up the Grapefruit League this spring, either his hat was too crooked or his 2024 season too valuable for the Braves to attempt to start winning games with him in the lineup. General manager Alex Anthopoulos mumbled something about “the flow of the season,” millions of eyes rolled, and the team bought itself that extra year while Acuña started 2-for-19 at Triple-A Gwinnett.

The assumption with that move was that the Braves were just marking time in the fourth season of a rebuilding program that’s been far more dramatic than most, in terms of both highs (the stealing of 2015 overall No. 1 pick Dansby Swanson from the Diamondbacks, the 2017 opening of SunTrust Park) and lows (the mid-2016 firing of manager Fredi Gonzalez, the late-2017 resignation and subsequent lifetime ban of general manager John Coppolella for circumventing international signing rules). With Wednesday’s win, they’re now 13-10, their best start in five years and good for third place in a topsy-turvy NL East behind the Mets (15-7) and Phillies (15-8). That trio of teams finished a combined 70 games below .500 last year, but with the Nationals (11-14) starting slowly and the Marlins stripped nearly to the bone after a 77-85 finish that was somehow good for second place, the standings look a whole lot different.

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The Astros allowed eight runs to the Angels and lost on Tuesday night, thus falling out of first place in the AL West. At this time of year, none of that is a big deal, but what’s noteworthy is that the eight runs surrendered were as many as the defending world champions had given up in their previous seven games combined. The barrage, which included two homers by Andrelton Simmons and one by Mike Trout, broke an eight-game streak in which the Astros had allowed two runs or fewer, the longest in the majors in nearly three years, and put a dent in what has been one of the most stifling early-season run-prevention acts in recent history. You may have heard: these guys are still very, very good.

The Astros’ two-or-fewer streak actually began with a loss, in this case a 2-1 defeat to the Mariners on April 16, but they rebounded with a vengeance, outscoring Seattle 20-4 over the final three games of that series, all of them victories, then allowed just two runs during a three-game sweep of the White Sox. Monday night’s 2-0 loss to the Angels ended their winning streak but kept the prevention streak alive, albeit for just one more day.

According to the Baseball-Reference Play Index, the Astros’ eight-game streak of preventing two or fewer runs tied four other clubs for the second-longest of the post-1992 expansion era:

The 2015 edition of the Astros — the one that marked their return to contention — posted the longest such streak since 1992 (Pirates, July 30-August 8), holding the Rays, Dodgers and Yankees to two runs or fewer in nine straight games. The 1982 Cardinals also had a nine-game streak; you’d have to go back to the 1974 Orioles (August 29 to September 7) to find a 10-gamer. Even at eight games, what the Astros just did was pretty special.

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Between injuries that sapped his speed, a monster contract that hasn’t aged well, and a reputation as a clubhouse problem (deserved or not) that has followed him from team to team, Matt Kemp has more often been considered a liability than an asset over the past few years. Improbably, the 33-year-old outfielder is now back where his major-league career began in Los Angeles, one of the hottest hitters on a team desperate for a big bat in the absence of Justin Turner.

Once upon a time, Kemp was a superstar, a homegrown lineup centerpiece on a club teeming with young talent. A sixth-round draft pick out of an Oklahoma high school in 2003, he was just 21 when he debuted with the Dodgers on May 28, 2006. He hit seven homers in his first 15 games before cooling off, and while he was limited to 98 games the next year by a season-opening return to Triple A and a two-month absence due to a right shoulder separation, he hit a sizzling .342/.373/.52. Once the Andruw Jones experiment ended, he took over the team’s center-field job in 2008, and in his first two full seasons, he totaled 44 homers, 69 steals, and 8.3 WAR while helping the team to back-to-back NLCS berths. He even won a Gold Glove in 2009, his only season in center after which both his DRS and UZR were in the black.

Kemp’s game fell apart in 2010, a time during which he later conceded he lost focus amid the temptations of Tinseltown. As the Baseball Prospectus 2011 annual summarized, “He incited the ire of Joe Torre and his staff by giving up at-bats, failing to hustle out of the batter’s box, blundering on the basepaths and in the field, and showing a general lack of intensity.” Then came a 2011 turnaround in which he more than lived up to the hype, with an NL-leading 39 homers and the league’s second-best wRC+; he fell one steal shy of the fifth 40-homer/40-steal season in history. He won another Gold Glove, finished second in the NL MVP voting, and in November of that year, signed an eight-year, $160 million extension — which, at the time, was the largest contract in NL history and the seventh-largest overall.

Then came injuries, an endless litany: both hamstrings, a torn labrum and rotator-cuff damage in his left shoulder, a severe left ankle sprain. And surgeries, too: two for the shoulder, plus one for the ankle, including a microfracture procedure. Over the 2102-13 seasons, he played just 179 games, and the Dodger outfield, which now included Yasiel Puig and (occasionally) Carl Crawford, as well as Andre Ethier, learned to get along fine without him. Though Kemp returned to hit .287/.346/.506 with 25 homers and 141 wRC+ in 2014, his defensive woes (-22 DRS, -13 UZR) spelled the end of his time in center field and limited him to 2.5 WAR.

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It took a no-hitter — a 108-pitch, 10-strikeout gem by the A’s Sean Manaea — to stop the Red Sox in their tracks, snapping their eight-game winning streak and dealing them just their third loss of the year in their 20th game. Though they lost to the A’s again on Sunday, they’ve spent time in some rarefied air in recent days.

When the Sox beat the A’s on Friday night to climb to 17-2, they became the first team in 31 years to reach that early-season pinnacle, and just the sixth since 1901, when the American League began play:

Two of those five teams went on to win the World Series. The 1955 Dodgers, managed by Hall of Famer Walter Alston and led by Hall of Famers Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, Pee Wee Reese, and Duke Snider (and also featuring a 19-year-old bonus baby named Sandy Koufax), started the year 10-0 and ran their record to 22-2 before taking their third loss. By that point, they were nine games ahead of the National League pack; they would win by 13.5 games, then claim their long-awaited first championship by beating the Yankees in a seven-game World Series.

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Bryan Price finally took the fall on Thursday, but as the manager of a team short on major-league talent, with a rebuilding effort that isn’t yet close to paying off, it was only a matter of time. It’s difficult to see why the Reds waited until now instead of dismissing him last October — after four full seasons, another 18 games shouldn’t have changed the thinking of the Reds’ brass — but one thing that didn’t enhance Price’s chances for survival was the early-season struggles of Joey Votto. On the heels of one of the best seasons of his career, the 34-year-old first baseman is off to an uncharacteristically bad start, one that can’t help but stand out even given the small sample sizes.

Votto is currently hitting just .258/.315/.273, with one extra-base hit and five walks — as many as he had in a single game last August 27 — in 73 plate appearances. That’s from a five-time All-Star who hit .320/.454/.578 last year, with the majors’ best on-base percentage and walk total (135) and the NL’s top wRC+ (165). His SLG and .258 ISO were his highest since 2010.

In fact, before we dig into this year’s dismal numbers, it’s worth noting that Votto may have done more to enhance his Hall of Fame case last year than just about any player. With his second seven-win season in three years (according to Baseball-Reference WAR, which I continue to use for my JAWS system), he surpassed the seven-year peak score of the average Hall of Fame first baseman and put himself in range of surpassing the JAWS standard as well.

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The 2018 Marlins have had precious little about which to cheer so far, and the forecast calls for more of the same. The performance of 25-year-old lefty Jarlin Garcia has been an exception, however. In the first two starts of his big-league career, Jarlin the Marlin* threw a hidden no-hitter — no hits allowed over a span of 27 outs, stretched across multiple games — via six hitless innings against the Mets on April 11 followed by 4.1 hitless innings against the Yankees on Tuesday night. Garcia was hardly perfect, scattering eight walks across those two starts, but joining Bartolo Colon and Shohei Ohtani in an exclusive club — the other pitchers to throw hidden no-hitters so far in 2018 — is close to perfection itself.

*His name is actually pronounced HAR-leen, which puts him behind teammate Starlin Castro in that pecking order.

Prior to his seven no-hit innings against the Astros on Sunday, Colon had gone the last 2.2 innings of his three-inning relief stint on April 10 without allowing a hit. Ohtani’s last 4.2 innings of his April 1 outing against the A’s were hitless, as were his first 6.1 in the rematch a week later. He and Garcia thus share the season high of 33 outs without a hit recorded.

Like any reputable speakeasy, you won’t find the Hidden No-Hitter Club on Google Maps, but the club itself isn’t that exclusive (a point which I’ll address momentarily). But first, consider Garcia. Unlike Colon and Ohtani, with whom you can’t help but be familiar if you’re reading this, he’s hardly a household name. The 6-foot-3, 215-pound Dominican-born southpaw isn’t a rookie, having spent all but the first couple weeks of last season in the Marlins’ bullpen, from which he made 68 appearances to the tune of a 4.73 ERA and 4.23 FIP. He jumped to the majors from Double-A Jacksonville, where over the course of 2016 and early -17 he totaled all of 80.1 innings, mostly as a starter; he missed 10 weeks in mid-2016 due to a triceps strain, and entered last season with mixed reviews as to whether he was even one of the top 10 prospects in one of the game’s worst farm systems.

As a reliever, Garcia held his own through the end of August (2.91 ERA, 3.74 FIP), then allowed nine runs while retiring just three hitters in his first two September appearances. In all, he struck out a modest 18.7% of hitters while relying upon a combination of a four-seam fastball that averaged 94.7 mph, a slider that produced a 14.5% whiff rate and a .194 AVG/.242 SLG when put in play, and a changeup that produced a 21.7% whiff rate and .129 AVG/.258 SLG when put in play (data via Brooks Baseball).

With nothing to lose but another 100 or so games, the Marlins decided to return Garcia to the rotation for 2018, and while the results have been superficially encouraging, neither his .096 BABIP nor his 2.6-point K-BB% mark (16.9% K, 14.3% BB) are sustainable. But until he’s just another guy getting knocked around in a Marlins’ uniform, his performance is at least worth celebrating. In terms of predecessors, I’ve struggled to find a parallel for his hitless first start, which ended after 77 pitches because manager Don Mattingly and pitching coach Juan Nieves saw signs he was laboring.

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