You sure wouldn’t think there would be anything wrong with the Diamondbacks. They currently have the best record in the National League by multiple games, and even after a loss on Wednesday, there’s an eight-game gap between them and the Dodgers with almost a quarter of the season already gone. They survived the absence of Steven Souza Jr. They’re actively surviving the absence of Jake Lamb. They’ll try to continue to survive the absence of Taijuan Walker. No team ever stays totally healthy.

And one of the big early stories has been the breakthrough by Patrick Corbin. After eight starts, Corbin owns a 2.12 ERA, with an easy career-high rate of strikeouts. The biggest change for Corbin has been an increased reliance on his best pitch — his slider. He’s now throwing the pitch at multiple speeds, sort of going the way of Rich Hill or Lance McCullers. Corbin is setting himself up for an offseason payday. And on the surface, he’s cruising, having allowed just two runs over his last two starts.

Yet something underneath is incredibly worrisome. Something fundamental to the very idea of pitching. Corbin has suddenly lost his zip. No one would do that on purpose.

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The other day, I wrote about Corey Dickerson, and how, since he’s joined the Pirates, he’s all but stopped striking out. I went through and tried to identify changes he’s made. This has become a fairly routine writing process, looking at changes in the numbers and then going to the video. I realize I write more about players who are becoming good, or who are becoming bad, than I do about players who are still good, or who are still bad. Players who stay the same are old news. I’m biased to look for players doing something different, and in that regard I’m not alone.

Players who change are interesting. Players who don’t change are interesting, too, but those players are just out there, acknowledged and understood. When players start making adjustments, or when opponents start making adjustments to them, it’s like you’ve got a mystery box, and you just want to know what’s in it. What is the new player going to be? Has he become truly better, or truly worse? Players become moving targets, and if nothing else, we can stand to learn from whatever happens.

I guess I don’t need to justify this. I think many of us are in the same boat. We want to know who’s changing, and how. I’ve run some math. This post will have a big table in it.

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Many of us have jobs. All of us have lives. And one thing that’s true about any job, or about any life, is that sometimes you wake up in the morning and you just don’t have it. Maybe you’re groggy, maybe you’re irritable, maybe you’ve got brain fog, maybe you have a headache. For whatever reason, there are simply bad days, and they can happen at random. They can come right after normal days, and they can come right after great ones. It’s all part of the experience of existence. You learn not to let the bad days define you.

Many of us have jobs, and all of us have lives, but few of us are performers. The average employee, when necessary, can hide herself or put forth a reduced effort. You can make yourself scarce, or even call in sick. If you’re just having a regular weekend day in the dumps, you can choose to stay in, to not engage with the world. Everyone has the right to bad days, and most people have the flexibility to more or less live their bad days in private. Other people don’t have to know when you’re off.

Performers, entertainers, have no such luxury. The responsibility is to perform for an audience, an audience that will quickly realize if something’s not right. The pressure to do well is ever-present, because, one way or another, you’re going to have to do something, and the people will judge you if what you do isn’t good. The stakes can be frightening, even paralyzing, because there’s no option to hide when you’re a performer. A performer like Dylan Bundy.

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Baseball is a game governed partially by design. When you see teams like the Astros or Cubs win the World Series, you can almost convince yourself that people are actually in charge. You can almost believe we have a handle on this. And to an extent, we do; baseball as a sport isn’t entirely random. The most talented players often become the best players. Clubs with enough of the best players often become the best teams. What’s so hard about that? Find and develop good players, and the rest should take care of itself.

But there’s a dirty little open secret. And this isn’t about how baseball games can turn on the flukiest of events. That’s true, also, but I’m referring to player development. What we’re all led to believe is that scouts are out there looking for guys who could be good. Then coaches and experience mold them, and then, eventually, guys become successful. A quality major-league player is a triumph for an entire organization. That performance level, however, can be fleeting. Becoming good in the majors isn’t the end of the story. A player is also supposed to stay good. And there’s surprisingly little people can do about that. Talent gets ripped away, often by injury. Injuries can be cruel and hard to predict, yet in a given year they can shape the landscape of an entire league. They can alter a team’s very direction.

Recently, the Mets designated Matt Harvey for assignment. Tuesday, the Mets traded Harvey to the Reds for Devin Mesoraco. Harvey’s development was a triumph for the Mets, just as Mesoraco’s development was a triumph for the Reds. They represented the best of what could go right for a talented young player in the proper hands. Now they’ve come to represent the nightmares that baseball people have when they fall asleep. Harvey and Mesoraco were two of the best. They weren’t allowed to sustain.

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One of the bigger stories of the early part of the season has been the ace-level emergence of Gerrit Cole. Freed from the Pirates, Cole has moved on to the Astros and seemingly threatened to throw a no-hitter every start. Cole’s strikeout rate has taken off, and one has been left to wonder why this pitcher didn’t show up consistently in Pittsburgh. On the Pirates’ side, Colin Moran and Michael Feliz have been fine. The club has also overachieved, winning more games than it’s lost. But if anything, the Pirates’ early success makes the loss of Cole more painful. No one likes to see a player improve somewhere else.

Something about going to Houston has allowed Cole to tap into his inner potential. There’s been much conversation about why the Pirates couldn’t pull this talent out. As some consolation, however, the Pirates have sort of done a similar thing to the Rays. Near the end of February, the Pirates picked up Corey Dickerson for a song. The Rays, I’m sure, are content with the early performance by C.J. Cron. But the Dickerson of the present doesn’t look like the Dickerson of yesterday. Cole left Pittsburgh and found a new level. Dickerson arrived in Pittsburgh and found a new level. It doesn’t make up for trading an ace, yet there are reasons why the Pirates are firmly in contention.

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Sunday afternoon, Shohei Ohtani returned to the mound for the first time in nearly two weeks. He was very good against the Mariners until the bottom of the seventh, when he failed to retire any of three batters. Still, that partial inning couldn’t spoil the appearance, and Ohtani’s ankle seemed like it must’ve been perfectly fine. To fast-forward here, I’ll note that Ohtani made very quick work of Mitch Haniger in the bottom of the second. Let’s watch that.

The first pitch, a called strike:

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On today’s edition of Effectively Wild, Ben Lindbergh and I had the opportunity to talk with Steven Brault. Brault is interesting, first of all, because he’s a major-league pitcher. In the grand scheme of things, there are not that many major-league pitchers, and surviving at the level requires one to be an expert at his craft. Aside from pitching, Brault is also a musician, and he co-hosts a podcast with teammate Trevor Williams. As an individual, Brault has a lot going on, but the reason we sought him out in the first place is because of his hitting. Brault has batted a total of 32 times in the bigs. He’s recorded seven hits, sure. But he also has yet to strike out.

Presumably, you know enough to know that’s atypical. You already understood that strikeouts are on the rise, and that, on balance, pitcher-hitters are terrible. Brault is finding himself on the same list as names like Dizzy Dean, Heinie Meine, and Sloppy Thurston. It’s not that Brault is a hitter in the way that Madison Bumgarner is a hitter. Bumgarner stands out because of his power. Brault stands out because of his contact. Among active players with zero strikeouts, Brault is first in plate appearances, with 32. Carlos Rivero is standing in a distant second, with eight.

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You could almost be convinced that hitting is easy. Or, at least, you could almost be convinced that getting better at hitting is easy. What can a hitter do to improve in this day and age? Aim up. Try to hit the ball in the air. Elevate and celebrate, and everything. So much contemporary analysis is built around identifying a player or players who are hitting more fly balls than they used to. And, without question, for some players, this has been the key. For some players, aiming up has unlocked potential that could never get out. Especially in the era of aggressive infield shifts, a ball in the air is more valuable than a ball on the ground.

But the important equation isn’t so simple. We went through the opposite of this 10 or 15 years ago. There was a time when we all fell in love with ground-ball pitchers, because, after all, grounders can’t be homers. But there are processes that lead to someone getting grounders, and there are processes that lead to someone getting flies, and fly-ball pitchers have their own upsides. Moving to the present, with hitters, it’s not about whether a fly is better than a grounder. It’s about the swing. What specific kind of swing can allow a hitter to become his best self, overall?

The answer isn’t the same for everyone. The answer could never be the same for everyone. Some hitters, for sure, have gotten better by steepening their swing paths. Kyle Schwarber and Joc Pederson are two hitters attempting the opposite.

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Wednesday night, in a game against the A’s, the Mariners started James Paxton and received one of the most dominant starts in the franchise’s whole entire history. A couple innings after Paxton was removed, the Mariners lost, and the conversation deteriorated into an argument over bringing in the closer in a non-save situation. Thursday has brought the additional news that Ichiro Suzuki is transitioning into a non-roster advisory role, so it would be easy for Paxton’s start to get lost in the shuffle. It wasn’t the most important story of the game, and the game is no longer the most important story of the day.

But I won’t turn down many opportunities to write about James Paxton. I have the freedom to write what I want. And Paxton wasn’t only good against the A’s. He wasn’t only overwhelming. He was almost genuinely unhittable, collecting 16 strikeouts over the span of seven innings. Paxton issued one single walk, and he allowed a handful of hits. Nobody scored. Of Paxton’s 105 pitches, an incredible 80 of them were strikes. I know that, through the lens of ERA, this year’s Paxton has been modestly disappointing. That ERA misleads, and Wednesday provided a reminder that Paxton is almost as good as it gets. And as he went about setting down the A’s one by one, Paxton followed a pretty simple game plan. It’s one that could hint at even more to come.

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