As May came to an end, I made my way cautiously over to Brian Dozier, who was slashing .202/.294/.329 at the time. Approaching a player in the midst of a slump can go one of two ways — you can either get Brandon Moss and complete honesty about what that battle is like, or you get frustrated non-answers tinged with anger.

Dozier was more of the former — even though his numbers at the time were some of the worst of his career, particularly the ones that concerned balls in play. He didn’t mind, though, since he had a simple solution on which he was working that day. The results were immediate.

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Atlanta’s ace, Julio Teheran, has a career 3.34 ERA, a good mark even for this pitching-friendly era. This year’s numbers, at least in some ways, are the best of his career. He’s a 25-year-old with less than $30 million in guaranteed money remaining on his contract, which runs through 2020 if you count the low-cost team option for that season. If the Braves make him available before the deadline, he’d instantly become one of the most valuable assets on the market.

But is Teheran an ace, like the Braves are likely to price him? Or is he more of a good pitcher on a nice run? Since assuming regular major-league duties in 2013, he’s 44th in pitching Wins Above Replacement despite being 11th in innings pitched, as he’s accrued value by staying healthy and racking up innings, but not dominating in the traditional walk, strikeout, and home run categories.

But this year, once again, Teheran is dealing, and he’s doing so without strikeout, walk, or home-run rates that would appear on the first page of each leaderboard. For teams hoping to acquire the Braves ace, they’ve got to be wondering who he will be on their team; the guy who looks great by ERA or the guy who looks like an innings-eater by FIP?

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We often treat knuckleball pitchers as if they were members of some long-forgotten sect, practicing their secret ninjutsu on the rest of the league with a pitch that defies gravity and cannot be classified. That’s fine, the knuckler is the rarest pitch in baseball, and it has its iconic moments. Let’s not begrudge anyone a little fun.

But once you peal back the layers on the pitch, you start to see that each truism about the knuckler isn’t necessarily true. In fact, there are probably more ways in which the art of throwing a knuckleball is similar to the art of throwing other pitches than it is different. At least, that is, in terms of strategy and outcomes. Mechanics are obviously a different story.

Let’s unpack some of the things we might hear about knuckleballs, and then us the data and the words of R.A. Dickey and Steven Wright to guide our analysis.

Velocity doesn’t matter.

Maybe this isn’t a thing that’s said a ton, but nobody breathlessly reports knuckleball velocity readings the way they do fastball readings, so at least implicitly we’ve decided that speed doesn’t matter as much with the floating butterfly.

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Everything Xander Bogaerts did well in his breakout season last year, he seems to be doing better this year. More power, more patience, more contact, and better defense — he’s basically equaled last year’s full-season WAR figure already, and there’s three-fifths of a season left to go. He’s leading the league right now!

Of course, WAR isn’t your traditional counting stat: Bogaerts could hypothetically put up negative wins going forward, were he to regress in one way or all of them. But since he gave us such a great preview last year, it’s tempting to believe in all of the improvements he’s made. He’s really the same guy, just a little better.

At the center of his improvement has been how hard he hits the ball, the angles (both vertical and horizontal) of those batted balls, and his defensive range. He didn’t think much had changed about those particilar variables when I asked him, though. Just a few minor tweaks.

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“I’ll tell you one thing I don’t like,” Sean Doolittle said as he grabbed his glove and jogged his way out of the clubhouse for stretch. “The hitters get to talk to the umpire and I don’t.”

You see it all the time, even if many hitters don’t want to talk about their conversations with the umpire. Muttering, head-shaking, even outright questions — “where was that?”. Occasionally you’ll even see demonstrative complaints that don’t result in the hitter being tossed, but do result in some aggressive stares and good old baseball posturing.

On the mound, it seems like the stakes are higher. Pitchers might be allowed a stare or aggressive body language, but if it escalates too quickly… Is Doolittle right? Do pitchers do get less leeway before they are warned or ejected? Or get to say less? They definitely don’t get to talk in close quarters with the person determining the balls and strikes, especially in the American League.

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This past Monday, against Cleveland, Seattle left-hander James Paxton recorded the highest single-game average fastball velocity of his career, at just under 99 mph. While sources differ on the matter, it was at least a mile per hour harder than his previous single-game high, which he’d established in his previous start (and season debut) at San Diego about a week earlier. Jeff Sullivan described that appearance against the Padres as “horrible and promising,” because Paxton had allowed eight runs in just 3.2 innings, but also exhibited a sort of arm speed he hadn’t previously. Monday’s start wasn’t horrible, at all. And even more promising.

There’s a mechanical explanation for why Paxton threw harder on Monday than he’d ever thrown before. But there’s also a change in pitch mix that led to one of the best starts of his life, too. And with those new mechanics and that new pitch mix also came a new mindset. It might be fair to say this is a new James Paxton.

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The first read of Trevor Story’s split stats produces an easy narrative. In April, he recorded a .988 OPS due (in part) to ridiculous, unsustainable power. Since then, his OPS has been under .800, with half as many homers. The league adjusted to him, and he didn’t adjust back. Simple enough.

Of course it’s much more complicated than that in reality, at least in terms of what’s happening on the field. To the player, it’s simple.

Jeff Sullivan documented a stark adjustment that the league made to the Rockies’ shortstop after that huge first week. They stopped throwing him inside because he showed he could pull those pitches for homers.

“A lot of people don’t pitch inside, I don’t think,” said Story about that first week, framing that first week as the anomaly, which might come as a surprise. “Some teams do, and some teams don’t.”

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Generally, the theory is that even top prospects bust. Byron Buxton is the toppest of top prospects, but even that distinction can’t protect him from failure of one kind or another. Exploring that theory is much more difficult when you’re the player himself. Or the writer asking that player about those expectations and the difficulties he’s been having so far. “You’re going to have a stamp on you wherever you are, but I try to put it to the side,” the struggling Twin said recently before a game with the Athletics. It’s hard not to empathize.

The theory with Buxton is that the tools are there but that he needs to make an adjustment to major-league pitching. It’s looked bad, but the talent is in there.

In 195 major-league plate appearances so far, Buxton has struck out 36% of the time and walked just 4% of the time, for a 32-point differential between his strikeout and walk rates. It’s a toxic combination. And rare. Consider: among 106 top-10 prospects since 1990, only Javier Baez has recorded a worse strikeout- minus walk-rate differential in his first 200 plate appearances.

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