Nolan Arenado will never be Joey Votto. He’s too hyperactive, he’s too aggressive, and he knows it. He’s fine being Nolan Arenado, too. But that doesn’t mean the Rockies’ standout third baseman doesn’t struggle to find the perfect approach at the plate to fit his skill set.

Over the last two years, there hasn’t been so much of a yo-yo in his approach as a steady progression. “I’m just trying to be selective, as much as I can,” he said before a game with the Giants. “But I don’t want to get too selective, because that’s when I get tentative.”

A hitter in his own head is no good, but a hitter that swings at everything isn’t either. While Arenado’s swing rates have never swung below league average (he’s almost 10% above league average for his career), his reach rates have changed, signaling that the batter has indeed started to discern balls and strikes better. Watch his monthly reach rate haltingly improve over his career:

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The list of guys with new pitches every spring runs deep (27 last year on Jason Collette’s excellent list). The list of those that continue to throw those pitches during the regular season is a little bit shorter (23 last year). And the group that see real success from adding that extra pitch is even shorter — ten pitchers added more than a percentage point to their swinging strike rate thanks to a new pitch last year.

This year, the Spring Training list was once again full. Brewers’ starter Jimmy Nelson is on there, and he’s often been called a two-pitch guy since his changeup is not a plus pitch. Now he’s added a spike curve to his mid-90s fastball and above-average slider. He used it plenty in his first start, so he’s already made the jump to the second list. Can his new pitch mean continued success this year?

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When you look at the player pages for a prospect, you’ll see present and future grades. When it comes to the grades per pitch, the difference between the two is mostly consistency. As Kiley McDaniel puts it, the future grade is “usually the best version of the pitch currently.”

If you watched Michael Pineda pitch yesterday, you know exactly what this means. By Gameday, he threw nine changeups, but by PITCHf/x he threw 12, and the number might be even larger. Only twice before in his 42 starts has he thrown that many. They weren’t all good. But when they were good…

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Last year was the worst year of Shin-Soo Choo’s career. He shrugs it off, but it was clear that he was hurt for most of the year. September brought two surgeries, one for his elbow and one for his ankle. Talk to him about those injuries, and you quickly see a central conflict in every player’s life — do you play through an injury and provide less value, or do you take the time off to get right?

In the context of the season last year, it was clear that Choo wanted to do his best to help a hurting team despite his own problems. “Everybody on the team was hurt, it was a tough season,” he admitted before a game against the Athletics. “I wanted to play, that’s all.” The Rangers last year set a new record for days lost the disabled list, with 99 more days than the 2004 Diamondbacks.

If you play through injury, your numbers suffer. That’s how Choo had his worst strikeout and second-worst power numbers since he became a regular. And then the fans tend to howl, particularly if you’re in the first year of a big new deal with a new team. “I know I was hurting, but I didn’t want to say anything, because it’s my job to stay in the lineups every day,” Choo said.

And the howling? Did it bother the player? “It’s okay, I’ll take it, it’s my job,” he said. “You’re a ball player, in any sport, people talk about your numbers, people talk bad, that’s okay, it’s our job.” Really, people are going to complain either way in this situation. “I’m okay with no numbers, I don’t want people to say he’s aways hurt,” Choo said.

But it’s hard to pinpoint exactly how the injury hurts you at the plate or in the field. “I just had to play, I didn’t think about it too much,” Choo said of how the elbow and ankle affected his play.

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The least interesting thing about recovering from a shoulder injury might be trying to figure out how it happened. It happened, and life has to move on. In Sean Doolittle’s case, it might — might! — have happened while he was taking anti-inflammatories for his oblique late last year, meaning the pain was “slightly masked” by the drugs as the pitcher put it. Who knows.

The best you can do is strengthen the muscles around the injury and work your way slowly back to health. You can’t just start throwing. “Your instinct is to open it up as soon as you get a ball in your hand,” said Doolittle before the A’s first game this season. So the team keeps the ball away from you for a bit.

Kyle Boddy, who founded pitching development complex Driveline Baseball, isn’t surprised to hear Doolittle talk about that instinct to throw hard. “Guys literally have no idea how to play catch,” Boddy said. “They line up from 45 feet and start throwing like 65-70 MPH. This is because many pro organizations give you ten minutes to throw before taking the field, which is ultimately pretty injurious and limiting to the arm.”

So before the throwing come the strengthening exercises. These might be familiar to any pitcher, but Doolittle says he’s just been doing them more often, in more variations, with more sets.

Many involve resistance bands and shoulder and arm movements against the resistance created by those bands. Other exercises have him holding the bands in static positions as a trainer pushes in different directions on his arm. Each time his body attempts to bring the hand back to that static position, a different small muscle is activated. Even without a resistance bad at home, you can test the theory by balancing on one foot with your eyes shut — notice all the little muscles in your legs and torso that work hard to keep you upright.

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Because there’s a lot of noise, we tend to look past spring training stats. But recent work suggests that using spring training stats can improve projections, and our own Mike Podhorzer worked with Matt Swartz to show that a pitcher’s strikeouts and walks in the spring are meaningful results.

In other words, if we use our small-sample tools, maybe Spring Training really is a little bit like September: expanded rosters, some meaningless games, but still baseball, being played at a high level. The veterans usually play veterans early in the game, and the minor leaguers don’t get the same number of innings or plate appearances to be grouped with the veterans in any statistical mining we might do.

So, that said, let’s look at the starting pitchers, and their strikeouts. These strikeout rates are basically half-way to the stabilization point — the point at which they represent more signal than noise — and they’ve been (mostly) facing the veterans before they leave early, along the right field line.

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The Braves have acquired Trevor Cahill and cash for their Josh Elander, a 24-year-old former catcher that was playing outfield in High-A Lynchburg for the second time last year. So mostly this transaction is about the Braves getting a cheap starter on the cheap. The quality of that incoming pitcher, and the fit on a rebuilding team — these are the things that are most debatable about the deal.

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This week’s nuttiest pitches might even have a point. But let’s just start with the GIFs. Because it’s fun to watch crazy pitches do crazy things.

Let’s do the uncle charlies, the yakkers, the yellow hammers — curveballs are on the menu today. As usual, we’re looking at the last three years because that’s what MLB.tv allows us, and we’re sorting PITCHF/x to find the pitches with the most extreme horizontal and vertical movement, as well as velocities.

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