The Twins demoted a struggling Byron Buxton, once the consensus top prospect in the game, twice last season.

The first occasion was on April 25th, after 17 games and 13 starts. Buxton was batting .156. The Twins dispatched Buxton again to Rochester, N.Y., on August 6th after Buxton had played in 63 games — 59 starts — and was slashing .193/.247/.315.

On April 25th of this season, Buxton was again struggling mightily, batting .133.

After a strong finish last season, he had issues right out of the gate this season.

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PITTSBURGH — FanGraphs alum and MLB.com analyst Mike Petriello authored the following tweet last October. The social-media missive is pinned to his Twitter profile — and rightfully so, because it’s funny, and humor is often rooted in some truth.

The truth, in this case, is that Kenley Jansen has dominated with one pitch like few before him — specifically, with a cutter that he’s thrown 86.0% of the time this year and 88.4% of the time over his carer. Jansen’s usage has invited natural comparisons to Mariano Rivera’s own approach for years. Jansen has become dominant in Rivera-like fashion and now just requires ultimate postseason success to further raise his profile.

I showed Jansen the tweet recently in the visiting clubhouse at PNC Park. To get a better look, he took my iPhone in his massive catcher’s mitt of a left hand and examined it. He could have crushed it like a soda can and returned the fragments to me. I waited in suspense for his reaction.

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PNC PARK — On Wednesday, I approached Yasmani Grandal on something of a covert mission in the visiting clubhouse at PNC Park. I was attempting to extract a candid answer from the Dodgers catcher.

I did not formally introduce myself, though he could surmise I was a reporter from my visible media credential, and possibly from my build and attire.

I began by asking him if he knew where he finished in NL MVP voting last season.

“I heard someone voted for me,” Grandal said.

I asked Grandal what he thought of that vote.

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Nicky Delmonico demands our attention, if only for a moment.

In the midst of an all-in rebuild of the Chicago White Sox, general manager Rick Hahn has focused on acquiring high-upside, high-risk assets who could help the club in future seasons. Delmonico is not that. He was signed to a minor-league deal after being released by the Brewers in 2015, having failed to reach even Double-A.

Now, three years later, Delmonico is living a charmed life. Over his first 87 career major-league plate appearances, he owns a .315/.425/.589 slash line and .427 wOBA — a figure that’s 70% better than league average. He even hit his first home run in Fenway Park, against the club for which he grew up rooting.

Not surprisingly, there’s a lot to suggest the fun won’t continue — at least not to this degree. According to Baseball Savant, Delmonico has been nearly the most fortunate hitter in baseball this season among those who have seen at least 200 pitches. He’s recorded the fifth-highest wOBA relative to his xwOBA of the 474 players in that sample.

The outfielder possesses a pedestrian average exit velocity of 82.9 mph through his first 59 batted balls tracked by Statcast. He’s barreled just 5.1% of those balls in play, another pedestrian figure.

Nor are the underlying skills indicative of a future star. Delmonico was never rated as a top prospect (though he did rank 92nd on the stats-only KATOH top 100 list this year). Confined to the corner outfield, Delmonico has to hit just to be average.

But Delmonico — a former bat boy at the University of Tennessee, where his father coached — doesn’t need to be a star for this to be a success story. Steamer and ZiPS project him to be a league-average bat (99 wRC+) going forward this season.

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Rich Hill keeps forcing us to rethink everything.

He has us rethinking how to pitch, finding success even while employing just a fastball and curve — and frequently utilizing the latter as his primary pitch.

Has has us rethinking when it’s appropriate to give up on an arm. Perhaps never, in his case. Hill’s return to the majors — and to a three-year, $48-million deal — began in independent ball two years ago.

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Rob Manfred might be distancing himself from robot umps.

Last October, Manfred addressed and seemed open to the idea that tracking systems could be used to call balls and strikes:

“As technology continues to improve and those sorts of adjustments can be made [in] real time, that technology will become more feasible for use on the field. I don’t believe we are there yet.”

But last week, while speaking with USA Today’s Bob Nightengale, the MLB commissioner seemed to back away from the idea of turning over ball and strike calls to machines.

“I don’t believe the current technology is sufficient to call balls and strikes on a real-time basis,’’ Manfred says. “If and when we get to that technology — and sooner or later we’re going to get there — there’s still a fundamental question about whether or not we want to remove that human element from the game.

“There is a human aspect to that, a work aspect to it, that’s always been an important part of our game… I don’t think you can just jump to the conclusion that if you have the technology to do it that’s the right thing for your product.”

Added Nightengale: “Bravo.”

As indicated by Nightengale’s response, there’s still plenty of resistance to technology in the game — or anything that challenges tradition.

Maybe we’re further away from seeing automated calls than some thought, a fact that might be frustrating to Ian Kinsler and Joe Maddon, both of whom have voiced frustrations with calls recently.

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Washington left-hander Gio Gonzalez pitched into the seventh inning on Sunday in San Diego. His 120th pitch of the late afternoon was ripped into right field by Manuel Margot for a single. It was his last pitch of the outing, as Nationals manager Dusty Baker strode to the mound, gestured to the bullpen, and took the ball from Gonzalez.

Twenty years ago, this wouldn’t have been a noteworthy event. The sequence would seem rather innocuous, in fact. But we live in an age marked by an unprecedented number of pitching injuries, an age in which teams and players are more often turning to science to better understand performance and injury prevention. We live in an era when pitch counts routinely accompany the game data in the corner of a telecast. No team of which I’m aware has figured out how to significantly reduce pitching injuries, but there is a general sense that it’s better to be safe than sorry.

And this is where Baker stands out from the crowd.

While pitch counts are crude metrics, only 10 teams have allowed a starting pitcher to exceed 120 pitches this season; only two teams have allowed it to occur on multiple occasions.

Baker and the Nationals have accomplished it four times.

Baker is lapping the field.

The Nationals under Baker also rank second in average pitch count per start (100.5 pitches), one of only two teams averaging more than 100 pitches per start. They also rank second in number of 100-plus pitch outings (76). The Nationals are trailing only the Red Sox (101.1, 81) in each category, according to the Baseball Prospectus data.

It’s not curious just that Baker is leaning on his starters to an unusual degree relative to the league in 2017, but that he’s doing so at a time when the Nationals have a 14-game lead in the NL East and a 100% chance of reaching the NLDS according to FanGraphs playoff projections entering Monday. This would seem like the time to give players more rest when possible.

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For some time, it seemed like the battle between analytics and scouts had died out.

The divide first surfaced in the public consciousness following the publication of Moneyball 14 years ago. Michael Lewis recounts in his book how some in the A’s front office contemplated a future in which scouts were redundant and no longer necessary — at least not in such numbers. It was an extreme view.

In the meantime, however, a sort of peace appeared to have been brokered. It was generally accepted that the best clubs, the model organizations — like the St. Louis Cardinals for much of the 2000s — successfully integrated both camps.

And then in 2015 something happened: Statcast was installed in every major-league stadium.

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