Less than a month ago, the Pirates called up top prospect Jameson Taillon from the minor leagues, and slotted him into their struggling rotation. With Taillon now sidelined by shoulder fatigue, the Pirates have once again dipped into their minor-league repository. Today, they’ve called up yet another top-tier pitching prospect in Tyler Glasnow. Glasnow’s spent the past three months putting up sick-nasty numbers with the Pirates’ Triple-A affiliate. In 96 innings across 17 starts, he boasts a 1.78 ERA and 2.94 FIP. He’s struck out a remarkable 30% of batters faced this year, which is tops among qualified Triple-A hurlers. Triple-A hitters proved to be no match for his filthy fastball-curveball combination.

Glasnow’s mowed down minor-league hitters, but many are concerned that his lackluster command will prevent him from succeeding at the next level. That’s a big reason why the Pirates kept him in the minors as long as they did, and why they passed him over for Taillon when they needed a pitcher last month. As lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen noted in a recent chat, “His stuff is hellacious and pitchers with that body type often develop command late, but there’s a non-zero chance Glasnow never throws enough strikes to dominate.”

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At one point not too long ago the Rays were a game under .500 and hanging around the fringes of the developing wild-card race. It’s never easy for an organization to hover around .500 because it’s unclear in which direction you want to try to make the team go. Thankfully for the Rays front office, the team went and made things simple, suddenly playing like the worst team in the league. The Rays have bottomed out, and while there are still elements to like, the July approach is obvious: Sell. Sell for prospects, so as to accumulate prospects. Heaven knows there are organizations that practically run on prospects.

As has been discussed, the landscape of available starting pitchers hasn’t looked very sexy. The Rays could conceivably change that. Odds are, they won’t be real interested in moving Chris Archer. Jake Odorizzi, though, has generated attention. And then there’s Matt Moore. Moore’s numbers don’t look great, and he hasn’t scratched his once un-seeable ceiling. If you glance at Moore, you might see something like a fourth or fifth starter. Yet it’s also easy to convince yourself that Moore’s on the rise. He looks like one player with legitimate upside.

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One season ago, the Blue Jays had one of the stronger team offenses in baseball’s recent history. Going into this season, not too much stood to change. So throughout the winter, the talk was about what the Jays could do to strengthen the starting rotation. It would be fair to say that, when the Jays signed J.A. Happ, the community was underwhelmed. It looked like the plan was simply to brutalize, and then April rolled around, and the Jays had a good rotation and a mediocre lineup. Baseball was one step ahead of us. Baseball is forever one step ahead of us.

Concerns shifted, as they do. While Aaron Sanchez emerged as a quality starting pitcher, people began to wonder about some of the hitters. To be sure, there were some ugly trends taking place. Let me tell you, though: Those days are gone. There was a time, this year, when the Blue Jays had trouble scratching out runs. They’re back. The Blue Jays, I mean, and I guess the runs. They’re destroying the competition, and I’m not sure how much they can be expected to slow down.

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On June 29, the Baltimore Orioles reached their high-water mark of the season, according to our playoff odds. They’d defeated the San Diego Padres, 12-6 to win their seventh consecutive game, putting them 17 games above .500 with a 5.5-game lead in the division and a 71% chance to make the postseason.

And then the pitching staff happened. It’s been one week since that day, and in that week, little good has come out of the Orioles’ rotation. Baltimore followed up its seven-game winning streak with a five-game losing streak, due largely to the fact that its starting rotation averaged just five innings per start with a 7.46 ERA and 6.74 FIP. Sweeping conclusions aren’t to be drawn from any seven-game stretch, of course; the Cubs’ rotation has been equally underwhelming over the last week and there’s no alarm bells going off there. But unlike in Chicago, what we’ve seen from Baltimore’s starters over the last week only reinforces what we already knew: this Baltimore rotation isn’t very good.

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Tim Lincecum used to be freakishly good. He no longer is. Hampered by hip woes, the 32-year-old right-hander went from winning Cy Young awards and tossing no-hitters to the precipice of pitching oblivion. His velocity down and his ERA up, he succumbed to surgery last September.

He’s on the comeback trail, but not with the team he helped win three World Series. The former Giant signed with the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim in May and debuted with his new club in mid-June. His performances have been underwhelming. In four starts, the once-overpowering righty has allowed 29 hits in 18 innings. His fastball is averaging a pedestrian 89 mph.

The extent to which Lincecum can return to his old form remains to be seen. His surgically-repaired hip appears to be holding up, and his damaged psyche is healing as well. He’ll likely never be an elite power pitcher again — or a power pitcher at all — but he feels he can be a productive starter. Only time will tell.

Lincecum talked about his early development as a pitcher, and his career going forward, prior to a recent game at Fenway Park.

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Lincecum on pitching: “When you’re younger, you don’t have a plan. You either trust your stuff or you don’t, or you just throw it and hope. I always trusted my stuff. My fastball didn’t always play, but my curveball made my fastball better. That’s what I could execute. Some guys have an idea of how they can pitch — what pitches they should throw in what counts — but guys like me just end up throwing the ball and trusting it. There’s an aspect of that even at this level. You have a plan, but you’re basically throwing the baseball. It all depends on how well you can execute.

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A couple of months ago, we announced that we’d partnered with the Pitch Talks crew, and were going to be doing a series of events with them around the country this summer. Well, the first show of the summer is this Thursday, at The Wilbur in Boston, and the show is going to be great. Here’s the schedule for the show, in case you don’t believe me.

Paul Swydan and I will be representing the FanGraphs crew, hanging out with friends of the site Jonah Keri and Alex Speier, talking Red Sox and baseball from a nerdy perspective. A one-hour conversation with the Red Sox GM will follow — which is sure to be an interesting chat, given the Red Sox current position in the standings — and then the night will close out with a roundtable of some of the most notable beat writers in the area, plus a live recording of Jonah Keri’s podcast with Bill Lee, and then we’ll all hang out afterwards and have a good time.

Now, on its own, this is easily worth the $32 price of admission. But because we wanted to encourage those in the Boston area who overload on baseball conversations over the next month, we actually have a special offer for you to make this an absolute no-brainer.

If you attend the Pitch Talks show on Thursday night, you’ll be given access to a 24-hour promo code that will get you $32 offer the admission price to Saber Seminar, which is the best baseball conference of the year, and will be held on August 13th/14th on the campus of Boston University. A two-day collection of amazing speakers, presentations, research, and discussion, Saber Seminar is an absolute must-attend for anyone in the northeast interested in the game.

And, best of all, all of the money raised through ticket sales for the conference goes directly to cancer research and support; The Jimmy Fund and The Angioma Alliance will receive 100% of the proceeds raised through this great event. So you get to attend the best baseball conference of the year, and you get to support two great charities at the same time. It’s the biggest win-win in baseball.

But now, because of the support of the Pitch Talks crew, you now get to go to two great events for the price of one. Buy the $32 ticket to Pitch Talks on Thursday, then use the promo code to get a $32 discount on your ticket for Saber Seminar on Friday, and you’ll end up paying $140 for both Pitch Talks and Saber Seminar, while supporting two great charities at the same time.

If you’re going to be in the Boston area over the next five weeks, I highly encourage you to come to both events. Pitch Talks is going to be a lot of fun tomorrow night, and there is no better place to learn about baseball than Saber Seminar in August. I’ll be at both events, and would love to say hi to as many FanGraphs readers as possible.

So come hang out with me and a bunch of other great folks this Thursday at The Wilbur, and then come spend the weekend with even more awesome people at BU in August, all for just $140. Look forward to meeting plenty of you tomorrow night, and then catching up again next month, as we bond over baseball and our support of cancer research.

Buy your Tickets to Pitch Talks now, and we’ll see you on Thursday night!

A few years ago, I was driving down I-95 just north of Philadelphia when my timing belt broke. I had been happily cruising along in the far left lane of a four-lane road when all of a sudden my dashboard lit up with icons I’d never seen before and, even more alarmingly, my gas pedal refused to tell my car to “Go.” Without any means of acceleration, I somehow navigated my way across four lanes of traffic to the shoulder where my suddenly useless car came to a final stop. It was confusing, frustrating, and a little bit scary. Although I’ve never pitched professionally, I’m struck by a sense that right now Aaron Nola might feel a bit like I did that evening on the side of the road.

Aaron Nola was absolutely cruising. Through his first twelve starts he had a 2.65 ERA which was backed up by peripherals so strong that his FIP (2.77) and xFIP (2.74) provided an extra boost of confidence that, yes, Nola was for real. Then, without any real warning whatsoever, it all fell apart.

For the sake of convenience, let’s call those first 12 starts Nola’s Good Stretch and the most recent five starts his Bad Stretch. Nola has given up more earned runs (27 ER) in his 18-inning Bad Stretch than he did in the entire 78 innings of his Good Stretch (23 ER). That is an intense decline in results and, as a result, the Phillies announced that Nola will skip his final start before the All-Star Break in an effort to give him time to right a path that’s gone horribly awry. But look at a few more numbers across his splits and you’ll notice something a bit curious:

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Ah, this part. I always enjoy this part. Not because I enjoy when superstars struggle, but because I enjoy seeing the standards to which we hold those same superstars. The standards are revealed when people start to worry. Over his last…I don’t know, eight starts, Jake Arrieta has a 3.77 ERA. He’s allowed a slugging percentage of .331. This is Jake Arrieta in a rut. I mean, this really is Jake Arrieta in a rut — people aren’t making up the rut — but you can see how silly reality is. That all-time amazing version of Arrieta became the version we allowed ourselves to take for granted.

But, heck, where’d he go? Arrieta himself would admit he hasn’t been firing on all cylinders. He’d like to pitch better than he has. The Cubs would like him to pitch better than he has. While Arrieta hasn’t been bad, lately he’s fallen short of expectations. And if you examine the record now, you see signs that Arrieta has been off to some degree for several weeks. This isn’t all that recent of a thing.

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With the extended holiday weekend behind us, we get back to the business at hand: our position-by-position look at hitter contact quality. Only three positions to go. Last time, it was left fielders. This time: a fun-filled group of center fielders. As we have in the previous installments, we’ll use granular ball-in-play data, such as BIP type frequencies, exit speed and launch angle to perform this analysis.

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It still seems like something of a mystery, how Bartolo Colon gets away with doing what he does. I mean, yeah, he throws a lot of fastballs, but they’re different types of fastballs. He’s also got impeccable command, and he understands the art of pitching to the point where he’s literally out there using the wind to his advantage. That all makes sense. But it’s still hard to fathom that a 43-year-old who pipes an 89-mph heater right down the middle on seemingly every pitch is now on year five of a career resurgence after effectively being out of the league at age 33.

Aroldis Chapman? Aroldis Chapman’s easy. Wanna know how Aroldis Chapman does what he does? Well, you see, he throws a baseball 103 mph. That’s it! Throw a baseball 103 mph one time and I can almost guarantee you that you will pitch in the big leagues. Chapman can do that, and he can do other stuff, too.

On the surface, there’s almost nothing similar about these guys. Colon’s 43 and he throws right-handed. Chapman’s 28 and he throws left-handed. Colon’s a starter, short and stocky. Chapman, a reliever, tall and lanky. From 2010 to -15, Colon struck out 17% of his batters and walked just 4%. Chapman over that same time struck out 43% and walked 12%. Polar opposites, these two.

The one thing at which Chapman has ever been below average is the walks; when he got in trouble, it’s because he wasn’t putting the ball over the plate. Putting the ball over the plate just so happens to be Colon’s biggest strength. It also just so happens to be the area where Chapman’s changed this year — he’s turned himself into a flamethrowing Bartolo Colon.

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