Time to sound the New Pitch siren because Robbie Ray is throwing a curveball! And, at least early in the season, it looks like it matters: after a year spent wondering why his balls in play kept finding grass and suffering while his run-prevention marks failed to match his fielding-independent ones, the Arizona lefty finally has the numbers you might expect for a guy who’s been among the top 15 in strikeout rate among starters since he entered the league.

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The Arizona Diamondbacks bullpen could charitably be described as not particularly great. A more straightforward talker would call the group pretty lousy. We currently have them projected as the very worst group of relievers in Major League Baseball.

The closer is 40 years old and has some of the most significant command problems of any pitcher in the league. The best 2016 ERA of the three primary middle relievers belongs to Andrew Chafin, at 6.75. Tom Wilhelmsen (6.80) and J.J. Hoover (13.50!) round out the trio of reclamation projects being asked to hold leads, and while single-season ERA is of course a terrible way to evaluate a pitcher’s quality, it says something about the Diamondbacks bullpen quality that these are the guys they are asking to pitch in important situations early in the season. Nothing wrong with betting on reclamation projects with better stuff than results, but usually you don’t have to bet on them to hold a tie game in the 8th inning on Opening Day.

But three games into the season, there are reasons to think the Diamondbacks might have two good relief pitchers in their bullpen. And it’s not any of the guys we just mentioned.

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Since people take us for experts for some reason, we’re commonly asked what we consider important in the season’s very early going. What’s most important — and this should be abundantly clear — is that there’s active baseball in the first place. At the very least, there’s spring-training baseball, and as of just yesterday, there’s meaningful baseball. That’s it! That’s the whole point. Everything else is a detail.

But since we all get worked up over the details, we’re asked which details are most important early on. Statistically, the answer is, not much. A high or low batting average isn’t too suggestive. A high or low ERA isn’t too suggestive. A win or loss here or there are but ones of dozens. The more important things are the measurements that take less time than others to stabilize. Changes in, say, power. Changes in contact. Or changes in velocity. There are few things that stabilize in less time than how fast a pitcher throws. This is why so many of our March and April stories and tweets are about unusually fast or slow fastballs. This all brings us to Zack Greinke, the Diamondbacks’ opening-day starter.

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By now, the most prolific pitchers of the spring have put in the equivalent of three major-league starts, some close to four with how short the average start has become. And as much as we talk about the inconsistent talent level in the spring, these starters have mostly faced major-league-quality hitters because the first four to five innings of spring baseball is a decent approximation of regular-season ball. It’s not entirely irresponsible to make certain observations about a pitcher two weeks into the season, so we might as well do it now, too. So let’s talk about Taijuan Walker. Again.

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The Diamondbacks are one of two potential NL West sleepers. One thing they have going for them is that, this year, they should get something like a full season from A.J. Pollock. But then, beyond him, there’s the potentially electric starting rotation. Although there are more questions every day about the well-being of Zack Greinke, he’s followed by names like Shelby Miller, Taijuan Walker, Patrick Corbin, and Robbie Ray. Inconsistent, the lot of them. But they’ve all been well-regarded before, and you never know when a young pitcher could have everything click.

One mission for the team, then, is to try to squeeze everything it can from the pitchers it has. You can try to get the pitchers in better shape, and you can try to work out kinks in their mechanics. Every pitcher on the planet wants greater release-point consistency. But how about just changing how pitchers pitch? It’s early, but there’s a sign something could be changing down in the desert.

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The first time we met Chris Owings, he was a top prospect. Going into the 2014 season, he had just been named the 66th-best prospect by Baseball America and the team’s third best. He was slated for the lion’s share of the playing time at shortstop. Through the beginning of June, he was above-average at the plate thanks to good power, and better than average in the field thanks to a good arm. Both of those things took a hit, literally, on June 20th.

In the first year of the new catcher rules designed to eliminate collisions at the plate, Owings found himself colliding with the knee of Giants catcher Hector Sanchez that day. Even in slow motion, the hit doesn’t look vicious. Some called it awkward.

It was enough to keep him out until September, diminish his performance upon his return, and require Owings to undergo labrum surgery in October. Manager Kirk Gibson kept him out for a while longer because he was afraid “Owings might change his swing as a result and hurt something else” as Zach Buchanan then characterized it. Despite those best efforts, Owings retooled his swing after surgery. When I talked to him that summer of 2015, he agreed: “I had to change my swing, couldn’t quite let it eat with the one-handed follow through.”

That’s a shame, because it meant that, the second time we met Chris Owings, he was faltering. His power had disappeared, he wasn’t making contact like he had in his debut, and pitchers had begun challenging him more often in the zone. His defense had faltered, too. He lost the shortstop job to Nick Ahmed in the meantime, and ended up playing more second base to compensate for his weaker arm and worsening production against right-handers.

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The Shelby Miller trade. Those four words haunt the Arizona Diamondbacks, and that one deal probably cost the last Arizona front office their jobs. It’s the worst transaction any team has made in recent history, and it was widely panned before Miller fell apart last year; having him fail so spectacularly certainly didn’t help the perception of the deal.

But Miller apparently isn’t content to just let his name become synonymous with bad decisions. Coming off the worst year of his career, Miller looks like he’s trying to change his narrative, and the easiest way to do that is become a wholly different pitcher.

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Zack Greinke made his second start in spring training yesterday, and it did not go well. Facing off against Team Mexico, he allowed six hits in 2 2/3 innings, including a number of balls that were crushed by a line-up of guys who won’t play in the big leagues this year. Of the 12 batted balls that Greinke allowed that were tracked by StatCast, four of them were hit at least 100 mph. This is not really what you want from a guy who got paid like an ace in large part because of his perceived contact management skills.

But while the exit velocity numbers showed that Greinke was getting squared up regularly, the pitch velocity numbers were the most concerning elements of the day. Statcast didn’t record a single pitch even at the 90 mph threshold, with Greinke essentially sitting at 89 with his fastball all day. Given that he averaged 92 on his fastball last year, that’s a fairly steep decline, and Greinke even admitted after the game that his stuff isn’t where he wants it.

“It’s still early,” Greinke said. “It is what it is. It’s still early and it’s not like some crazy, crazy thing. But it’s not ideal, either.”

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As if being a 27-year old rookie weren’t hard enough, Ryan Schimpf went at things in an unprecedented way last season. While the fighter — schimpf literally means “to curse and fight” in German — probably established himself as a useful major leaguer with a couple of important tools, regression will come for a player with such an extreme batted-ball mix.

Since we started recording these things, no batter has ever had a qualified season during which he hit fewer than four grounders for every 10 fly balls. Schimpf hit three for every 10 in his debut last year. Even if you relax the entry to 300 plate appearances, the San Diego second baseman is an outlier — only one person has ever recorded a higher fly-ball rate.

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To preview MLB spring training, Tyler Kepner examined the competitive “window” status — that is, the realistic possibility for contention — of all 30 major-league clubs earlier this month for the New York Times. Kepner employed four logical window designations: closed, open, closing and opening.

I think reasonable people can mostly agree that the Cubs’ window of contention is open, and the White Sox’ window is closed. The Royals’ is perhaps closing, and the Braves’ is opening (if not in 2017, then soon). While we will not agree on every status, it’s an interesting exercise.

Windows of contention are an interesting concept, particularly in an era of two Wild Cards in each league. How do teams balance the future and present? How do clubs play a so-so hand knowing the unpredictability of the game? Few teams are able to sustain long windows of contention. The Braves of the 1990s and early 2000s and the Cardinals of the 21st century have done it as well as any team in the in the Wild Card era.

It’s also easier to operate if you suspect your window is either completely open or closed. If you’re the Cubs and Indians last deadline, you’re willing to trade significant young assets for impact relief help. If you suspect your window is closed, like the White Sox, you’re willing to deal assets like Chris Sale and Adam Eaton. There’s a clarity in decision-making, in creating a strategy and plan to implement.

Said Texas Rangers GM Jon Daniels to FanGraphs’ David Laurila on charting a course:

“Something our management team has talked about a lot is the mistake we made our first year here, in 2006. We were caught in the middle. We convinced ourselves that if A, B, and C went right, we had a chance to win, and I think you can make the case that, for any team, it’s not a sustainable strategy.”

Being caught in the middle is the most difficult position for a club. Consider, for instance, a team with some relatively young stars at the major-league level. The front office thought this core of players would form the foundation of a contending team, but it’s not surrounded with the requisite depth, prospects or resources to realistically contend and sustain. The White Sox entered the season in that position. In the meantime, they’ve chosen a course. The Angels, Diamondbacks, Marlins, and Twins could all face difficult decisions in choosing paths in the not-too-distant future.

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