“You’re asking a lot of tough questions,” right-hander Lance McCullers laughed, before adding, “No, you’re good, you’re good.” We were talking about the role of health and confidence in his efforts to improve his command. To his credit, the young Astros flamethrower had stand-up answers, and wasn’t bothered. All of these things are related, and it’s easy to see for him. It’s just a question of getting right.

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Carlos Correa placed second last week on the trade-value list that Dave Cameron puts together every season. That placement seemed to surprise some, given that Correa is having a very good, but not great season. Correa’s 120 wRC+ is hardly spectacular, even if that number increases to 150 if you start with the latter part of May. He has improved over the last few months, but even with that improvement, the placement might seem high. What definitely seemed high was Correa’s ZiPS projections over the next five years, starting at 7.9 WAR next season and totaling more than 40 wins from ages 22 to 26. Cameron, too, was surprised, and in the comments, his explanation caught my eye:

I was shocked by the Correa forecast myself, and asked Dan to double check that there wasn’t an error in the code or something, given how bullish it is on Correa’s future. But Dan said the system just loves Correa, as the history of guys who can hit like this at 20/21 in the big leagues is almost universally fantastic. The age really is the key thing to keep in mind here; it’s easy to forget how big of a leap guys can make early on, and at 21, there’s still a lot of room for growth.

Carlos Correa is currently in the midst of his age-21 season, and he’s accumulated 820 career plate appearances. Over the last 100 years, only 59 players have received at least 800 plate appearances before the end of their age-21 season and then eventually made their way to a Hall of Fame ballot. One finds that — without regard for how they played or for how long — an astonishing 36% (21) of those players eventually made in the Hall Of Fame. If you move the bar up to 1,000 plate appearances, 21 of 44 players are in the Hall of Fame. Of more recent players, it looks like that trend might continue. Edgar Renteria, Starlin Castro, and Elvis Andrus probably will not make the Hall of Fame and Justin Upton and Jason Heyward have a ways to go, while Alex Rodriguez, Ivan Rodriguez, Miguel Cabrera, Adrian Beltre, and Andruw Jones all have at least decent statistical cases.

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Luis Valbuena has a 157 wRC+ since the beginning of June playing third base for the Houston Astros. Super-prospect Alex Bregman is beating down the door with his performance at Triple-A. Perfect fits be damned. Try and tell a contending club it’s got too many good players. They’ll find some room.

MLB.com’s Jesse Sanchez just broke some news:

Source: INF Yulieski Gurriel agrees to 5-year, $47.5 million deal with #Astros #Cuba More on https://t.co/mkcBseoZWQ pic.twitter.com/6uj12AgGGL

— Jesse Sanchez (@JesseSanchezMLB) July 15, 2016

Let’s get brought up to speed. Gurriel (previously spelled Gourriel) is 32, and he’s been considered Cuba’s best baseball player for about a decade. He’s primarily played third base, and also kicked around at shortstop and, more recently, second base. In 15 years between Cuba and Japan, Gurriel hit .335/.417/.580 with 250 homers and 121 steals. In early February, Yulieski and his younger brother Lourdes Jr., 22, defected from the island. In June, Yulieski was declared a free agent, able to sign with any club free of international spending limits. He’d been linked to the Dodgers, of course. The Mets had shown some interest. The Angels seemed to make some sense. Now, he’s an Astro.

BaseballAmerica’s Ben Badler worked up a scouting report on Gurriel last April in which he called him a plus defender at third with quick reactions, athleticism, a 70-grade arm, and the occasional mental lapse. He’s a complete hitter who bats from the right side, able to hit for average and draw a walk, and scouts see good bat speed that should translate to plus power in the majors. At the time, Badler drew comps to Hanley Ramirez and David Wright, which don’t sound so great anymore, but remember this was before the beginning of the 2015 season; Ramirez was coming off a 135 wRC+ at third base with the Dodgers, Wright was still Wright. Brian Cartwright does good work translating international player’s stat lines to MLB equivalents, and he projected Gurriel for a .283/.330/.458 line back in February, good for a .340 wOBA. There’s no expectation that Gurriel won’t hit.

Five years for a 32-year-old is perhaps a bit scary, and it’s a little more than what Dave Cameron estimated he might get last month, but Gurriel makes the Astros better now. Or, more accurately, in three weeks or so, which is when FOXSports’ Ken Rosenthal reports he’ll be ready to join the club. The Astros plan to keep Gurriel at third base, which creates an interesting positional logjam in Houston.

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There’s a maddening midseason tradition of realizing April performances have subconsciously impacted our perceptions of players in foolish ways. No matter how many times we tell ourselves that the baseball season is long and small sample sizes are fickle tricksters, we inevitably look up in July to find out that a player written off for dead in April is actually doing quite well, thank you very much. It’s an unavoidable reality that first impressions matter and affect the way we view those around us. The perils of first impressions may have had no bigger victim this season than Ken Giles.

When a team gives up five players to acquire you (and a rookie-ball lottery-ticket-type prospect), expectations are inescapably large. Of course, this is the situation Giles found himself in when the Astros dealt a package of players highlighted by Vincent Velasquez and former #1 overall pick Mark Appel to Philadelphia in order to acquire the flame-throwing relief pitcher. The reason for the steep price Houston paid is that Giles was under team control for another five seasons. Intellectually, the first month of his Astros tenure shouldn’t matter any more or less than the ensuing five years but, realistically, it was inevitable that he’d be under a microscope for that first month.

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Now that we’ve seen the triple-digit velocities of the Major League All-Star Game, let’s take a look at two prospects who sit in the low 90s with their fastballs! If that’s not exciting enough, neither one has what you might consider a plus secondary pitch! They’re not at the top of any prospect lists! Wait. Why are we going to talk about Phil Bickford and Joe Musgrove, anyway?

Because they have plus command. Command isn’t a thing on which you can easily put a number. Not only are minor-league strike zones more, uh, diverse than major-league ones, but so is the level of competition. A pitcher with a blazing fastball can fill up the zone with poor command and produce low walk rates. Think of Jose Berrios, who recently came up to the big leagues after putting up great walk rates in the minors — and this despite reservations on his organization’s behalf about his command. The command didn’t look sharp when he got to face big leaguers.

Plus command is a funny thing, though. When it’s not paired with elite stuff, it can be denigrated. Some don’t think much of misters Bickford and Musgrove. But, since Eric Longenhagen got a good look at those two at the Futures Game, and I had a chance to talk with each, let’s combine our views to take a clear look at these two and see what particular struggles they have, and what they have to say about fastball command. Turns out, they each have some unusual movement on their fastballs, and ideas on how to improve the rest of their repertoires.

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At the end of May, Carlos Correa possessed a .253/.348/.414 line that didn’t much resemble the numbers from his Rookie of the Year debut. The walks were there, the strikeout rate was about the same, but the defense was down and the power was out. Hey look at him now! He’s got a .268/.366/.477 and is approaching last year’s weighted-offense mark. Let’s look at what happened in June.

The easy answer is that Correa has been hitting the ball harder. He’s hitting for more power, duh. But if you split the season into two halves, each featuring roughly significant samples of balls in play — 100 balls in play is a good number, and most everyday players are at around 200 right now — you’ll see that Correa has improved more than almost everyone in baseball.

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Ben Smith has a 21.21 ERA in three appearances for the Tri-City Valley Cats. All told, the 23-year-old southpaw has allowed 19 base-runners and 15 runs in 4.2 innings for Houston’s short-season affiliate.

There’s a lot more to his story than numbers.

Smith will be watching this week’s College World Series with interest. The school out of which he was drafted in 2014, Coastal Carolina, is a surprise participant in the championship round. Several of the Chanticleers are former teammates, and he expects to be “sneaking into the locker room a couple of times” each night to follow their fairy-tale quest for a title.

The fact that the lanky left-hander is playing baseball is a real-life success story of its own.

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The Astros have gotten painfully little production from the first-base position this season. Spring-training hero Tyler White stopped hitting in April, and Marwin Gonzalez hasn’t exactly stepped up to pick up the slack. Houston’s lack of offense from first is a big reason why they’ve underperformed their preseason expectations. In an effort to fill the void, the Astros have called up top prospect A.J. Reed, who figures to get the lion’s share of starts at first base from here on out.

Reed’s hit everywhere he’s played. In 2014, he lead the SEC in both on-base and slugging his junior season at Kentucky, and he closed out his draft year by slashing .289/.375/.522 between two levels of A-Ball. He enjoyed his biggest breakout last year, when he hit an unquestionably gaudy .337/.428/.604 with 34 homers between High-A and Double-A. His performance has deteriorated a bit this year, but he’s still managed a .266/.345/.509 slash line in Triple-A.

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No matter where you get your information, the Houston Astros entered the season as consensus favorites to win the American League West. Our preseason projections gave them a better than 50% chance to take the division. Forty-six of 55 FanGraphs staff members chose them to win the division. In case you think a pro-Astros bias exists on the site, whether being informed by our projections or for some other reason, consider also that Baseball Prospectus’ staff liked the Astros, as did the fine folks over at CBS and ESPN.

Y’know what’s a great way to dump a big bucket of cold water on some hot preseason expectations? Start your season 6-15. Do that, and you’ll drop your preseason playoff odds by 37% before the end of April and get FanGraphs to write an article saying you’re already in trouble. Another way: start your season 17-28. Do that, and you’ll drop your playoff odds to a season-worst 18% and get Sports Illustrated to write an article wondering if you’re already done. By that point, it was totally reasonable to have written the Astros off, May and all.

Except, y’know what’s a great way to fire those preseason expectations right back up? Win 23 of your next 31, including seven in a row near the end of June. Do that, and you’ll get your get your record back over .500, leapfrog the Mariners in the standings, get your playoff odds back to being a coin flip and get this very article written about you: the Astros have gotten themselves back in it.

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Jose Altuve has 18 steals in 19 attempts this season. No, that’s not the bizarre stat. That’s just an impressive stat. Jose Altuve is an excellent base-stealer! Among the 71 players with at least five steal attempts this year, Altuve’s success rate ranks third. Since he began receiving regular playing time in 2012, no one’s stolen more bases. He’s fast, he steals plenty of bases, and he steals them well. Which is what makes the bizarre stat so bizarre, and here it comes: despite being fast, stealing plenty of bases, and stealing those bases well, Jose Altuve has been a terribly costly base-runner.

It’s easy to assume that good base-stealers are also good base-runners. The best base-stealers, typically, are the fastest guys on the field, and the best base-runners, typically, are those same fastest guys on the field. But if you think about it, aside from simply being fast (which isn’t necessarily a requirement for proficiency in either skill), base-stealing and base-running really aren’t as similar as they might appear. Base-stealing is more about pattern recognition, acceleration, and timing. Base-running has more to do with risk/reward decision-making, fluidity, and instincts. A base-stealer runs in a straight line with a defined endpoint. A base-runner runs in angles. Speed and athleticism is all that really ties these skills together.

Altuve has the speed and athleticism. That’s for sure. But when it comes to his base-running company, he’s the only one:

Look at that list of names. Look at it! It’s literally a list of nine old dudes whom way too many baseball fans believe they could beat in a footrace, and then Jose Altuve, one of the best base-stealers in the world.

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