It’s probably no secret that, when the Blue Jays decided to try Aaron Sanchez as a starter, we were skeptics. It was nothing against Sanchez personally; from my perspective, at least, it was really quite simple. As a starter in the past, Sanchez never threw enough strikes. Big velocity and everything, but, not enough strikes. Most of the time, pitchers who struggle with strikes continue to struggle with strikes. It was just a way of playing the odds. So often, wishing for a pitcher to show better control is like wishing for a hitter to show better discipline. Those improvements are relatively rare.

They do happen, though, and often enough that optimism isn’t unwarranted. The Blue Jays wanted to see if Sanchez would find a way to more consistently own the zone. With strikes, Sanchez would have significant upside. The Jays went for it, and, wouldn’t you know it, but Sanchez has been utterly fantastic. Last year’s starting experiment is now a distant memory, as Sanchez is in the process of establishing himself as one of the more electric young starters in the league.

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Nomar Mazara hit a 491-foot home run the other day. You’ve probably heard about it, you’ve probably seen it. If you haven’t, go check it out. Something special, that homer. Something special, that Mazara. I thought there might be a post in that homer, and there might still be, but in the midst of running some numbers on it, something else caught my eye. While looking up information about a 21-year-old phenom who hit a 491-foot home run, I somehow came away most impressed with Michael Saunders.

See, there’s some outstanding stuff about that Mazara homer, even beyond the age and the raw distance. You’ll see that it came off a left-handed pitcher, with Mazara being a left-handed batter himself. You’ll see that it was pretty far on the inside of the plate, that Mazara really had to turn on it. And you’ll see that it was a breaking pitch, one that started even further inside, that was never really in the strike zone until the moment Mazara hammered it. It was already a special homer on the surface, made even more special by the way it happened. And Mazara hit it a long way. You can’t fake what Mazara did. I’m not sure you can fake what Michael Saunders has done, either.

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The early part of the Major League Baseball season presents an interesting paradox when it comes to interest and attendance. Fans have waited all winter for real live baseball, and Opening Day comes with big crowds and pageantry. After Opening Day, crowds tend to thin out a bit as people come to terms with the long season, and in many places, weather that is still less than hospitable to baseball. Comparing attendance this season to attendance at this time last season shows a still-healthy game with a few teams having made major jumps after successful seasons a year ago.

When looking at per-game attendance so far this season, it should come as no surprise that the usual names remain atop the board, per Baseball Reference.

The Los Angeles Dodgers, St. Louis Cardinals, San Francisco Giants, and New York Yankees were the top four in attendance last season — in that order — and those same four teams continue their grip on the attendance lead this year. The Chicago Cubs have swapped spots with the Los Angeles Angels while the Toronto Blue Jays have taken an edge over the Boston Red Sox. The bottom five teams are the same as the end-of-the-season numbers last year, although in a different order, as Tampa Bay Rays finished the end of the season last while Oakland A’s were ahead of the Chicago White Sox and the Miami Marlins.

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News broke earlier that the Pirates agreed to a three-year contract extension with Francisco Cervelli. It’s an easy enough story to analyze in isolation, but to really add depth, you can compare and contrast Cervelli and Russell Martin, who was Cervelli’s predecessor. When Martin left the Pirates, it seemed like it ought to have delivered a massive blow, but if anything Cervelli has been the superior catcher since. This year in particular, they’ve shot off in completely opposite directions.

Cervelli’s not someone who’ll hit for power, but in 2016 he’s reached base nearly 40% of the time. And the defense is there, so the Pirates are pleased. The Blue Jays like Martin, and there’s no question he’s one of their leaders, but — well, maybe you haven’t noticed this. I don’t know which things you have noticed. Russell Martin has been one of the worst hitters in baseball. Like, worse than you’d believe. Did you know Erick Aybar has a wRC+ of literally 7? That’s a 7, where a 100 would be average. Martin’s all the way up at 11. The next-worst mark: teammate Ryan Goins, at 22. The Blue Jays don’t have a good record yet, and while that’s because of a number of things, Martin has been horrible. He’s made it tough to be successful around him.

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It seems impossible, but when it comes to pitching, Marcus Stroman is just a baby, man. “I’m still fairly new to pitching — I just started really pitching my junior year in college,” Stroman pointed out when we talked before a game against the Giants. He was a junior at Duke University in 2012.

Even if you count the first two years pitching at Duke, it’s only six years. Six years might seem like a long time. Six years ago, I decided to take a leap into writing about baseball for a living. Six years is not a long time, at least not to me. I’m still trying to figure out how to arrange my words in the right order, so it’s no surprise that the pitcher is “starting to learn sequences” better now.

And so, as good as the righty starter has been — top 20 by any overall per-inning measure — his latest work, and words, put into focus how he might get better.

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A few years back, I wrote a four–part series about the worst final seasons for good players. It was inspired by Willie Mays, who very prominently had a bad final season, but was far from the worst season. Now, David Ortiz has inspired the flip side of the coin – the best final season. The Large Father is off to quite a hot start, and so some people have asked, how good does he have to be to produce the best final season of all-time? As you’ll see, the answer is he’ll have to do quite a lot.

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Among the many surprises of the 2016 season, the fact that the Blue Jays struggling offense is being carried by good performances from their starting rotation has to rank near the top of the list. Toronto bashed their way to the postseason last year, but with Russell Martin (.185 wOBA) and Ryan Goins (.198 wOBA) giving the team absolutely nothing at the plate this year, the bottom of the Blue Jays order has been a rally-killing black hole. And the lack of offense from those two have put pressure on the rest of the line-up, which means that the continuing struggles of Troy Tulowitzki have been a bit more obvious this year.

Tulo didn’t hit that well after coming over from Colorado in the mid-summer trade last year, but his defense at shortstop allowed him to remain a valuable contributor, and because the team was scoring six runs per night, his lack of offense didn’t seem like a big problem. Now, with the team scoring four runs per game, Tulo’s .172/.275/.336 line is a bit more problematic, and the offensive issues magnify his own struggles. Thankfully for the Blue Jays, there’s one easy sign to point to as reason for hope; Tulo has a .190 BABIP, which ranks 190th out of 194 qualified hitters so far this year. That isn’t going to last, and Tulo’s ability to still hit for some power and draw walks means that he should be a productive hitter once again after that number corrects itself with more time.

But it isn’t true that Tulowitzki’s problems are just bad luck. There are some legitimate reasons to think that age might just be slowing his bat in an irreversible way.

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A a writer, you typically have an agenda when you approach a major-league hitter in the clubhouse. Literally. Even me! I try to keep it open-ended — and avoid the old “can you talk about how important player X is so that I can finish up my piece on him”-type questions — but I still have a (loose!) narrative sketched around some key stats when I step to a player. It’s called research.

Sometimes, the player has an agenda, too. Maybe that’s wording it too strongly. Sometimes, the player doesn’t want to answer your questions and has something else on his mind. That’s better.

That describes what happened when I talked to Josh Donaldson last night before a game against the Giants. He was obviously thinking about the night before, and when I brought up an old conversation about his two-strike approach, and the deception between Zack Greinke and Paul Konerko, he started talking about pitchers not following the rule book.

I let him run with it.

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Nothing about Josh Donaldson being great is surprising anymore. There was the late-career breakout in 2012, and then confirmation that the breakout was real in 2013-14. And then, of course, he won the Most Valuable Player award in 2015. We love stories about unexpected rises to prominence more than anything else, and that’s true within baseball and outside of it. Once a player reaches the elite and stays there, the story of the rise fades away, and consistent excellence has a strange way of becoming almost routine — whether it deserves it or not. (Note: it does not.) The really fun part comes, however, when great players do things to try and make themselves more great, pushing themselves past the already absurdly high plateau. From what we’ve seen so far this season, Donaldson appears to be embarking on that hallowed and honorable mission.

First, a little background to what we’re talking about. Donaldson based his breakout on better patience, all-fields power, and a few aggressive mechanical changes. Those mechanical changes were based on the leg kick and bat tipping of Jose Bautista, so it was a nice coincidence when the two were united on the Blue Jays last season. Here’s a couple GIFs that visually explain some of those changes, from a 2014 interview with Jerry Brewer:

2013 swing — smaller leg kick, controlled bat tipping:

2014 swing — bigger leg kick, aggressive bat tipping:

The latter swing is more of the hitter we know today — the guy who consistently murderizes baseballs — and we can see the quite obvious visual similarities to Bautista’s swing. It’s also the swing that, along with his great defense, vaulted him into the top of the WAR leaderboards over the past few years. Since he joined the Jays, however, Donaldson’s batted-ball tendencies have trended more toward his other power-laden teammate, Edwin Encarnacion. There’s certainly potentially something to gain from him moving more toward Encarnacion’s approach, as it has mimicked the sort of trajectory a number of players follow during single-season power surges. Here, allow us to consider how.

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It is abundantly clear which team won the R.A. Dickey trade. Acquiring Noah Syndergaard, Travis d’Arnaud, John Buck, and Wulimer Becerra from the Blue Jays for Dickey, Josh Thole, and Mike Nickeas in December 2012 has paid off for the New York Mets in a big way. This isn’t a particularly controversial opinion in need of detailed supporting evidence, but Spencer Bingol covered the particulars of the Mets’ heist several months ago, even before Noah Syndergaard turned into a starter who pitches like a lights-out closer.

Barring something unexpected, the Mets will have gotten more wins at a lower price from their part in the trade than the Blue Jays will have from their part in the trade by the time Dickey’s contract expires at the end of this season. Then the Mets will continue to reap the benefits for several more seasons while d’Arnaud, Syndergaard, and Becerra remain under team control. There’s no way, in an absolute sense, to spin this as anything but a win for Mets and a loss for the Blue Jays.

This kind of retrospective analysis is valuable, but it is a bit simplistic. The interesting question isn’t which set of players performed better; that’s obvious.  The interesting question is if the Blue Jays would have been better off not making the trade.

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