PITTSBURGH — To begin this post, I would like to remind the audience of a series of fortunate events detailed back in February, a timeline of transactions that appears to be quite consequential as related to the surprise Diamondbacks and their resurgent ace Zack Greinke.

On Dec. 2, new Diamondbacks general manager Mike Hazen announced the hiring of Mike Fitzgerald to lead the club’s analytics department, which was to take more prominent and influential place in the organization. It was Fitzgerald who was a primary table-pounder for free-agent-to-be Russell Martin and his presentation skills in the summer of 2012, when Fitzgerald was the No. 2 analytics official in Pittsburgh.

On Dec. 2, the Diamondbacks non-tendered Welington Castillo, the starting catcher who was most responsible for the Diamondbacks’ placing 26th in majors by framing runs saved last season. Castillo ranked 95th in framing runs saved last season, according to Baseball Prospectus.

And on Dec. 2, the Diamondbacks signed Jeff Mathis, the top-rated receiver available on the open market, to a two-year deal. In a part-time role with Miami, Mathis ranked 13th in framing runs last season. To date this season, he ranks eighth.

Dec. 2 was a busy day for the Diamondbacks, and some suspected it might also be an important day for Greinke, from whom the Diamondbacks needed a better season in 2017 to contend in the NL West and to justify his record contract.

Seven months later, Greinke is in the midst of a significant bounce-back season and by some measures — including strikeout rate, K-BB%, and swinging-strike rate — he’s never been more dominant.

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PITTSBURGH – That Zack Greinke is reinventing himself, that he remains effective even as his velocity leaves him, that he has bounced back while pitching in front of a better defensive cast this season — none of it should represent one of the greater shocks of the 2017 season. After all, this is an elite-level athlete with excellent command, one who owns a five-pitch mix and a feel for the craft. He is also a diligent student of the game.

Before I caught up with Greinke this week in Pittsburgh, he was seated at a card table before a laptop, a sort of make-shift video and data center hastily constructed each series in the center of the opposing clubhouse in PNC Park, a common setup for the road traveling party. Greinke was several days away from his Thursday start in Miami, but he was one of the players seemingly most interested in studying upcoming opponents. Greinke embraces data and — shameless plug alert — is a reader of FanGraphs.

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When you look up and see that the Athletics are in the midst of a two-game mid-week series against the Marlins in late May, you might suspect that the major-league baseball schedule is simply an exercise in randomness. At this point in the campaign, that’s actually sort of the case. The combination of interleague play and the random vagaries of an early-season schedule conspire to mean that your favorite team hasn’t had the same schedule as your least favorite team. Let’s try to put a number on that disparity.

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It’s still May. The Cubs are barely over .500. The Brewers are in first place. Needless to say, it’s still somewhat early in the season. Things aren’t going to end up the way they are now.

That said, we’re coming up on Memorial Day weekend, and the Arizona Diamondbacks have the fifth-best record in baseball. And if you look at our BaseRuns standings, which attempt to strip out sequencing from more-reliable performance data, the 27-19 Diamondbacks should actually be 29-17, putting them third overall in MLB, just barely behind the Dodgers for the #2 spot. They are sixth in the game in position player WAR and third in pitcher WAR.

So, yeah, it’s at least time to ask if the Arizona Diamondbacks actually good now.

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Round bat, round ball, traveling in different directions: the eight-word story of hitting really captures some of the difficulty of that practice. When you get into the art of choking up — moving the hands up the barrel and shortening the bat — you uncover a whole world of players attempting to address that difficulty. David Kagan examined the physics of choking up today at The Hardball Times. Here, we ask the practitioners what they think. It turns out, the players serve up some conventional wisdom, but also some insight into the reasoning behind the practice.

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Let’s take a look at the standings, shall we? The Diamondbacks are presently sitting in…okay, third place. But while they might be third place in the National League West, they’re also fifth place in the National League, overall, meaning they occupy a playoff spot. In other words, it’s been more of a good start than a bad one. And an encouraging start, given the organizational shake-up between years.

If you’ll remember, coming into the season, the Diamondbacks were defined by what you could call an intriguing post-hype pitching staff. It stood to reason that, if it was going to be a good year, they’d need those pitchers to deliver on the promise they’d had before. And, wouldn’t you know it, but according to the leaderboards, the Diamondbacks are fifth in baseball in pitching-staff WAR. They’re first among starting rotations. The effectiveness has been there, even despite Shelby Miller’s injury.

About that! Miller’s absence opened up a spot. One turn was given to Braden Shipley. The other three turns have gone to Zack Godley. Over three starts and 18.2 innings, Godley’s got 19 strikeouts, with four runs allowed. It’s not so much that Godley has been unhittable. It’s that he’s been good, and better than before. Godley, who’s never been a Baseball America top-10 organizational prospect. There’s a new exciting pitcher on the staff.

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Over the last few seasons, the Diamondbacks haven’t been a team worthy of positive attention. Ever since Mike Hazen took the reins back in October, however, we’ve been keeping tabs on them. It started when Dave correctly noted that there wasn’t a clear direction for the D-backs to pick heading into the 2017 season. We’ve seen why through the first six weeks of the 2017 campaign: this season has presented the D-backs an opportunity. With the Giants’ rapid fade and the Mets’ injury troubles, the National League Wild Card is suddenly wide open, and teams like Arizona (and Colorado) have an opportunity to step into the void. As such, it’s time to start paying attention to the D-backs.

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Last night, Zack Greinke took a no-hitter into the 8th inning. Gregory Polanco ended the no-hit bid and the shutout with one swing, but Greinke’s 8/1/1/1/11 line was still his best outing of the year. And that’s saying something, because in the first five weeks of 2017, Greinke has been as good as he was in his prime.

Back in spring training, the narrative was primarily about his velocity. He was sitting in the high-80s in Arizona, and while I noted that he’d done this before, he continued this somewhat worrying trend on Opening Day, when he lasted just five innings against the Giants, running a 5.22 FIP/5.28 xFIP in his first start of the season.

But since Opening Day, Greinke has made seven starts, and with just one exception, they’ve ranged from really good to staggeringly excellent. His line during those seven starts: 46 2/3 IP, 40 H, 6 HR, 7 BB, 54 K. That’s a 2.70 ERA/2.83 FIP/2.65 xFIP, and in this run environment, that translates to a 60 ERA-/68 FIP-/65 xFIP-. Even including his Opening Day clunker, he’s at 62 ERA-/74 FIP-/71 xFIP-. Over a full season, those marks would each be the third-best of his career in their respective category. Right now, Zack Greinke is pitching like Peak Zack Greinke.

And, remarkably, he’s doing this without his fastball. His dominance of late isn’t because his velocity has returned; he’s actually throwing just as not-hard as he was when there was so much concern over him in March.

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Since the start of the 2015 season, the Diamondbacks have been easily baseball’s best baserunning team. They’ve been baseball’s best baserunning team in terms of stolen bases, and they’ve been baseball’s best baserunning team in terms of other kinds of advances. Baserunning isn’t one of those components that makes or breaks a roster, given that it’s more peripheral or secondary than anything else, but the longer something like this goes on, the easier it is to recognize.

In this very season, the Diamondbacks are at it again. That’s the second-place Diamondbacks, the wild-card-spot-occupying Diamondbacks. A few years ago, by our numbers, as a team they were 13 runs better than average on the bases. Last season, they were 18 runs better than average. This season, they’ve already been about 12 runs better than average. They didn’t do anything noteworthy on this particular afternoon, but that’s what a team gets for facing Max Scherzer. The team’s still been elite, and they’ve played only 30 games.

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It was inevitable. Jon Duplantier was eventually going to allow an earned run, and it happened last night. After 21.2 professional innings with a 0.00 ERA, the Arizona Diamondbacks pitching prospect surrendered a pair of markers in the first inning of a game against the South Bend Cubs.

It’s worth noting that he’s not superstitious. That was the first thing about which I asked him when we spoke on Monday. Given that he was about to make his fourth start of the season for the Low-A Kane County Cougars, the last thing I wanted to do was jinx him.

Deplantier told me he used to be somewhat superstitious. Having found it mentally draining, though, he’s “pretty much scratched that” from his psyche. Addressing his run of perfection was thus perfectly acceptable. “Giving up runs is going to happen,” he told me. “If I never gave up a run… I don’t know how I’d be doing it, but I do know there’d be a lot of money to be made.”

He has a chance to make a lot of money. Arizona drafted Duplantier in the third round last year, and were it not for health concerns, he likely would have gone higher. The 22-year-old Rice University product has a classic pitcher’s frame — he’s listed at 6-foot-4, 225 pounds — and his fastball has touched 97. He’s currently commanding the pitch well, and he’s doing so with a delivery he trusts. Despite his injury history, the D-backs haven’t tinkered with his mechanics.

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