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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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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