Pitch names aren’t very imaginative. What is a fastball but a ball that’s thrown fast? The ball, in fact, thrown the fastest, relative to the curveball — which curves — or to the knuckleball — thrown as if off the knuckles. The changeup is also entirely explained by the name, although this one requires you know something about another pitch. The changeup is supposed to change things up, when a hitter is looking for a fastball. It’s supposed to represent a change of speed. Absent a fastball, a changeup is nothing but a slower fastball. The changeup needs to change something up to survive.

The game has seen a lot of pitchers. For the overwhelming majority of them, we’re sitting on pretty limited information. Surely, there have been some outliers over the years, pitchers who have done unusual things with their pitches. According to conventional wisdom, a good changeup needs to be about 8 mph to 10 mph slower than the fastball. Anything less than that, it’s thought, and there’s not enough of a change of speed. The best-known exception to this idea is Felix Hernandez, who’s been known to throw changeups in the low-90s. Felix’s changeup is one of the best in the game, so he’s served as evidence that there’s more than one way to throw a hitter off with a change. Henderson Alvarez specifically cited Felix as the reason he’s willing to throw his own changeup harder. It can be rewarding to push the limits.

Zack Greinke, too, is pushing the limits. Obviously, he’s pushing the limits of un-scored-upon-ness. But he’s also become a lot more like Felix than you might have realized.

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The last time Zack Greinke allowed a run in a game a game that counted the regular season was June 13, when Justin Upton hit an eighth-inning homer. Even that solo shot was subject to an instant-replay review, and before that, Greinke had allowed just one run in the first. But people care about what’s come after that. What’s come after that have been six starts, spanning an out shy of 44 innings. Over those innings, opponents have batted .129; over those innings, opponents have scored not any runs. The Dodgers actually found a way to lose one of those games, but this is a streak that forces you to focus on the individual. Generally speaking, the name on the front is more important than the name on the back. But we’re all allowed to forget that, when someone’s doing something incredible.

Greinke doesn’t own the longest scoreless streak ever. Nor will he soon, probably. The odds favor the opponents being able to do at least something, and all it ever takes is one swing, on even a pretty good pitch. But we can’t declare the streak over until it’s over, and for the time being, Greinke is closer than he’s ever been. All eyes will be on his performance the next time he’s out there, because he still has a chance at an impossible record. It’s fair to wonder: how has Greinke gotten this far? How has he rattled off more than 43 consecutive scoreless innings? As best as I can tell, there are three general keys.

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Not to beat a dead horse, or any kind of horse, but the Matt Kemp trade has been lopsided. There’s still an awful long way to go, but for now the Matt Kemp trade is more like the Yasmani Grandal trade, and Grandal and the Dodgers couldn’t be happier. The other day on Twitter I was tipped off to an article about Grandal written by Matt Calkins. The headline: “Padres blew it with Yasmani Grandal.” It talks about Grandal’s limited playing time, and the lack of trust some Padres pitchers had in him. One paragraph stood out to me as particularly interesting:

Despite the general San Diego approach being to throw down and away, Grandal thought the power pitchers should be throwing inside in the early part of the count before using the outer half of the plate to record the out. But the veteran hurlers weren’t catching his drift, and as a result, he wasn’t catching their pitches.

Pitchers identified were Andrew Cashner, Tyson Ross, and Ian Kennedy. Last season, Grandal didn’t catch Cashner. Ross eventually stopped throwing to him, and Kennedy did too. They preferred working with Rene Rivera. This year, the Padres pitching staff has struggled. From the bottom of the same article:

San Diego’s pitching, however, has disappointed, and Grandal can’t help but wonder if that would be the case had his advice been heeded.

On the one hand, this doesn’t really matter. Grandal isn’t in San Diego anymore, so everyone just ought to move on. But on the other hand, this can be an interesting thing to investigate. So let’s talk about what Grandal talked about.

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It seems like a simple question to ask. Which recent home run was the least likely?

You could flippantly answer — the one Erick Aybar hit this year, or the one Melky Cabrera hit this year — and because they’ve got the lowest isolated slugging percentages with at least one homer hit, you would be right. But that doesn’t control for the quality of the pitcher. Aybar hit his off of Rick Porcello, who is having some issues with the home run right now.

A slightly more sophisticated approach might have you scan down the list of the worst isolated powers in the game right now, and then cross-reference those names with the pitchers that allowed those home runs. If you do that, you’ll eventually settle on Alexei Ramirez, who hit his first homer of the year off of Johnny Cueto earlier this year.

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Step one for Mike Bolsinger was throwing a unique curve.

Only eight players in 2014 had a smaller velocity difference between their fastball and curve, and his curve is two ticks faster than the average curve, which led me to highlight him in my JABO piece on what makes great curveballs. That piece helped alert the Dodgers’ front office to his viability as a starter. They acquired him and then turned to him when depth became an issue. That gave him an opportunity.

Step two for Mike Bolsinger was adding a third pitch, of course.

Most interesting about this new pitch for Bolsinger might be that it’s not very different from the other two pitches he throws. He threw a cutter and a curve and now he’s throwing a … slider. Everything breaks towards his glove, and everything averages between 80 and 88 mph. Watch him pitch, and you’ll think he’s throwing the same pitch over and over again. Actually, he might be.

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Do you like pornography? You don’t have to answer that. Just, here’s some pornography, only of the type that…well, you’re still not supposed to watch at work, but you could at least get away with watching it with your parents:

That’s Joc Pederson, either befriending Coors Field or trying to assault it. According to the ESPN Home Run Tracker, it’s the longest home run of the year, although there is that Coors-related asterisk. Also yesterday, Pederson hit a different mammoth dinger. The day before, he hit a different mammoth dinger. Among those with at least six homers, Pederson has the greatest average distance. Strong hitter. Good rookie.

These are indicators of strength. And there are some other familiar ones. For example, Pederson is tied for second in isolated power, behind only Bryce Harper. He’s barely a percentage point off the lead in home runs per fly ball. The comparisons to Adam Dunn are being made for a reason — lots of walks, lots of strikeouts, lots of power. We know that Pederson has pop. But how else might we be able to think about this? Enter Statcast. Glorious Statcast!

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Hitting and pitching may seem equally complicated, but consider this: when it comes to hitting, you have to use both of your hands in one place. By necessity, that adds a wrinkle, and can make hitting analysis difficult. In order to focus on something we can bite off and digest, let’s just ask Mike Trout, Bryce Harper, and Joc Pederson what they think about the top hand.

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It took a little while to get here, with an unexpected obstacle or two, but we’ve got a six-player trade between the Braves and the Dodgers. The youngest player involved is 26, the average age of the players is about 31, and this year they’ve all combined to be worth -1.2 WAR. Sounds to me like something worth examining in detail.

Going from Atlanta to Los Angeles:

• Alberto Callaspo
• Eric Stults
• Ian Thomas
• Juan Jaime

Going from Los Angeles to Atlanta:

• Juan Uribe
• Chris Withrow

It’s anything but a blockbuster. You could say a lot of these parts were expendable. Uribe lost playing time. Withrow’s still sidelined after surgery. Callaspo was likely to be designated for assignment. Jaime already had been designated for assignment, and cleared waivers. The Braves booted Stults from the starting rotation. Thomas has 16 big-league innings. Most likely, this isn’t a trade that’s going to make any meaningful difference, but if you look at it long enough, you can see components of certain interest. It’s kind of like a statistical Magic Eye puzzle, where the image revealed is very slightly more interesting than the immediate visual appearance of the puzzle itself. OK, good, I think I’m selling this well.

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Clayton Kershaw is in unfamiliar territory. The three-time Cy Young award winner and consensus best pitcher in baseball finds himself sporting a 4.24 ERA in mid-May, prompting questions about what might be wrong. As we’ll see, luck has largely been unkind to Kershaw, and he’s due for a big regression toward better numbers; however, he hasn’t been the Kershaw we’ve seen for the past two years in one important part of his game, and that has led to some poor results.

Pitchers can’t control everything on the baseball field. After the ball leaves their hand, control is ceded to the batter, the defense, and luck. Also chief among the factors pitchers have little control over: the rate of men they leave on base, the rate of balls in play that go for hits, and the rate of fly balls that go for home runs. Metrics like FIP (Fielding Independent Pitching) and xFIP try to take out a lot of the variability in a pitcher’s stat line influenced by things outside of their control, attempting to measure only what the pitcher is responsible for.

Kershaw has been a victim of some of those factors in 2015. First of all, there’s the rate of balls in play that have actually gone for hits. Here’s a chart of Kershaw’s batting average on balls in play against him over the course of his career compared to league average:

This year batted balls have been finding holes in the infield and gaps in the outfield, something Kershaw doesn’t have much control over. Once those batted balls start finding gloves, they’ll start getting turned into outs more often.

Kershaw’s rate of runners left on base in 2015 has been unlike years past as well. Here’s a chart of the rate at which he’s stranded runners on base over his career compared to league average:

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Did you see Giancarlo Stanton’s homer that went out of Dodger Stadium? Stanton hit and the Dodger fans went “OOOOHHH!” and then 467 feet later, when they saw it go out, they went “OOOOHHH!” again. The Marlins color guy punctuated the moment by saying, “You don’t see that every night!” which indeed is true but maybe undersells it a bit. I mean I’d go so far as to say you don’t see that even every other night! In 4,000 lifetimes you and I could never do that, but Stanton did it in this one. Amazing.

Less amazing but more pertinent to this article is what kind of effect that has on the pitcher. As a former high-school pitcher (second-team all district, baby!) I’ve given up a homer or two and, in my very limited experience, when you face that guy again one of two things happens. The first is you challenge him again because he can’t hit your best stuff and also you’re an idiot. The second is you stay the heck away from throwing him the pitch he crushed in the first at-bat and probably stay the heck away from throwing him anything hittable in general. But that’s me in high school. Are major-league pitchers like that? At least one is!

Mike Bolsinger was the starting pitcher for the Dodgers last Tuesday. It was his 86 mph cutter at the top of the strike zone that Stanton hit so hard it briefly turned the fans of Dodger Stadium from Dodger fans into Marlins fans. An inspection of the relevant at-bat reveals that Bolsinger missed his location on both pitches he threw Stanton. The first cutter was supposed to be low and away but was up at the top of the strike zone. He was lucky Stanton missed it. The next one was supposed to be belt-high inside (there was nobody on base so I’m going by where the catcher set up). Bolsinger got the height right but left the pitch just a bit further over the plate than he probably wanted, a few inches which wound up endangering the well-being of anyone walking outside the left field area of Dodger Stadium.

So how did Bolsinger react to facing Stanton a second time? So this is interesting! Bolsinger threw Stanton six straight curveballs! Common perception is that you don’t want to throw too many of the same kind of pitch consecutively for fear the batter will hone in on the specific movement of the pitch. Mike Bolsinger may have many fears — groundhogs and people who don’t use coasters potentially among them — but what he definitely isn’t afraid of is throwing the same pitch twice.

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