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Remember when Johnny Cueto was viewed as a risk? I mean, he’s a pitcher, of course he’s a risk — all pitchers are risks. But even relative to other pitchers, Cueto was regarded this offseason as a rather large uncertainty. Between his underwhelming second half and ugly postseason with Kansas City, a right elbow that barked multiple times throughout the year, and his heavy workload in 2014 and 2015, expectations were tempered entering the 2016 season, and it seemed like folks were prepared for the possibility of a Cueto decline, or even collapse.

That preparation was for naught. Out of the gate, the Giants are getting peak Cueto. My preferred method of looking at pitcher WAR is using a 50/50 split of FIP-based WAR and RA9-WAR. It’s not perfect, but neither is looking at just one, and we know the ideal mix is somewhere in between. For now, I’m fine with simply splitting the difference. Do that, and this is your current 2016 top five:

1. Clayton Kershaw, 5.6 WAR
2. Johnny Cueto, 4.0
3. Noah Syndergaard, 3.7
4. Jake Arrieta, 3.5
5. Chris Sale, 3.4

Nobody’s Kershaw. But this year, Cueto’s arguably been the next-best thing. Or at the very least, the next-most valuable. Cueto threw another complete game last night, already his fourth of the season, and this one came against the Rockies. When Cueto’s taken the mound this year, the Giants are 16-2. I don’t think too many folks are still viewing Cueto as an uncertainty.

Environmentally, there couldn’t be much more going in Cueto’s favor, and that’s got to be acknowledged. He spent the first seven years of his career pitching in Cincinnati, a bandbox of a ballpark that works against pitching, and then he moved to the American League, where pitchers are replaced in the batting order by dudes whose only job is to hit. Now, he’s back to facing pitchers, and not only that, he’s facing pitchers in baseball’s most pitcher-friendly stadium. Adding to that, Cueto’s a guy who loves to work around the edges of the zone, and while recently he’s commonly pitched to the likes of Brayan Pena and Salvador Perez, the latter of whom routinely grades among baseball’s worst pitch framers, Cueto this year is enjoying the pleasure of pitching to Buster Posey, who’s currently grading as baseball’s best. He’s also enjoying the pleasure of pitching in front of an elite defense, though he’s long enjoyed that pleasure.

He’s gone from small parks and designated hitters and poor catchers to a favorable home stadium, more easy lineups, baseball’s best catcher, and an excellent defense. Of course, we’ve got adjusted stats to account for most of that, and Cueto’s still in the top-10 in those. If it were that easy to succeed in San Francisco, everybody would do it, and yet no one’s doing it like Cueto.

For one, it sure seems like he’s taking advantage of his new environment. By the metrics, this year’s Giants have had, by far, baseball’s best infield defense. Baseball Info Solutions credits San Francisco’s defense with 39 runs saved on the season; only one other team cracks 20. And along with that, Cueto’s increased his ground-ball rate by more than nine points — the second-largest increase of any qualified pitcher from last season. Cueto’s been a ground-baller in the past, but this is the second-highest rate of his career, and its coinciding with a change in location.

Last season, only Jordan Zimmermann threw a higher rate of pitches in the upper-half of the zone and beyond than Cueto. With all his offspeed pitches and lack of top-end velocity, you might not think of him this way, but Cueto’s recently been one of baseball’s most extreme high-ball pitchers. Not anymore. Going from last year to this year, Cueto’s had one of the five largest shifts toward the bottom of the zone:

Don’t get it twisted — Cueto still likes his high pitch. But there’s been an effort to more often work in the lower half of the zone in San Francisco. The lower half of the zone is where Posey works his receiving magic, and the lower half of the zone is where ground balls are generated, the ones that Brandon Crawford and the rest of the Giants defense routinely turn into outs.

And that relationship between Cueto and the infield defense? It manifests itself not only in quantity, but in quality as well. Among the 133 pitchers with at least 1,000 pitches thrown this season, Cueto’s average exit velocity of 86.8 miles per hour ranks fourth. His grounders have gone just 83.2 mph, also fourth. His two-seam fastball, with which he pounds the inner-half of the plate against right-handed batters, has generated an average exit velocity of 82.2 mph, baseball’s best. It gets swings that look like this:

Oh, yeah. Cueto can help himself out, too.

We’ve long thought of Cueto as something of a contact-manager, given his repeatedly low BABIPs and high strand rates, and now we’ve got the data to support that assumption.

There’s more going on here. Cueto’s going to his slider more often, and he’s truly solving right-handed batters for the first time in his career. He’s running a career-low walk rate and a career-high first-pitch strike rate, evidence that his command is sharper than it’s been in the past. And then he’s still doing all the things that have made him Cueto all along — the masterful mixing of all six pitches, the deception from his many deliveries.

It’s just all clicking right now. You can’t not give credit to Cueto’s surroundings, but you also can’t not give credit to Cueto for using his surroundings to his advantage. Cueto’s looked like an ace in the past, but that went away for a bit. Now, he looks like a better ace than ever before. The Giants are almost certainly going to make the postseason this year. This time, they won’t need Madison Bumgarner to throw 50 innings.

Less than a month ago, the Pirates called up top prospect Jameson Taillon from the minor leagues, and slotted him into their struggling rotation. With Taillon now sidelined by shoulder fatigue, the Pirates have once again dipped into their minor-league repository. Today, they’ve called up yet another top-tier pitching prospect in Tyler Glasnow. Glasnow’s spent the past three months putting up sick-nasty numbers with the Pirates’ Triple-A affiliate. In 96 innings across 17 starts, he boasts a 1.78 ERA and 2.94 FIP. He’s struck out a remarkable 30% of batters faced this year, which is tops among qualified Triple-A hurlers. Triple-A hitters proved to be no match for his filthy fastball-curveball combination.

Glasnow’s mowed down minor-league hitters, but many are concerned that his lackluster command will prevent him from succeeding at the next level. That’s a big reason why the Pirates kept him in the minors as long as they did, and why they passed him over for Taillon when they needed a pitcher last month. As lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen noted in a recent chat, “His stuff is hellacious and pitchers with that body type often develop command late, but there’s a non-zero chance Glasnow never throws enough strikes to dominate.”

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At one point not too long ago the Rays were a game under .500 and hanging around the fringes of the developing wild-card race. It’s never easy for an organization to hover around .500 because it’s unclear in which direction you want to try to make the team go. Thankfully for the Rays front office, the team went and made things simple, suddenly playing like the worst team in the league. The Rays have bottomed out, and while there are still elements to like, the July approach is obvious: Sell. Sell for prospects, so as to accumulate prospects. Heaven knows there are organizations that practically run on prospects.

As has been discussed, the landscape of available starting pitchers hasn’t looked very sexy. The Rays could conceivably change that. Odds are, they won’t be real interested in moving Chris Archer. Jake Odorizzi, though, has generated attention. And then there’s Matt Moore. Moore’s numbers don’t look great, and he hasn’t scratched his once un-seeable ceiling. If you glance at Moore, you might see something like a fourth or fifth starter. Yet it’s also easy to convince yourself that Moore’s on the rise. He looks like one player with legitimate upside.

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One season ago, the Blue Jays had one of the stronger team offenses in baseball’s recent history. Going into this season, not too much stood to change. So throughout the winter, the talk was about what the Jays could do to strengthen the starting rotation. It would be fair to say that, when the Jays signed J.A. Happ, the community was underwhelmed. It looked like the plan was simply to brutalize, and then April rolled around, and the Jays had a good rotation and a mediocre lineup. Baseball was one step ahead of us. Baseball is forever one step ahead of us.

Concerns shifted, as they do. While Aaron Sanchez emerged as a quality starting pitcher, people began to wonder about some of the hitters. To be sure, there were some ugly trends taking place. Let me tell you, though: Those days are gone. There was a time, this year, when the Blue Jays had trouble scratching out runs. They’re back. The Blue Jays, I mean, and I guess the runs. They’re destroying the competition, and I’m not sure how much they can be expected to slow down.

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On June 29, the Baltimore Orioles reached their high-water mark of the season, according to our playoff odds. They’d defeated the San Diego Padres, 12-6 to win their seventh consecutive game, putting them 17 games above .500 with a 5.5-game lead in the division and a 71% chance to make the postseason.

And then the pitching staff happened. It’s been one week since that day, and in that week, little good has come out of the Orioles’ rotation. Baltimore followed up its seven-game winning streak with a five-game losing streak, due largely to the fact that its starting rotation averaged just five innings per start with a 7.46 ERA and 6.74 FIP. Sweeping conclusions aren’t to be drawn from any seven-game stretch, of course; the Cubs’ rotation has been equally underwhelming over the last week and there’s no alarm bells going off there. But unlike in Chicago, what we’ve seen from Baltimore’s starters over the last week only reinforces what we already knew: this Baltimore rotation isn’t very good.

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Tim Lincecum used to be freakishly good. He no longer is. Hampered by hip woes, the 32-year-old right-hander went from winning Cy Young awards and tossing no-hitters to the precipice of pitching oblivion. His velocity down and his ERA up, he succumbed to surgery last September.

He’s on the comeback trail, but not with the team he helped win three World Series. The former Giant signed with the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim in May and debuted with his new club in mid-June. His performances have been underwhelming. In four starts, the once-overpowering righty has allowed 29 hits in 18 innings. His fastball is averaging a pedestrian 89 mph.

The extent to which Lincecum can return to his old form remains to be seen. His surgically-repaired hip appears to be holding up, and his damaged psyche is healing as well. He’ll likely never be an elite power pitcher again — or a power pitcher at all — but he feels he can be a productive starter. Only time will tell.

Lincecum talked about his early development as a pitcher, and his career going forward, prior to a recent game at Fenway Park.

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Lincecum on pitching: “When you’re younger, you don’t have a plan. You either trust your stuff or you don’t, or you just throw it and hope. I always trusted my stuff. My fastball didn’t always play, but my curveball made my fastball better. That’s what I could execute. Some guys have an idea of how they can pitch — what pitches they should throw in what counts — but guys like me just end up throwing the ball and trusting it. There’s an aspect of that even at this level. You have a plan, but you’re basically throwing the baseball. It all depends on how well you can execute.

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A few years ago, I was driving down I-95 just north of Philadelphia when my timing belt broke. I had been happily cruising along in the far left lane of a four-lane road when all of a sudden my dashboard lit up with icons I’d never seen before and, even more alarmingly, my gas pedal refused to tell my car to “Go.” Without any means of acceleration, I somehow navigated my way across four lanes of traffic to the shoulder where my suddenly useless car came to a final stop. It was confusing, frustrating, and a little bit scary. Although I’ve never pitched professionally, I’m struck by a sense that right now Aaron Nola might feel a bit like I did that evening on the side of the road.

Aaron Nola was absolutely cruising. Through his first twelve starts he had a 2.65 ERA which was backed up by peripherals so strong that his FIP (2.77) and xFIP (2.74) provided an extra boost of confidence that, yes, Nola was for real. Then, without any real warning whatsoever, it all fell apart.

For the sake of convenience, let’s call those first 12 starts Nola’s Good Stretch and the most recent five starts his Bad Stretch. Nola has given up more earned runs (27 ER) in his 18-inning Bad Stretch than he did in the entire 78 innings of his Good Stretch (23 ER). That is an intense decline in results and, as a result, the Phillies announced that Nola will skip his final start before the All-Star Break in an effort to give him time to right a path that’s gone horribly awry. But look at a few more numbers across his splits and you’ll notice something a bit curious:

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Ah, this part. I always enjoy this part. Not because I enjoy when superstars struggle, but because I enjoy seeing the standards to which we hold those same superstars. The standards are revealed when people start to worry. Over his last…I don’t know, eight starts, Jake Arrieta has a 3.77 ERA. He’s allowed a slugging percentage of .331. This is Jake Arrieta in a rut. I mean, this really is Jake Arrieta in a rut — people aren’t making up the rut — but you can see how silly reality is. That all-time amazing version of Arrieta became the version we allowed ourselves to take for granted.

But, heck, where’d he go? Arrieta himself would admit he hasn’t been firing on all cylinders. He’d like to pitch better than he has. The Cubs would like him to pitch better than he has. While Arrieta hasn’t been bad, lately he’s fallen short of expectations. And if you examine the record now, you see signs that Arrieta has been off to some degree for several weeks. This isn’t all that recent of a thing.

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After a promising start to the season, the Red Sox pitching staff is starting to again resemble the disaster that sank the 2015 season. Over the last two weeks, the starting rotation has put up a 6.89 ERA, as David Price‘s disappointing debut season in Boston has continued, Steven Wright’s knuckleball-magic has started to show signs of wearing off, and Clay Buchholz and Eduardo Rodriguez just took turns throwing batting practice. The Red Sox continue to hit well enough to stay in contention, but with the pitching staff imploding once again, even the team’s manager is admitting that it’s “obvious” that the pitching needs upgrading. Despite a thin supply of available arms, it seems pretty clear that Dave Dombrowski is going to be among the most active executives in scouring the market for a starting pitcher over the next month.

But as the team looks to load up for a playoff push, there’s a case to be made that the Red Sox biggest move this summer should be to add another bat to the line-up instead.

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It still seems like something of a mystery, how Bartolo Colon gets away with doing what he does. I mean, yeah, he throws a lot of fastballs, but they’re different types of fastballs. He’s also got impeccable command, and he understands the art of pitching to the point where he’s literally out there using the wind to his advantage. That all makes sense. But it’s still hard to fathom that a 43-year-old who pipes an 89-mph heater right down the middle on seemingly every pitch is now on year five of a career resurgence after effectively being out of the league at age 33.

Aroldis Chapman? Aroldis Chapman’s easy. Wanna know how Aroldis Chapman does what he does? Well, you see, he throws a baseball 103 mph. That’s it! Throw a baseball 103 mph one time and I can almost guarantee you that you will pitch in the big leagues. Chapman can do that, and he can do other stuff, too.

On the surface, there’s almost nothing similar about these guys. Colon’s 43 and he throws right-handed. Chapman’s 28 and he throws left-handed. Colon’s a starter, short and stocky. Chapman, a reliever, tall and lanky. From 2010 to -15, Colon struck out 17% of his batters and walked just 4%. Chapman over that same time struck out 43% and walked 12%. Polar opposites, these two.

The one thing at which Chapman has ever been below average is the walks; when he got in trouble, it’s because he wasn’t putting the ball over the plate. Putting the ball over the plate just so happens to be Colon’s biggest strength. It also just so happens to be the area where Chapman’s changed this year — he’s turned himself into a flamethrowing Bartolo Colon.

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