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We’re doing it. It’s happening again. We’re forgetting about Mike Trout. It’s like collectively, we’re a second-grade teacher with a real-life wizard in our classroom and yet we never call on him or her to be the volunteer for any of the science experiments, so as not to single out the wizard kid while also ensuring that we remain impartial to the other, more normal children, except we know damn well that the normal kids would rather see the wizard kid perform science experiments rather than do it themselves. Call on the wizard kid! Mike Trout is right there!

Y’know how I know we’re forgetting about Mike Trout again? It’s June 1. We’re one-third of the way through the baseball season. Trout has been tagged in exactly one FanGraphs post since Opening Day. It was a post about whether Bryce Harper is better than him. Since that post, Harper’s hit .207 with a 115 wRC+. Trout’s slugged .641 with a 198 wRC+.

For the year, Trout’s been the most valuable position player in baseball. He’s been a top-three bat mixed with a top-three base-runner. He’s seventh in the league in on-base while also ranking among the league’s top-20 power hitters. He’s projected to finish the season with 9.7 WAR (yawn, but it’s not 10), which would give him 47.3 WAR over his first five full major-league seasons. And that’d be the ninth-best five-year peak of any hitter, ever. And Mike Trout is 24.

Even though we, the collective second-grade teacher, don’t call on the wizard kid in class, we’d be lying to ourselves if we said we weren’t curious what he or she were doing at all times. We’re curious what the wizard kid does at recess, we’re curious what the wizard kid eats for lunch, we’re curious what the wizard kid does at home, we’re even curious how the wizard kid gets to school. Broom? Honda Odyssey? Intangibility?

We want up-to-the-minute updates on the developments of wizard kid’s life, so we should want up-to-the-minute updates on the developments of Mike Trout’s game, too. Let’s now briefly discuss five things that are different about Mike Trout.

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Tuesday afternoon, the Mariners clobbered the Padres, and this happened:

The Bethancourt in question is Christian Bethancourt, the only major-league Bethancourt, and as you can see, he finished the game hitless. Bethancourt, though, has finished a lot of games hitless. He’d never finished a game at second base, and he’d definitely never finished a game at second base after having caught, pitched, and played left field. Sometimes the whole structure of baseball collapses when a blowout gets blowout-y enough, and on Tuesday, Bethancourt became the fifth player we know of in big-league history to play all those positions in a game. He’d still be the fifth ever even if you took away the pitching appearance. The four previous times this happened, the player played literally every position, the manager clearly just having fun. Bethancourt stumbled upon a brand new box-score line. Baseball still has its firsts.

The question of the day, which means nothing: all right, so, Bethancourt appeared at four different positions. How comfortable was he at each? Time to analyze some body language. Sure, bodies can lie, but they don’t know how to speak in cliches.

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Every player, of course, goes through ups and downs, but not every player has the same range between the peaks and the valleys. Take Matt Shoemaker. Just a few weeks ago, there was an argument that he could be the worst starting pitcher in the majors. Even the Angels didn’t know what to do with him, and the Angels are in no position to be picky. Through six starts, Shoemaker had an ERA north of 9, and he’d allowed a slugging percentage close to .600. He looked like the major-league version of the non-prospect he was once considered. He was in over his head. Every at-bat was a nightmare.

Over the last three starts, Shoemaker’s allowed five runs. Better yet, he’s managed 28 strikeouts with just a pair of walks, and two outings in a row now he’s ripped off double-digit whiffs without a single free pass. Since the somewhat arbitrary date of May 12, Shoemaker’s allowed a slugging percentage of .256, a thousandth of a point better than Jake Arrieta. Shoemaker isn’t one of the best pitchers in baseball, and he isn’t one of the worst pitchers in baseball, but he’s looked like both, within a very short time frame. The rebound here has been extreme.

What’s been the key for Shoemaker’s turnaround? Maybe he polished his mechanics. Maybe he’s clearer of head. Maybe almost anything. But there’s certainly one thing that does stand out, which is Shoemaker adopting the Masahiro Tanaka strategy. Tanaka simply doesn’t throw many fastballs. Shoemaker as well has gone with something else.

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Heading into the 2012 season, Baseball America wrote of DJ LeMahieu, “Most scouts see him as a singles hitter who doesn’t provide enough beyond his batting average.” BA added that “his fringy speed and quickness don’t fit at second base.”

The latter turned out to be patently false. The 27-year-old won a Gold Glove at second base with the Rockies in 2014, and he remains a solid defender. He doesn’t look like a middle infielder — LeMahieu is 6-foot-4 — but his plus-2 DRS over the last two years puts him solidly in the gets-the-job-done category.

From an offensive standpoint, the singles-hitter label has a grain of truth to it. Despite calling Coors Field home, LeMahieu doesn’t leave the yard very often. Extra-base hits aren’t his forte (last night’s home run and pair of doubles notwithstanding). And while he’ll accept a free pass — his walk rate is a respectable 8.3% — no one is about to compare him to Eddie Yost.

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How do you know when a knuckleball pitcher is good? It’s not an easy question to answer. We know it’s not just a matter of having a knuckleball — there have been bad knuckleball pitchers. But the pitches themselves aren’t easy to scout, and the whole idea behind an effective knuckleball is sort of the lack of consistency. There’s not a large sample of these pitchers to examine, which further complicates things. A knuckleballer is the most unusual player type in the game, someone who can be almost impossible to trust, but someone who also throws a pitch that seems almost impossible to hit.

There’s a line somewhere. There has to be. There’s a line beyond which a knuckleball pitcher is legitimately good, and maybe that’s when he throws 60 good knuckleballs out of 100, or maybe it’s when he throws 90 good knuckleballs out of 100. We’ve seen R.A. Dickey be an ineffective knuckleballer, and we’ve seen him be an effective one. The pitch gave his career a second chance, which is one of its magical aspects. At some point, I suppose, you just have to look at the numbers. The numbers will tell you when a knuckleballer is working. I don’t know of any other approach, and what the numbers are indicating is that Steven Wright has mastered the weirdest pitch in the sport.

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It was an inauspicious start to the season for Michael Feliz. It’s been an inauspicious start to the season for the entire Houston Astros ballclub. One of them’s turned it around, providing hope to the other.

Feliz’s numbers, on the whole, are impressive, and even they come with something of an asterisk. In 20 innings of relief work, the 22-year-old right-handed rookie has struck out 33 batters and walked four — only two pitchers in baseball currently have a better K-BB%, and they both wear pinstripes. You’ve probably heard of them. The asterisk is that Feliz has walked just four batters all year, and they all came in his season debut, a 107-pitch relief outing back on April 6 after starter Collin McHugh recorded just one out. Feliz was thrust into action in the first, asked to eat innings, faltered, and was promptly sent to the minors for a fresh arm. He was recalled a couple weeks later, and since then, he’s been completely unhittable.

Dating back to that April 26 recall, Feliz has struck out half of the batters he’s faced, and he’s walked none of them. He’s getting ground balls, and he’s working multiple innings. Before the year, you might’ve only known Feliz’s name by being an Astros fan or a prospect hound — while he fell just outside of preseason top-100 prospect lists, most evaluators viewed him as a top-10 piece in a deep Astros’ system. Now, he’s turning heads, with the kind of numbers that practically demand attention.

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On Monday, the White Sox lost 1-0, so that makes things fairly uncomplicated — they lost because they didn’t score. It happens. Also, they ran into Matt Harvey, and the Mets had reportedly identified a problem with Harvey’s mechanics beforehand, so if Harvey’s back on track now, well, there’s no shame in losing to him. Matt Harvey is an ace, and sometimes aces shut people out.

That’s how the White Sox lost their most recent game. Now let’s talk about the previous games.

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When the December three-way trade between the Chicago White Sox, Cincinnati Reds, and Los Angeles Dodgers was announced, you could sense Dodgers’ fans frustration. “Dodgers, Reds, Sox Complete Three-Way Trade Centered Around Todd Frazier,” is a great headline if you’re a Dodgers fan. Until you realize that Frazier isn’t coming to Tinseltown. Surely this was a mistake. After all, Justin Turner was having knee surgery, and how good is he, really? “We need Frazier!” the people of Los Angeles almost certainly said.

Well, it didn’t work out that way for the boys in blue. And, as it turns out, that’s just fine, as Trayce Thompson has been a revelation this season.

Before we get into why and how he’s been a revelation, I want to share a brief nugget of FanGraphs history with you. At one point, we had been considering a book project, and we crafted a few sample pages for it. On one, we placed blurbs for four players, one of whom happened to be Thompson. Here’s the blurb Carson Cistulli wrote for him (click to embiggen):

So, whenever I see Trayce Thompson’s name, I think of this, and it makes me smile. As I think you’ll agree, that blurb is Vintage Cistulli.

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Danny Salazar has a fastball that averages nearly 95 mph and one of the best changeups in the game. Given that lethal combination, it’s no surprise that he’s striking out over 11 batters per nine innings and has a 2.32 ERA. In his age-26 season, the Indians right-hander is continuing his ascent into most-overpowering-pitchers territory.

Signed by Cleveland out of the Dominican Republic in 2006, Salazar began emerging as a top-shelf prospect after returning from Tommy John surgery in 2011. Two years later, he was in the big leagues with a heater that touched triple digits. Last season, he logged career highs in wins (14), innings pitched (185) and strikeouts (195).

Salazar talked about his repertoire, which includes a changeup with a unique grip — no, it’s not a splitter — when the Indians visited Fenway Park earlier this month.

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Salazar on why he’s emerged as a front-line pitcher: “I think it’s learning. Every time I go outside, every time I watch a game, I’m paying attention. I’m seeing how guys attack hitters. That’s helping me to become a better pitcher.

“You learn about yourself and you learn about hitters. My best pitch is a fastball, but I know that if I’m just throwing fastball, fastball, they’re going to do damage to me. I have to use my secondary stuff, too. I’m learning more about myself and more about the other teams and how to attack them.”

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Baltimore’s Camden Yards opened to almost universal praise in 1992. The success of the park and its broad appeal spurred the development of new stadiums throughout baseball. Since the construction of Camden Yards, 21 of the league’s 30 franchises have received new stadiums, while eight others have undergone renovations (sorry, Tampa Bay). In Cleveland, they’ve seen both occur.

Averaging roughly one new stadium per year has been great for business, as attendance has gone up across the league and the old unsightly multipurpose stadiums have been retired. It would be reasonable to think, however, that such a boom in stadium construction would naturally result in an equally steep decline. There are, of course, only so many clubs for which to build new park. Reason isn’t always at play in such cases, however. Both the Braves’ relocation to a new home next year — and a recent announcement by the Rangers that they plan to build a new air-conditioned ballpark just 20-some years after debuting the old one — should solidify that notion for us. As long as they create profits for ownership, stadium building, renovations, and fights for public money will never end.

Baseball is a business, and franchise owners acts as corporate heads looking to extract money and increase profits wherever they can. Getting the public to fund a stadium is a very big part of that and most owners have been incredibly successful in this regard. Of all the news stadiums built in this era, only the San Francisco Giants privately funded their stadium, with the St. Louis Cardinals representing the only other club to account for a significant portion of their stadium’s expense. In most cases, we’ve seen public fights, with threats to relocate elsewhere — sometimes to another city and sometimes just to a neighboring suburb. We’ve seen this play out recently in the case of both the Braves and the Rangers — and, despite all of the new stadiums, we’re not done seeing it.

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