One is tempted, after learning that a player has tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs, to discount whatever value that player has provided on the field before positive test. There’s an asterisk applied. An unspoken caveat. A bit of a good old-fashioned “well, actually.”

Facing Kyle Kendrick isn’t exactly the same thing as using PEDs. Kendrick certainly has a habit of enhancing the performances of opposition batters, but the players who hit against Kyle Kendrick aren’t technically cheating. They’re not doing anything insidious, not violating some sort of rule, written or unwritten. They’ve simply had their names penciled into the lineup on the same day that Kendrick has been asked to start for his club. No need for an asterisk. A mental note, perhaps. But bad pitching is a part of the game. In some form, there will always be a Kyle Kendrick.

Seth Smith happened to be in the lineup when Kendrick started against Baltimore on Thursday. Perhaps it’s not accurate to say that he “happened” to be in the lineup. He’s the team’s usual leadoff man against right-handed pitchers, and Kendrick does indeed throw with his right hand. So there Smith was, doing the job that the Orioles have asked him to do. He’s not a typical leadoff man, in that he’s not a speedster. But he gets on base, and that’s what matters in the quest to set up Adam Jones and Manny Machado.

Suffice to say, Smith did his job on Thursday night.

Smith went 4-for-4 with a walk and scored two runs as Baltimore walloped Boston 8-3. Kendrick went just four innings. He allowed six runs, including a moonshot by Machado. He was, in essence, Kyle Kendrick. But that simple fact, that very essential and intrinsic fact of baseball, helped Smith morph into a fearsome, exasperating monster of a player for the duration of the game. Smith entered the game hitting .222. He exited hitting .286.

There was no big, ringing hit from Smith. The closest thing to it was an opposite-field double that brought two runs home. But it was how his hits happened that made this night special. Because the things did on Thursday made him appear awfully similar to Mike Trout, who just so happens to be the best player in the game.

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Trevor Story was one of the great surprises of 2016. He continues to be of interest early in 2017.

Story has always been a fly-ball hitter, which is an attractive trait for a player who calls Coors Field home. In his eight minor-league stops, Story hit more fly balls than ground balls six times. As a rookie last season, he posted a 0.62 GB/FB ratio and a 47.1 FB%.

This season?

Story has gone full Schimpf on us. He ranks second only to Schimpf in GB/FB ratio and second in GB/FB ratio (minimum 100 plate appearances) since batted-ball ratios have been recorded.

Story was already an extreme fly-ball hitter. Now he’s even more extreme — nearly the most extreme on record.

Story’s proclivity for fly balls doesn’t appear to be the result of fluky, early-season sample size. Consider: his average launch angle is 32 degrees, nearly double his 2016 average (16.7 degrees). A number of batted-ball metrics are near stabilization points. In the majors, Story ranks second only to Schimpf (33.1 degrees) in average launch angle. I haven’t seen any reports on Story’s apparent swing alterations or changes to philosophy early this season, but it appears as though he’s up to something.

We’ve written quite a bit about the uppercut philosophy this spring, and more and more MLB hitters appear to be buying in. The league’s average launch angle has inched up from 10.0 degrees in 2015, to 10.6 degrees in 2016, to 10.9 in 2017.

The question is, when does a hitter become too extreme in approach?

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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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A few minutes ago, I turned on a game between the A’s and the Twins, which is a sentence no one has ever written before. I turned the game on just in time to see Jharel Cotton pitching to Danny Santana. You might not know very much about Danny Santana. In fact, you probably don’t know very much about Danny Santana. That’s okay. Context clues. Relatively speaking, he’s a little dude. Hits a bunch of grounders. Utility player; reserve; Minnesota Twin. Here’s what Santana did:

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The Ring of Power could only be destroyed by returning it to whence it came, in the fiery Cracks of Doom of the great volcano Orodruin in the land of Mordor. Frodo Baggins and Samwise Gamgee had to travel all across Middle-Earth to accomplish this, traveling a great distance and encountering many perilous places and foes. Yet as is often the case, traveling a great distance resulted in accomplishing a great thing. Frodo and Sam rid the world of the Dark Lord Sauron. Luke Skywalker traveled to what was left of Alderaan and became a galactic hero. I am a massive dweeb.

Marcell Ozuna sent a baseball on a grand and glorious journey last night. He did not destroy it to eliminate a great evil, depending on how you feel about the Rays, but he did launch the ball into a far-flung flight. He sent a baseball into a part of Tropicana Field that was hitherto unexplored, and exploration of decrepit ruins like the Trop often yields important archeological information. The ball was like a sports version of the Cassini probe, a lonely adventurer into parts unknown.

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Yesterday, the Rangers announced that they’d be without Cole Hamels for the next couple of months, as he recovers from an oblique strain that was probably why he was pitching so poorly. A few hours later, they played the Astros in the third game of their four game series, and just like the previous two nights, they lost.

And they didn’t just lose; they got pounded 10-1, pushing them eight full games behind Houston in the AL West race. Now 11-17, the Rangers have the fourth-worst record in baseball, and their playoff odds have taken a nosedive; we currently are giving them just a 10% chance to reach the postseason.

And while it’s early enough to turn their season around, the disastrous first month of the season, paired with significant injuries to Hamels and Adrian Beltre, make it more likely that the Rangers are going to enter July in a precarious position. With some improvements from some key players, it’s not that hard to see this team making a late-season comeback, as they did a couple of years ago, to dig out of this big early hole and still put themselves in Wild Card position. But before they get there, the team will have to convince the front office to keep the roster together, and in particular, to ignore the numerous calls they’ll certainly be receiving on Yu Darvish.

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This is Alex Stumpf’s second piece as part of his May residency at FanGraphs. Stumpf covers the Pirates and also Duquesne basketball for The Point of Pittsburgh. You can find him on Twitter, as well. Read the work of previous residents here.

For the last six years, Tom Gillespie has been scouring the world looking for future Pirates. He says it’s the same as normal scouting: getting a name from beating a bush or a word from a trusted coach. It just happens over in Europe and Africa.

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Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about infield-alignment terminology and walking Bryce Harper, then answer listener emails about proper pitch usage, winning minor league championships, the minimum acceptable velocity given perfect command, improving equipment, taking batting practice seriously, Eric Thames vs. Ivan Nova, making positions be dictated by batting order, the Royals’ awful offensive month, a message from the baseball god, a WWE-style MLB team, pace of play and the playoffs, voiding contracts, and more.

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Last night, the Rockies slept in San Diego. For the most part, they slept well. They’ll head to Colorado after today’s game, and they won’t sleep as well when they get home. This is important, and backed by the players and science, so stick with me.

I did not sleep with them, or ask each one, but the ones I did talk to all mentioned the difference between sleeping at home and sleeping in San Diego and San Francisco. “The first night we were here, everyone was talking about how well they slept,” Rockies’ starter Tyler Chatwood told me in San Francisco. “Sometimes you feel it the first night, you have a crappy night’s sleep and feel tight,” said setup man Adam Ottavino of Colorado.

Plus, science says sleeping at high altitude is hard, and that rest and recovery generally is a difficult thing up high. In 2013 a meta-study in Turkey summed up the research:

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