Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about Jason Benetti, Andrew Triggs, Addison Reed and Odubel Herrera, C.B. Bucknor’s bad day, and Starling Marte’s suspension, then answer listener emails about the nature of fandom, dominance against a division rival, a billion-dollar payroll, Eric Thames’s hot start, transplanting an NPB team, catching up to favorite players from childhood, Mookie Betts’s strikeout-less streak, an RBI record, an unusual replay-review scenario, an extreme shift suggestion, and more.

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Few people benefit in Pittsburgh from Starling Marte’s 80-game steroid suspension, but Andrew McCutchen could be one of them.

After McCutchen logged the first eight seasons and 10,317.1 innings of his defensive career exclusively in center field, the Pirates elected to move him — against his wishes — to right field this year. The idea? To accommodate the more able glove and fleeter feet of Marte in center field. While moving a Face of the Franchise off a position at age 30 is unusual — just a reminder that Derek Jeter never moved to second base — consider McCutchen’s four-year Defensive Runs Saved numbers: 2013 (5), 2014 (-13), 2015 (-8), 2016 (-28).

The -28 was an MLB worst last season.

The right-field experiment had worked out reasonably well early this season, even if McCutchen’s heart wasn’t into it. But that experiment is on hold now, as McCutchen receives a second — and perhaps a last — chance in center field. McCutchen seemed pleased to return there when speaking with my former employer, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review:

“Center field is where I need to play. It’s where I want to be at. If I’ve got to show a couple people that — show I can do what I need to do — that’s what I’m going to do.”

During his stunning age-29 season, stunning for the extent to his production collapsed, McCutchen claimed he was healthy. But teammate Gregory Polanco appeared to suggest that McCutchen actually wasn’t. “He seems faster than last year,” said Polanco. “His knee is healthy again and he’s flying.”

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This is Joe Sheehan’s’s third piece as part of his April residency at FanGraphs. A founding member of Baseball Prospectus, Joe currently publishes an eponymous Baseball Newsletter. You can find him on Twitter, as well. Read all our residency posts here.

Starling Marte has been suspended 80 games for a first violation of the Joint Drug Agreement. Per MLB, Marte tested positive for Nandrolone. He accepted the suspension, calling his actions “a mistake” without denying responsibility for the positive test. Marte will be eligible to return on July 18, when the Pirates play their 94th game of the season at home against the Brewers. Per the latest changes to the JDA, Marte will also be ineligible for the 2017 postseason.

This is a blow for a Pirates team that needed everything to go right to challenge for a playoff berth. Already playing without infielder Jung Ho Kang, whose DUI violations have left him unable to secure a visa, the loss of Marte for 80 games projects to something like a two-win hit for a team that didn’t have two wins to spare. The Pirates have moved Andrew McCutchen back to center field to cover for Marte, and Marte’s playing time will fall mostly to Adam Frazier, off to a .295/.354/.455 start while playing five positions. Jose Osuna and John Jaso should get some extra PAs in Marte’s stead as well.

On the horizon is Austin Meadows, the No. 5 prospect in baseball according to Eric Longenhagen and No. 7 prospect according to MLB.com. Meadows, though, is off to a .146/.217/.244 start at Triple-A, running his line at that level across two seasons and 191 PA to .198/.277/.407. Meadows’s prospect status is intact; it’s just not likely that he’ll be ready for the majors before Marte can return.

Since the penalties for failing tests were increased in 2015, in the wake of the not-shady-at-all Biogenesis “investigation,” 14 players have been suspended 16 times under the MLB regime. (Jenrry Mejia, the Mets relief pitcher, was dinged three times in 10 months and is serving a lifetime ban.) Half of those are pitchers, and the other half have combined for 270 home runs in more than 10,000 plate appearances, 159 of those homers by Marlon Byrd. I mention this because it’s important to remember that Starling Marte’s suspension is result of home runs. Every single suspended player over the last 13 years owes his punishment to home runs: home runs none of them hit, home runs that were misunderstood in the moment and remain poorly understood today, home runs that were nevertheless used as a pretense for an elaborate campaign that assumes all players cheat and forces them to prove otherwise.

MLB expanded by two teams in 1993, adding the Florida Marlins and the Colorado Rockies. Offense jumped, as it always does in expansion years, from 4.1 runs per team-game to 4.6, helped by 81 games in the thin air of Denver. The strike years of 1994-95 saw an average of 4.9 runs per team-game, then 5.0 in 1996 before a dip to 4.8 in 1997. At that moment, it seemed as if the expansion effect was washing out of the player pool.

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Sometimes baseball is good, and sometimes baseball is bad, but always, baseball is weird. It can be weird because a player gets hit by pitches in four plate appearances in a row. It can be weird because a game ends with a strikeout, and then everyone celebrates, and then the umpire decides the pitch the batter missed wasn’t actually missed after all, even though it clearly and totally was, and then the game awkwardly resumes and ends with a strikeout a second time. And it can be weird because a guy like Kyle Hendricks walks a guy like Tommy Milone on a number like four pitches. There’s always this undercurrent of weird, and from time to time it bursts to the surface like a baseball-y geyser.

Think about what we have here. This event just took place earlier Wednesday afternoon. Kyle Hendricks is the pitcher people have loved to compare to Greg Maddux. At times, the comparison hasn’t even seemed all that crazy, and Maddux could use a bucket of baseballs to go hummingbird hunting. Tommy Milone, meanwhile, is and will forever be Tommy Milone, and not only is Tommy Milone a pitcher, but he’s also a pitcher you might not have even realized was still pitching in the majors. He is! Although, this afternoon, he was both pitching and hitting. As a hitter, he walked on four pitches, against Kyle Hendricks. OK.

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Earlier today, Nicolas Stellini documented umpire CB Bucknor’s tough night behind the plate at SunTrust Park on Tuesday. As Stellini noted, it’s only April 19 and we already have a contender for the worst call of the year.

But we also have a contender for the best call of the year.

As tough a night as Bucker endured, his performance also included one of the most courageous third-strike calls I’ve seen. Really! In fact, considering the actions of the Atlanta catcher, it might have been among the best strike calls I’ve seen.

On the seventh pitch of Wilmer Difo’s seventh-inning at-bat on Tuesday night, Braves right-hander Mike Foltynewicz missed his intended location by the width of the plate. The pitch, nevertheless, did graze the lower portion of the strike zone, and it was justly called (by Bucknor) a third strike.

While the pitch didn’t reach its intended target, it was a nearly perfect offering in one sense — namely, that it was difficult to hit or, at least, hit well. But it was surprising that Bucknor called the pitch a third strike, as Braves catcher Kurt Suzuki failed to catch the pitch. Instead, Suzuki whiffed on it.

It’s rare to see a major-league catcher fail to secure a fastball that passes through the strike zone. And it’s even more rare to see such a pitch actually called a strike by the home-plate umpire.

On one of the worst of nights we might see from a home-plate umpire this season, Bucknor also made one of the best calls we might see all season.

Here’s video of the pitch in question:

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You know how this works: Early into any season, many of us get obsessed with checking on fastball velocities. Big positive changes might portend great success — or surgery. And big negative changes might indicate future struggles — or surgery. It’s all guesswork in the first half of April, but it’s something, something potentially meaningful. Fastball speeds generally don’t lie to you. It’s this line of thinking that brought Jake Arrieta to my attention a short while ago; out of the gate in 2017, Arrieta wasn’t throwing the same stuff. He’s a high-profile pitcher, who’s put up high-profile numbers, and so any change is an important one.

I’ve kept my eye on Arrieta. I tend to dismiss pitchers who are dismissive of velocity changes, because they all say the same thing. At the end of the day, velocity loss is correlated to performance decline. There are exceptions, but there are exceptions to almost everything. Yet, there’s a complicating factor here. Arrieta’s velocity is down, and on its own, that’s troubling to me. But within context, perhaps we’re just observing something intentional. You know who else has lost velocity? Jon Lester. Also Kyle Hendricks. Also John Lackey. And also Brett Anderson. All the other guys in Arrieta’s starting rotation.

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