Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about Boog Powell’s debut, Ryan Webb’s and Matt Albers’ ongoing pursuit of history, and the ethics of baseball injuries, then discuss some early-season evidence that the save stat’s grasp on manager’s minds is starting to slip.

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I didn’t realize the Royals have lost nine games in a row. When it’s come to disappointing baseball, most of my attention was focused on teams like the Blue Jays, Giants, Mets, and Mariners. Every team mentioned here has under-performed, but sure enough, the Royals stand at 7-16, with baseball’s worst record. The upside, I suppose, is that they were once 7-7, but that’s damning with faint praise, since losing nine straight can derail even a wonderful season. The Royals have had a horrible week and a half.

As you examine things, it’s not like the Royals have experienced some kind of team-wide collapse. The defensive metrics paint a confusing picture, and the rotation has been better than the bullpen, but the Royals’ run prevention has surprisingly been a tiny bit better than average. The Royals aren’t out there just constantly getting smoked. Nearly the entirety of the problem is captured by the headline just above. Hitting. Teams need to hit. The Royals haven’t hit. It’s not unreasonable to suggest they’ve actually hit worse than ever.

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Remember last August when Gary Sanchez hit a ton of home runs and put up a .442 isolated-power figure for the New York Yankees? It was amazing. It was also special, so far as exhibitions of power are concerned. Consider: only four batters produced a higher single-month ISO last year than Sanchez. It wasn’t just improbable for a rookie; it was improbable for a major leaguer.

But the improbable is different than the impossible. Now another power-hitting Yankees prospect, Aaron Judge, has just finished his first real month as a starting outfielder in New York and has recorded a .447 ISO in the process — or slightly higher than Sanchez’s mark. The power is as large as Judge himself.

And while Judge has been the most impressive hitter for the Yankees, the club has received quite a few pleasant surprises. Starlin Castro, Chase Headley, Aaron Hicks, Matt Holliday, Austin Romine, and Ronald Torreyes have all exceeded expectations.

The result? A very successful first month of the season, leading to a 15-8 record. And while some of the club’s surprising performances won’t last — Judge included — the Yankees have banked some wins, increased their projections, and significantly improved their playoff odds, as the chart below shows.

The Yankees entered the 2017 season with playoff odds of 15.9%, the worst of any team in the AL East. Their strong April has put them over the 50% mark the rest of the way, however. At the start of the season, the Yankees were projected to have a .488 win percentage. Going forward, that number is already up to .509. Add in the wins they’ve already received, and their projected end-of-season winning percentage is up to .529.

Largely responsible for that positive trend is Judge himself. As with the club itself, his own personal projections now appear more optimistic.

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When Noah Syndergaard showed up to spring training having indulged in “Bowls of Doom” to gain 17 pounds with a view towards throwing even harder — this, after a season in which his fastball averaged 98 mph — alarm bells began clanging around the country. Among those waving red flags was the present author.

Here’s what I wrote on Feb. 13, 2017:

As exciting as all this [added strength] sounds, perhaps someone should pump the breaks. For a pitcher who threw harder than any other starter, who threw a variant of a fastball on 60% of his offerings, more velocity might not be such a great development. While we don’t have a full understanding of why so many pitchers are breaking down, perhaps the body is being pushed beyond its physical limits with the strength and velocity increases in the game. No one, among starter pitchers, is pushing limits like Syndergaard.

After pushing the limits in 2016, Syndergaard was attempting to push even harder against them this year. Perhaps he pushed too hard, flew too close to the sun, etc. Pitchers’ ligaments and soft tissue aren’t unlike wax wings; velocity, not unlike the sun. Record pitch speeds have wrought a record numbers of injuries. That Syndergaard is on the DL is, sadly, one of the least surprising developments early this season.

Sports-injury expert Will Carroll told FanGraphs on Monday that Syndergaard’s offseason work was likely unhelpful.

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Last year, Robert Gsellman came up to the big leagues and helped stabilize an injury-plagued Mets rotation. With a power sinker that had added velocity, the unheralded Gsellman missed bats and generated grounders at an elite level. And after another Steven Matz injury put the lefty’s dependability into question this past spring training, Gsellman was given a prime opportunity to grab a 2017 rotation spot and run with it. To date, however, he hasn’t returned to top form.

For one thing, the results have been ugly. By RA9-WAR, Gsellman has been one of MLB’s worst starters. That once-great sinker whiff rate has been halved. But beyond outcome-level stats, his pitch data indicates worsened stuff. Overall, Gsellman’s sinker is down 0.71 mph, and especially striking are his in-game velocity declines.

Below are LOESS-smoothed curves plotting the difference between the given two-seam fastball velocity and its initial “baseline” in that game — represented, in this case, by the average velocity of the pitcher’s first five two-seamers. By restating velocities like this, each start becomes its own “universe” and we mitigate pitch-tracking biases on the game and park level.

Out of the gate of his 2017 starts, Gsellman’s velocity is dropping. By the 40-pitch mark, he has typically lost 1 mph from his starting speed. As he approaches 80 pitches, his two-seamers are nearly 1.75 mph slower. The orange curve does rebound near its end, but a widened 95% confidence interval reflects a smaller sample of pitches and less certainty that he’ll continue to gain velocity back. Regardless, Gsellman is ending his starts at 1.5 mph off his opening speed. Compared to the dark gray curve for the league — which indicates starts this April in which pitchers threw 20-plus two-seamers/sinkers and 90-plus total pitches — Gsellman’s velocity has tumbled much more steeply.

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This is Alex Stumpf’s first 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.

With one month of the season in the books, the Ivan Nova signing has been the steal of the offseason.

After performing a career 180 following his trade to the Pirates from the Yankees at the deadline last year, Nova has become even more Nova-y in 2017, recording a 1.50 ERA over 36 innings, refusing to walk batters, and working at a record-setting pace.

His 95-pitch Maddux* on Saturday night was his fifth complete game in 16 outings as a Pirate. In that stretch of 100.2 innings, he has faced 396 batters and walked only four, including just one out of the 133 who stepped into the box this season. The last starter to go at least 100 innings in a season with a lower walk rate per nine was George Bradley in 1880. That was the year the number of balls required for a walk was reduced to eight, and four years before pitchers were permitted to throw overhand.

*”Maddux” is a term coined by Jason Lukehart in 2012 to denote a game in which a pitcher records a shutout while throwing fewer than 100 pitches.

Nova has been pitching like he is double-parked all year, challenging hitters right out of the gate and getting a lot of outs early in the count. Pittsburgh manager Clint Hurdle uses the number of batters retired on three pitches or less as a barometer for a starter’s performance. Nova has done it 57 times over five starts this season. His first pitch has been a strike 66.9% of the time, and he’s in the zone on 51.3% of his offerings. He has said he isn’t afraid to throw strikes, but there’s a fine line between challenging hitters and going out there with a “hold my beer” mentality and daring them to go hacking at the first pitch. They haven’t had a lot of success coming out swinging, combining for a .111 average with a mean exit velocity of 80.6 mph off the bat on the first offering.

That has all resulted in an average of just 12.1 pitches per inning — the lowest since Stats LLC started keeping track in 1988. If Rob Manfred ever institutes a Pace of Play Hall of Fame, Nova would be a first-ballot inductee.

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CLEVELAND – Like so many others, Chris Devenski watched in fascination last October. He observed, on the flat-screen television of his offseason home in San Diego, as Cleveland continuously elected not to save their best arm, Andrew Miller, for the ninth inning, but rather to utilize him in high-leverage situations earlier in the game.

Unlike the many other major-league pitchers watching, however, Devenski recognized the part Miller was playing: he himself had already assumed a similar new-age bullpen role in the second half of the season with Houston. He had, in fact, become accustomed to entering games at unlikely spots much earlier than that, from his experience as a piggy-back tandem starter in the Astros’ farm system. As Cleveland advanced through the playoffs, Devenski watched as the movement to rethink bullpen usage and role — a movement of which he’s a part — advanced. The revolution was televised.

“I saw my role, man,” Devenski told FanGraphs last week. “I saw what they were doing with Miller here [in Cleveland] and [Aroldis] Chapman with the Cubs, it seems like that is what is coming about now in the game. It’s changing a little bit. I saw [in Miller] what I do. It was pretty cool. It’s big-time situations there. It’s important.”

But Devenski is arguably more of a revolutionary, more of disruptive figure than Miller. Since joining the Indians, Miller has pitched in high-leverage situations often, but he’s only recorded two or more innings in an outing three times in the regular season. He’s never recorded more than six outs in an appearance. Devenski had 18 such outings last season alone, including nine in August and September when the then-rookie was thrust into more high-leverage situations.

Devenski has recorded six or more outs in seven of his nine appearances this season and has an absurd 49.2-point strikeout- and walk-rate differential (K-BB%) and 22% swinging-strike rate. He has become a unique weapon in an unusual role.

Devenski said his wide range of experiences — from starting to relieving to tandem-starting — made the job a natural fit. While most pitchers would rather start or rack up saves, Devenski seems to have embraced his work in a hybrid capacity.

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In some ways, the Nationals just finished up a great week. In the last seven days, they scored 77 runs, running a team batting line of .355/.423/.649 and a wRC+ of 175. For reference, Mike Trout’s best single-season wRC+ is 176. If you wanted to know what a line-up of nine Mike Trouts would look like, it would look something like the Nationals line-up of last week.

But beyond the results on the field, the Nationals had a terrible week, as on Friday, Adam Eaton’s knee gave out running through a close play at first base, and the postgame diagnosis confirmed the worst; a torn ACL that will sideline him for the rest of the season. The Nationals’ big winter acquisition, and one that cost them a significant chunk of the upper-levels of their farm system, Eaton was off to a strong start at the plate and had helped the team to a commanding early lead in the NL East.

Now, though, the team is roughly back to where they were at the beginning of last winter, with enough talent to see themselves as legitimate contenders, but with enough holes to not necessarily be seen as a favorite when October rolls around. As we noted before the season began, the Nationals have a depth problem, and so with Eaton on the shelf, the team will now turn to Michael Taylor and his career 69 wRC+ to hold down center field for at least the next few months. Taylor’s probably not a guy you want to be starting in October, and having him as the starting CF means he can’t fill in for Jayson Werth, who may remember that he’s 38 at any moment.

Given the team’s current options, it’s entirely possible that they could end up starting not only Taylor, but also Chris Heisey, in some important playoff games, and while the top of the line-up is pretty great, you don’t really want to be starting multiple guys of this ilk in October. And if any of the infielders get hurt, you’re tossing in a Stephen Drew here or a Wilmer Difo there, and a vaunted line-up can quickly start to look pretty thin.

So, the natural reaction to Eaton’s injury would be to make a trade to fill the gap. The team saw center field as a big enough weakness to surrender Lucas Gilioto, Reynaldo Lopez, and Dane Dunning six months ago, so they probably shouldn’t be willing to roll with the pre-Eaton status quo now. But making a deal is now more difficult than it was over the winter, and there’s a rational argument to be made that enough else has change to disincentivize the team from making another big all-in trade.

Let’s tackle that second point first. While it is certainly too early to be hatching any chickens, the Nationals strong start in April, combined with a pretty disastrous first month in New York, has significantly improved the team’s odds of making the postseason. While we saw the Nationals as the likely division winner on Opening Day, the Mets were a strong contender as well, and their presence left enough room for our forecasts to say that there was something like a 1-in-3 chance the Nationals wouldn’t win the NL East. As we stand here on May 1st, however, the 17-8 Nationals are already 6 1/2 games ahead of the 10-14 Mets, and the primary in-division challengers just saw their ace walk off the mound with an arm problem a few days after their best hitter was sent to the DL with a nagging hamstring issue.

So now, even without Eaton, the big early lead and the Mets health issues have combined to push the Nationals division odds up to 88%, so that 1-in-3 chance of not winning the division is now something like 1-in-9. The Nationals have a big enough cushion that they probably can run Taylor out there for the next five months and still win this thing, probably comfortably. So now, the question is more about how much you surrender to get a better player in the line-up in October.

Certainly, you want to put the best team on the field you can in order to give your team the best chance in the postseason, but the randomness of the playoffs can’t be understated. If you make another big trade for a center field upgrade, you’re hoping that the guy you acquire hits well for maybe 50 at-bats, and it can be a tough sell to give up a significant piece of the team’s future for the hope that you get a few good weeks out of a guy at the end of the year.

Which brings us to the difficulty of making a trade to begin with. Put simply, it doesn’t look like the market is teeming with potentially-available center fielders. Several rebuilding or potential sellers signed their center fielders to long-term extensions over the winter, taking Ender Inciarte, Odubel Herrera, and Kevin Kiermaier officially off the market. A few others who will likely be selling at the deadline have big weaknesses in CF too, as you’re not going to be hitting up teams like the White Sox for CF help.

Realistically, it looks like the best CF who is probably a good bet to get moved this summer is Lorenzo Cain. The Royals are off to a lousy 7-16 start, and with a bunch of guys heading into free agency this winter, they can’t afford to keep everyone together for the stretch run and hope a late-season revival makes up for their slow start. Cain wouldn’t replace Eaton at the plate, but he’s a better defender, and would put the the Nationals roughly back where they were in overall talent level before Eaton’s knee gave out.

But to land Cain, Mike Rizzo would have to outbid every other contender looking for a CF, and the Royals aren’t going to just give Cain away, given that he’s one of their best trade chips at the moment. And since the Eaton trade removed most of their high-level arms, you’re now looking at a small group of names that every other team is going to be asking for: Victor Robles, Juan Soto, and Erick Fedde, most likely. Eric ranked Robles as the #8 prospect in baseball before the season, so he should be off limits for a rental, but Soto and Fedde are both Top 100 material, and giving them up for a hoped-for October upgrade could also be a tough pill to swallow.

In the end, Rizzo and his staff will have to decide whether they want to push in as far as possible to try and win in the next two years, while they still have Bryce Harper around, or if they think they are better off trying to build a sustained winner even after Harper likely leaves. After all, it’s not like this a team clearly headed for a cliff where a win-at-all-costs posture is clearly correct. Trea Turner looks like a franchise player, Robles could be as well, and the team has long-term guarantees to Stephen Strasburg and Max Scherzer. Eaton is still around. They’ll still have Anthony Rendon in 2019. If the Nationals don’t give up a Robles or a Soto this summer, they could reasonably think that their window could extend past Harper’s time in Washington, especially if the money he might otherwise get is reallocated in free agency.

But that puts them right back where they’ve been the last few years; entering the postseason as a good-but-flawed team that probably would need some things to break their way to take down the Cubs or Dodgers in the playoffs. And after going out in the first round in three of the last five years, it’s only natural to want to avoid another early elimination because you gave the other team four easy outs a game by starting Michael Taylor in the postseason.

The May-September Nationals probably don’t need to replace Eaton. The rest of the team is good enough to likely hold on to their division lead, especially with the Mets in a somewhat chaotic state.

The October Nationals, however, could certainly use a guy like Cain, especially if he came along with a bullpen upgrade like Kelvin Herrera. But that’s not going to be a low-cost acquisition, and it’s not an easy call to give up big parts of the remaining farm system for the hope that these guys are significant upgrades in just a handful of games in the postseason. If you give up a Robles or a Soto to land another 2017 upgrade, in addition to what you already gave up to get Eaton, you’re probably setting yourself up for a rebuild after 2018, especially with Philadelphia and Atlanta poised to be contenders at that time.

Maybe it’s best to not worry about the future while you have a generational talent like Harper, and just try to push in on the next two years, accepting that there will be some losing seasons down the line. If you go out in the first round because Lorenzo Cain didn’t hit in October, well, at least you tried. But while a noble feeling, surrendering big parts of a team’s future for a bet on October performance alone remains a risky bet, and could set up the organization to have some long-term pain without any real guarantee of short-term benefit.

With the Eaton trade, the Nationals tried to thread the needle of contending both now and in the future. They gave up a lot to get him, but landed a young player with long-term control who could make them better without feeling like they sacrificed the future. Unless Kevin Pillar’s April power surge is for real, there doesn’t appear to be another Eaton-type out there, so this time, the Nationals will have to make a more clear choice. Do they push in on their Harper window, potentially sacrificing what’s left of the long-term future of the organization in the process, or try to make another playoff run with a good-not-great roster?

It’s not an obvious call. I think either decision could be defended, and since they have a big early lead, the organization can take a few months to see what Taylor can do, and whether he can convince them to not make a big trade for a CF in July. But if he’s just the Michael Taylor we’ve seen the last few years, it’s going to be tough for the team to feel comfortable with their outfield headed into the postseason, and if the Royals sweeten the pot with a guy like Herrera, it might be too tempting to avoid giving the team their best chance to win while Harper is still launching home runs in the nation’s capitol.