For three straight years before he even played a major league game, Andrew Heaney was ranked among Baseball America’s top 100 prospects. There was a buzz about him coming up, and he was considered the Marlins’ No. 1 prospect after the 2013 season. A polished young arm with great command and an elite slider, he was expected to hit the ground running.

He didn’t.

After starting the season with a dominant stretch in Double-A, Heaney was mediocre in Triple-A but received a big league summons. In five starts last season with the Marlins, he posted a 5.83 ERA and allowed six homers in 29 1/3 innings. Not good.

Three months later, in the span of 24 hours in December, he was traded twice. Two teams simply preferred to have other players, and though the pitcher had fun with it …

Well, @Dodgers we had a good run! Great to be a part of such a storied franchise. #thanksforthememories

— Andrew Heaney (@Heandog8) December 11, 2014

.. some of the shine had come off his prospect status in the process.

And now? The Angels rookie has a fine 3.29 ERA and 1.16 WHIP as he starts Thursday night in Texas with the Angels’ season hanging in the balance. He has recovered most of the excitement around his future, and all it took was two tiny tweaks that helped the young left-hander make the most of his stuff.

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Whether you credit longtime major leaguer Bobby Thomson — who is most famous for his Shot Heard Round the World — for first wearing batting gloves, or whether you remember the more iconic appearance of Mickey Mantle wearing a single white glove in a 1960 episode of “Home Run Derby” as the start of the trend, it’s common knowledge by now that a high percentage of pro baseball players wear batting gloves.

There are a few no-gloved hitters out there, however, and when asked why they don’t wear them, the answers usually include some blend of superstition and mechanical explanation. While we could easily dismiss both of those replies as ballplayers just being ballplayers, it does hit upon the interesting relationship ballplayers have with their psyche (superstition) and hands (mechanics).

Let’s take a closer at both sides of the explanation.

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The first thing you might notice when you watch Carlos Martinez throw are the numbers on the radar gun: 96, 97, 98. The Cardinals’ young righty throws the fifth-fastest four-seam fastball among starters in the big leagues, after all.

For all that velocity, though, the four-seamer might be his worst pitch. Among his pitches, it’s the only one that is not above-average by whiff rates, and it’s also allowed the highest slugging percentage on balls in play this year. “All the hitters who face me are looking for the four-seamer,” Martinez laughed when I pointed out that the pitch has his worst homer rate.

The pitcher’s response? Tighten up the rest of his pitches, one by one. That’s how he’s become a top-20 starter this year by strikeout rate, ground-ball rate, and ERA.

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Once a pitcher’s average fastball drops below 90 mph, pitching in the major leagues gets a lot more challenging. For instance, a pitcher is 16 percent more likely to give up a home run on a fastball clocked at less than 90 mph than one at more than 90. As such, continuing to pitch in the major leagues is more challenging as well, as teams just don’t hand the ball to these guys very often. Of the 146 pitchers who have thrown 500 or more four-seam fastballs this year, only 14 of them have averaged less than 90 on the pitch.

The league’s throwing harder every year, and it’s getting harder to live on the edges. Just look at how all fastball velocities are distributed this year.

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Cardinals starter Jaime Garcia has never thrown 200 innings. He’s had three major surgeries. He’s now 29 and was an afterthought going into the season, not mentioned at all in some team previews, and viewed as a bonus if he ever got healthy.

It’s been a tough time, and even the pitcher admits as much: “I’ve been through so much, with so many injuries, and it’s been tough,” he told me before a game against the Giants.

Is there a chance, though, that he’s come out of all of this improved as a pitcher? He’s currently showing the best ground-ball rate of his career, a number that would make him second in baseball if he had enough innings to qualify for the ERA title, and he’s slated to pitch a big September game against the second-place Pirates this weekend.

He credits the struggle to get here as a learning process that taught him more about his mechanics, his stuff, and his approach.

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Dodgers starter Alex Wood was 15th in strikeout rate last year among starters. This year, he’s all the way down to 67th. That’s a difference of more than two strikeouts per nine innings, and the second-biggest drop among qualified starters. His velocity isn’t down much, he’s throwing the same pitches, and they seem like they look the same. So what happened to Alex Wood’s strikeouts?

Turns out, a combination of mechanics and approach has robbed him of some effectiveness. In each case, though, there’s hope. The pitcher admitted that he’s thinking about both, and had answers for the way forward, at least.

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Sam Fuld had played 575 games without an ejection going into Monday’s game with the Orioles. Behind the plate, though, was umpire Brian Knight, one of the league’s most prolific ejectors. When that unstoppable force met that immovable object, we know who won. The player was sent to the showers early.

Fuld’s ejection for arguing the call can’t be undone, but the moment still offers plenty to unpack. He was called out for running out of the basepath and obstructing the throw to first base, so at issue are the mechanics of a bunt out in front of home plate.

But maybe more important is that Fuld — admittedly — may have failed to scout the guy behind home plate as well as he could have.

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He’s the youngest player in baseball, but he doesn’t sound like it.

“Every single day I go out there, I try to get better,” Carlos Correa told me recently. That’s something you might hear from any player, young or old. But in Correa’s case, any credit of his improvement is often deflected toward someone else. Everything comes back to the people that have helped him and taught him and played with him. When asked of the adjustments he has made as a hitter, Correa said, “Well, the hitting coaches here have helped me a lot.”

He is all of 20 years old, and already Correa is in the conversation for the best shortstop in baseball. Of course he has great natural talent — most big leaguers do — but it’s that maturity, that self-awareness, that openness to learn from anyone and everyone around him … that is what has made Correa so good at such a young age.

But there’s more to it than that. Like every major leaguer, he has had to make adjustments as he has developed, and there are certain things he must work on every single day to stay on top of his game.

With that, here are the three secrets to Carlos Correa’s success, directly from the player himself.

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If you split the career into halves, you’d be tempted to say that Ryan Braun has changed, fundamentally. At least when it comes to his balls in play, his ratios have changed somewhat dramatically the last three years.

But it’s important to remember that the league has changed over time, too, and that’s something the slugger is quick to point out. In the context of the league changes, Braun’s changes don’t look nearly as drastic. In fact, you might wonder if he’s changed at all.

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At this point of the season, there is still time for fantasy owners to make up ground in some categories — one of them being saves. Every year, a handful of teams make changes in terms of the man who will be getting those save opportunities down the stretch, and forward-looking owners can exploit those changes to their own benefit.

The list of statistics that are *not* statistically associated with closer change is long:

* ERA, projected or past
* Three-Year Fielding Independent Pitching stats
* Experience closing
* Shutdown percentage
* Whether the pitcher was the favorite or a bullpen committee member

These things don’t seem to matter much when it comes to closer changes. Maybe it’s because the samples are so small that these stats don’t do a great job capturing what’s happening in the bullpen. If you look at the list of things that *have* been shown to matter, not only is the list shorter, but the statistics become meaningful much faster. Here they are:

* Reliever strikeout rate
* Reliever velocity
* Reliever handedness

The short version? If you bet on the righty with the most gas and strikeouts in the pen, you’re going to be correct more often than you’ll be wrong. And that’s all we can hope for when it comes to our fantasy teams.

So let’s turn this lens on the current bullpens around MLB and see what we can find. Maybe we’ll predict the next closer change.

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