Surprisingly effective Mets rookie pitcher Zach Thornton announced this week that actually, he is going to be Zac Thornton. This despite years on the baseball radar going as Zach. Even his Instagram, after he told reporters he preferred Zac, said Zach for a day or two.

His rationale, per Newsday’s Laura Albanese: He has never understood what the H does.

I guess I hadn’t ever questioned what the H does, exactly, but it didn’t take long to summon my answer. It makes the most sense as an abbreviation for Zachary, which is spelled with an H that aids in pronunciation. And it makes it generationally and aspirationally clear that I have nothing in common with Zac Efron. Sold, I’m an H Zach.

But setting the actual choice aside, what I don’t understand is how more than one Zac(h)(k) has made it all the way to the majors without making it permanently. Thornton follows Zack (nee Zach) Britton in changing his spelling mid-career.

If one day I am the last Zach standing in the baseball world, I will wear the H with pride.

It’s time for bits and bobs I didn’t get to earlier in the week.

The Bullpen

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This week in his Pebble Hunting newsletter, Sam Miller wrote about the worst ABS challenges of the year made by batters — the instances of hitters watching what should be an obvious strike go by, early in the game with no leverage to encourage a risk, and somehow thinking it was a ball.

The Rays superstar slugger Junior Caminero is responsible for more of them than anyone, seemingly an enthusiastic, willful misunderstander of the pitches zipping past him in the strike zone. Or perhaps a fallible human blessed with the absence of self-doubt. Whatever it is, he challenges a lot, often to ill effect.

Meanwhile, Yandy Diaz — his teammate, his twin engine powering the Rays offense — hasn’t challenged once. He’s the only qualified hitter in baseball who hasn’t yet tried a helmet tap to flip an umpire’s call.

When teams don a uniform and operate with a shared strategy and follow a shared manager and develop a narrative arc across multiple years, we start to think of them together. But boy, sometimes baseball serves up a big, fat reminder that it’s an individual game with occasional team cooperation.

Even the Rays, who would have to be like a collectivist Scandinavian country on the MLB club scale of Cohesive Team Identity, are not molding their guys to behave in any consistent way. These are split-second decisions where we learn something about what’s going on under the hat, about what that hat can’t change.

Diaz is batting .307/.382/.467. He walks plenty and rarely strikes out. He has been doing this for years. It stands to reason that he knows the zone well enough to spot the occasional missed call. But he has chosen to let others do the challenging. Perhaps others who might need it more.

Maybe it’s about the team. Even if his choice is singular.

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OK, I knew D-backs star Corbin Carroll hits a lot of triples. If you had made me guess off the top of my head who has the most triples over the last few years, I think I probably would have even guessed Carroll and gotten it right.

But I would not have realized just how right I was.

MLB’s Sarah Langs noted that Corbin Carroll is now tied with Starling Marte and Mike Trout for the most triples among active players. That despite reaching the majors more than a decade after them.

His 55 three-baggers through just 587 games and 2,511 MLB plate appearances put him on pace to reach all-time heights with anything resembling this 15-a-year pace.

Carroll already has 12 triples this season, which is a ton, and means this supercut is already out of date.

Only eight players have logged 20 triples in a season since integration in 1947, with 2007 Curtis Granderson and 1949 Dale Mithcell setting the modern bar at 23.

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The Pirates have a guy named Esmerlyn Valdez who you might not have encountered yet. He debuted in May, has been a lineup staple for a month-and-a-half, and he hits bombs.

Since June 11, the day he really began a run of sustained playing time, Valdez has been the third-best hitter in baseball. It’s a small sample of just 113 plate appearances, but it’s a .320 average, 11 homers, a top-10 90th-percentile exit velocity number that essentially means he really does hit the ball hard enough to scare people, and hoo boy, so many strikeouts — with some walks to balance it out a bit.

We’ve seen power hitters get off to scorching starts like this before and then get pulled down by the inevitable force of performance gravity. Rhys Hoskins is a good outcome, Aristides Aquino is a less good one. Something like that will happen to Valdez, assuming he isn’t readymade Yordan Alvarez 2. But where he falls on the regression scale might mean a lot for the Pirates’ fortunes. If you haven’t caught some of his at-bats, I’d recommend it.

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As ever the lockout is looming, the labor talk is simmering, the salary cap advocates are advocating, and so on and so forth. Today I’m here to offer you a low-importance argument for a high-stakes decision.

I want to simply show you how NBA analysts have to talk about trades in their salary cap system.

Here’s the background you need: The Thunder, one of the best teams in the NBA and the champions in 2024-25, traded away a player named Lu Dort. He’s not a star level performer now, but he’s a role player with a reputation for one great skill (his defense) who spanned the franchise’s rise from rebuild doldrums to title contention. It’s like if the Braves shipped out Ozzie Albies, or something like that.

Look at this! Emphasis is mine.

While the loss of the veteran is certainly tough to see, considering it has now increased Oklahoma City's offseason savings to $90 million and, in turn, pushed the club below the second apron, the logic behind such a move is obviously sound.

Now, though most may be fixated on the three future second-round picks the Thunder netted in return for Dort's services, in truth, the biggest asset attained by OKC and, quite possibly, any team in the exchange is the lucrative $17.7 million trade exception it's now created.

Such a luxury, abbreviated as TPE, is given to a team that trades away a player with a certain salary and either brings back someone at a lower salary or for mere draft picks. The exception allows teams to trade for players without sending back matching salary and without having it impact their personal salary cap.

What?

This is how some huge group of fans believes they want their sport to operate? I love a deal where I obtain a big asset that is the lucrative $17.7 million for trading away a player with a certain salary and bringing back something worse. It’s like when a baseball team makes an obvious deal just to save the owner money except it got a makeover at McKinsey and Co. and can now bore most people into acquiescence.

If that’s the future you wish for, I don’t understand.

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Tip of the cap to Joe Sheehan, proprietor of a great baseball newsletter, for noting the clarifying effect this weekend’s slate could have on the pre-trade deadline playoff picture.

NL wild card:

Cubs (1st, 3.5 games up) at Pirates (1 game back of 3rd)

D-backs (3rd, 1 game up) at Nationals (2 games back of 3rd)

Padres (4 games back of 3rd) at Marlins (2 games back of 3rd)

Reds (6 games back of 3rd) at Cardinals (1.5 games back of 3rd)

AL West:

Mariners (2nd, 0.5 games back) at Rangers (1st, 0.5 games up)

Very enjoyable, season-swaying baseball for everyone except the front office employees who hope to have any idea of what they’re doing next week.

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I know what I’ll be doing. Next week, I’m rolling out a feature I’m tentatively calling the Move Matrix. It tries to address the dueling dynamics of:

• How reactive is your team constitutionally? Do they make big changes on a hair trigger? Do they hold steady regardless of their situation?
• How bold should they be right now? Is it time to do something drastic (in either direction)? Or is wait-and-see the appropriate approach?

I’m interested to know if you have a lean on a description or a prescription for your team ahead of the trade deadline — keeping in mind it's not about buying vs. selling. Do they always leave you wanting more action? Do you wish they would chill out for a minute? Drop a comment, or send an email to hellobandwagon@gmail.com. Let me know where they should go on the matrix.