You may not have noticed, but Cardinals starting pitcher Joel Pineiro is having himself one heck of a year: 12 wins already, outstanding 1.12 WHIP, sparkling 3.22 ERA, and even more sparkling 2.94 FIP.

But if you dig beneath the surface a bit, you’ll find one of the strangest seasons by a starting pitcher ever. Basically all of Pineiro’s peripheral stats are on the extreme margins, in different directions.

First of all, Pineiro is one of the worst pitchers in baseball at striking people out this season: his 4.07 K/9 is the third worst in the entire major leagues, among qualified starters, behind only Nick Blackburn and John Lannan. In fact, he has racked up a mere 67 strikeouts in almost 150 innings of work.

But at the same time, Pineiro is leading all major league starting pitchers in fewest walks allowed, with an insanely low 0.94 BB/9. Yes, it’s true, Joel Pineiro has somehow only walked 15 batters all season.  In 148.1 innings. Only 15.

Add the lack of strikeouts and the lack of walks together, and you actually get a pitcher with an incredible K/BB ratio of 4.17 (anything over 4 is amazing).  This puts Pineiro right up there with flame-throwing strikeout gods like Tim Lincecum, Justin Verlander, Zack Greinke, and Jon Lester.

But perhaps the most amazing stat of all is Pineiro’s HR/9, which is a positively microscopic 0.24, which is easily the best in baseball, and it’s not even close. How is such a tiny number even possible???

Well, the obvious answer would be that Pineiro doesn’t allow many flyballs, and this is absolutely true. In fact, Pineiro leads all starting pitchers with the fewest flyballs allowed, at 23.2 percent, and also leads all starters in most groundballs allowed, at a whopping 60.9 percent.  This is even better than Derek Lowe. In fact, far better. Lowe is second place, but more than five percentage points back, at “only” 55.6 percent.

As for line drives, basically nobody ever hits line drives off of Joel Pineiro.  He’s fourth best in baseball at limiting line drives.

But even Pineiro’s incredible ability to get ground balls and avoid flyballs is not enough explain his microscopic home runs allowed numbers. Because on top of leading the majors by far in home runs allowed, Pineiro also leads the majors in fewest home runs per flyball, at an insanely tiny 3.5 percent.  Once again, Lowe is second, but he yields homers at almost twice the rate of Pineiro, at a full 6 percent HR/FB. So basically, even when a hitter manages to hit it in the air against Pineiro, the ball doesn’t go anywhere.

Now just to throw one more extreme number into the mix, Joel Pineiro has also been incredibly unlucky this year with his strand rate. Pineiro is fourth worst in all of baseball this year with a 65.3 LOB%, so basically the few runners that do manage to make it to first base of Pineiro are highly likely to score.  This rate of 65.3% is far off of Pineiro’s career rate coming into the season of 71%

So what exactly is going on here? Are all of these extreme outlier numbers just random flukes?

Well, to some extent, certainly, but maybe not entirely.

Looking at Pineiro’s pitch breakdown, we notice something very odd.  Suddenly this year, in contrast to the rest of his career, he has started throwing an incredibly high number of fastballs. So something has definitely changed about Pineiro’s approach.

In fact, Pineiro’s fastball percentage of 71 percent is way, way above his previously long established career norm of a much more normal 59 percent, and is in fact is ninth-most in baseball among starting pitchers. But what makes this even weirder is that out of the top 15 guys on the list of highest fastball percentage, Pineiro’s fastball is by far the slowest. The rest of the top 15 pretty much all sling it up there in the mid-90s, so they can afford to get by with a lot of heaters, but Pineiro basically tops out at 88 or 89.

Most of the other pitchers in the top 15 are also basically two-pitch pitchers, which both explains their high percentage of fastballs and also means they set up the fastball with a strong secondary pitch.

But what is odd about Pineiro is that he no longer even has a secondary pitch. When he started out in the majors, Pineiro used to be a four-pitch pitcher, mixing in a slider, curveball, and change.  This season, he still throws all three of those pitches once in a blue moon, but all three have become mere “show-me” pitches; Pineiro throws all three of them only about 10 percent of the time or less, and all three are at or approaching career lows, percentage-wise.

Basically, it seems like Pineiro has discovered some sort of magical, all-powerful 88-mph sinking fastball that can get just about anyone out, and he therefore throws it pretty much all the time.  We are talking near-Mariano-Rivera-type single-pitch effectiveness here.

While the pitch doesn’t really fool anyone in that it is quite easy to make contact with, Pineiro can fearlessly pound the strike zone with it, because the pitch is immune to home runs or even line drives.  The result is a pitcher who walks nobody, strikes nobody out, but also doesn’t give up any home runs. Batters get lots of singles against Pineiro, because just about every pitch is in play, but that’s about it.

I’m not exactly sure what Trevor Hoffman was doing this offseason, but at this point it wouldn’t surprise me if he had been wandering the depths of the Florida Everglades with a map left behind by Ponce De León.

Because since the 41-year-old Hoffman came off the DL in mid-April, he has been pitching about as well as it is humanly possible to pitch.

In 10 games this season, Hoffman has yielded only 3 hits, and has not walked a single batter, while striking out 9. His ERA is 0.00, and his WHIP is a microscopic 0.30.

Most of the games were in tight situations too – 9 of the 10 appearances resulted in saves, including saves three days in a row from May 12 to 14.

After years in the figurative wilderness when it came to finishing games, it looks like the Brewers finally have themselves a real closer.

Daisuke Matsuzaka’s line in his start this week:

Nick Swisher’s line in one inning of relief:

From my perspective, this basically sums up the week.

I was there last night for Jon Lester’s no-hitter. It was our annual company trip to Fenway. I was sitting way back in right field with about fifteen of my coworkers, and we spent the first five innings drinking beer and trading office gossip. Then we realized what was happening in front of us.

Until about then, the crowd had been heavily invested in Manny Ramirez’s pursuit of his 500th home run. But as Jon Lester retired one Royal after another, the atmosphere in the old ballpark became increasingly giddy and electric, with moments of expectant silence broken by cheers after every strike, groans after every ball, and gasps after every grounder. The sunset blazed pink and orange over the left field wall.

I woke up this morning and it seemed like a dream. Last night I had this crazy dream, and I was at Fenway Park in May but it was really really cold, and for some reason, all my coworkers were there, and then Jon Lester threw a no-no!

I’ve seen a lot of great moments at Fenway over the past 26 years, but when Lester recorded the final out, the cry of jubilation that erupted in the Fens sounded unlike any other cheer I have ever heard there. It wasn’t the lusty roar I’ve heard at playoff games, and it wasn’t anything like the triumphant crowing you hear at Yankee games. It was the sound of 37,000 people surrendering themselves to euphoria, falling into 100% pure, unadulterated, grade-A baseball love. In fact, I may have given in to the euphoria of the moment a little too much, if possible. No need to go into too much detail, but if you were in Kenmore Square last night and saw a blond woman, about 5′6″, leaning into the brick facade of Fenway Park and apparently attempting to hug the venerable edifice, let’s just say you weren’t hallucinating.

The night was better suited for October than May. There was a wind whipping through Boston that put whitecaps on the Charles. Dust blew into my eyes on the way to the park. It was the kind of night you expected fly balls to become home runs and pop-ups to become singles. That Jon Lester threw a no-hitter is amazing enough. That he did it in such a gale? Unbelievable. Except that I was there and I saw it with my own eyes.

I walked back across the river, the moon and the Citgo sign shining brightly on the water. I could still see the white glow of Fenway’s light towers. The night didn’t feel so cold anymore—the wind had died down. I fell into talking with a couple of guys who were also making the trek back to the Cambridge side of the Charles. I’ve high-fived with strangers in Kenmore after a great game, but I’ve never had thirty-minute conversations with them. But maybe this is just normal, post-no-hitter behavior—who knows? They told me a great story. They were sitting next to an elderly woman. Last year, she gave her tickets to Clay Buchholz’s no-no last year to her daughter and granddaughter. There may be no crying in baseball, but I do believe there is karma.

At the All-Star Break the Washington Nationals were so buried at the very bottom of the standings that we can all be forgiven for having ceased to pay any attention to them. So it is not surprising that nobody noticed just how good the Nationals have been for the past month, having gone 7-1 in their last eight games, and 15-7 since July 15.

So what is their secret? Now that is the real shocker. Since July 1st, the Washington Nationals have had the best ERA in all of baseball. That’s right, I think you probably need to read that sentence again because it doesn’t seem to compute in your head, but for nearly a month and a half, the Nationals hurlers have been the best in the game, better than Boston, better than San Diego, better than the Cubs, A’s, or Mets.

This pitching dominance has been created by letting youngsters have the ball and seeing how far they can go. Things were bad for a while when injuries felled 1-2 starters Shawn Hill and Jason Bergmann, but in recent weeks rookies Joel Hanrahan (3.27 ERA) and John Lannan (3.71) have stepped into the void, along with veteran scrap-heap find Tim Redding (2.43). And prospects are looking even better with ace Hill due back any day now and Bergmann expected to be ready by September.

But even better than the rotation has been the team’s bullpen, which has been a strength since day 1, and currently sports the third best ERA in the National League, behind only the Mets and Padres. Pretty much anyone Manny Acta runs out of that pen can be counted on to turn in a good outing, whether it’s Chad Cordero (2.57), Jon Rauch (3.67), Chris Schroeder (1.46), Luis Ayala (2.45), or Saul Rivera (3.31).

Let’s face it, at 52-61 and 11.5 games out in the East, the Nationals are not going to get anywhere near contention this season, and probably not next season or the season after that, for that matter. But if they keep pitching like they have of late, by which I mean, better than any other team there is, they can make a pretty inspiring run at .500 down the stretch!