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.