I find that writing goes in phases, and they can be unpredictable. I don’t know when it’s going to be a good writing week. I don’t know when it’s going to be a bad writing week. And I don’t know what I’m next going to find interesting. For example, I feel like I spent a good year or two zoning in on pitch-framing, which I thought was just the coolest thing. And my current fascination appears to be player adjustments. That’s good, because players are always adjusting, and it’s bad, because adjustments can be complicated. But I feel like there should be more attention paid to what’s going on underneath, even when the surface numbers seem stable. What’s driving a player’s success or failure? What’s driving his stability?

Adjustment analysis comes in different flavors. Some are more convincing than others. Some are more subtle than others. There are PITCHf/x adjustment analyses. There are mechanical adjustment analyses. And there are just plain ordinary statistical adjustment analyses. Many times, people will argue it’s just an observation of sample-size noise. Definitely, some of the time, that’s true. Other times, the adjustments are real, even if fleeting. And sometimes they’re so significant they just about slap you in the head. You want a story of a player who made an adjustment and kept himself around the top of his game? Embrace the case of Adrian Gonzalez, who is what he was, yet at the same time very much isn’t.

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The funny thing is, Andrew McCutchen and Starling Marte are so good the Pirates would be in the conversation for baseball’s best outfield no matter who the third guy was. But more often than not, the third guy has been Gregory Polanco, and Polanco came with enormous hype. He’s had his good days and bad days, his good moods and bad moods, but these days Polanco’s on a tear. A few weeks shy of his 24th birthday, Polanco looks like he might be realizing his potential, with power, a quick swing, and a diminishing rate of groundballs. The more Polanco hits, the better off the Pirates are, and the better are the chances that Polanco really is establishing himself as a quality regular.

An interesting thing about Polanco is that, even when his numbers weren’t great, they were well and good against right-handed pitchers. It was lefties who were giving him fits, and while that’s not too uncommon for a young lefty bat, it was clearly a hurdle for Polanco to overcome. As much as the Pirates believe in and practice positional versatility, they still would’ve loved to not have to keep Polanco platooned. This leads to something that’s really encouraging. Polanco’s numbers, lately, are up. So is something else.

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Every year, a number of starting pitchers seemingly come out of nowhere to become significant contributors at the major-league level. Sometimes, as in the case of, say, Jacob deGrom, the sudden evolution at the major-league level is real and sustainable. In the case of the majority of these short-term success stories, the league adjusts, the pitcher is unable to, and either disappears from the major-league scene or settles into a lesser role.

Coming into the 2015 season, Brewers right-hander Taylor Jungmann appeared to be little more than a failed first-round pick, with prospects of perhaps a big-league cup of coffee in his future. Instead, he has turned out to be a bright spot in a lost season for the Brew Crew since being summoned to Milwaukee in early June. Has the big righty turned a corner, settling in for a long run in the big club’s rotation? Or is this a short-term mirage, a dream that the big righty might wake up from any moment now?

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A few months ago, someone asked me who the most underrated player in baseball was, and after kicking around a few names, I settled on Arizona outfielder A.J. Pollock. Pollock got to the big leagues as a speed-and-defense center fielder who hit well enough to justify a regular gig, and then had his breakout year derailed last season when Johnny Cueto hit him in the hand with a fastball. Since he missed roughly half the season, it was easy to overlook his offensive improvements, but Pollock carried the added power and improved contact rate over to this season, and has developed into one of the very best outfielders in all of baseball.

But Pollock’s 2015 season has been so good that it’s hard to call him the game’s most underrated player anymore. After all, he made the All-Star team this year, and thanks to a .325 average and a decent likelihood of being honored with a Gold Glove at years end, he’s not really flying under the radar anymore. Like Ben Zobrist and Bobby Abreu, Pollock might have been mentioned as the game’s most underrated player so many times that he’s now being properly rated.

But even with Pollock’s graduation to stardom now being pretty widely accepted, I still think the game’s most underrated player might be an outfielder for the Diamondbacks. This time, I’m going with Pollock’s teammate David Peralta.

Read the rest on Just a Bit Outside.

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A little over a month ago, Dave ran through his annual trade value rankings, and as he likes to do, after all the good bits, he wrote up the bad bit, addressing the game’s least-valuable players. Ranking third on his list was fallen Tigers ace Justin Verlander, whose contract is steady even when the pitching isn’t. Verlander ranked worse than Matt Kemp. Worse than Shin-Soo Choo. He’s making $28 million a year through 2019, and when Dave wrote the post up, Verlander looked like a wreck, after a season in which he also looked like a wreck. Verlander’s contract has been used as one of the reasons why the Tigers might be headed for disaster.

And, the Tigers might be headed for disaster. So might you and I be, I don’t know. Who knows anything? One thing I think I know, though — Verlander has turned things around. As the Tigers have faded out of the race, Verlander has seemingly re-emerged, and now it’s worth wondering what he actually is. Just as the world was getting used to the idea of an underwhelming, under-performing Justin Verlander, he’s showing signs that he…might…be…back? What if that were true? Are we open to the chance that that’s true?

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A week and a half ago, there was a remarkable home run, which I like. I’m drawn to those kinds of things, and I almost can’t help myself but write about them. I was floored by the home run itself; it was one of the most obvious subjects ever provided to me. The only problem was then I didn’t write for a week. The moment passed. Usually, these things have to be written right away, or people cease to be interested. It’s been a while since the home run, now. People are thinking about other things. The Mets. The Mets are neat.

I feel like I have to do it, though. I can’t let it fade away — FanGraphs needs to have a post dedicated to this home run. It was sufficiently incredible that we’d be doing you a disservice by not putting something together. While I know the moment is gone, this is a home run with a longer life, a home run for which you needn’t worry about context. Come with me back to Saturday, August 15. We’re going to watch the Indians and the Twins in Minnesota. We’re going to watch them because, in the fifth inning, there was Eddie Rosario.

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Around here, you know that we spend a lot of time working with metrics that attempt to strip noise out of results. Often times, we’re less concerned with what has happened and more concerned with what is going to happen, and these component metrics often do a better job of isolating either a player or a team’s overall contribution to the results, while removing some of the factors that lead to those results but aren’t likely to continue in the future.

At the team level, the most comprehensive component metric we host is called BaseRuns, which evaluates a team’s quality based on all the plays they were involved in, without regard for the sequence in which those events occurred. BaseRuns essentially gives us a context-neutral evaluation of a team’s performance, assuming that the distribution of hits and runs isn’t really something a team has a lot of control over. BaseRuns can be thought of as the spiritual successor to Bill James‘ implementation of the pythagorean theorem to baseball, as pythag strips sequencing out of the conversion of runs to wins, but doesn’t do anything to strip the sequencing effects out of turning specific plays into runs scored and runs allowed.

Historically, BaseRuns has worked really well. For the years we have historical BaseRuns data (2002 to 2014), one standard deviation was right around four wins, and the data appears to be normally distributed; 73% of team-seasons have fallen within one standard deviation, 97% of team-seasons have fallen within two standard deviations, and no team had ever exceeded three standard deviations. There have been years here and there where a team sequenced their way to an extra 11 or 12 wins, but they weren’t very common, and that was usually the only break from the norm in that season.

Until this year. Here is the year by year standard deviation in BaseRuns wins versus actual wins for every year that we have the data.

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It’s no secret that the Washington Nationals have fallen short of expectations this season. At 62-61, the unanimous NL East favorites from the preseason sit 5.5 games behind the Mets with a discouraging 19% chance of winning the NL East. Things have been particularly ugly of late, as the Nats have won just 11 of their last 30 games.

As Dave Cameron pointed out last week, several of the biggest culprits for the team’s struggles are members of the team’s offensive core. Anthony Rendon and Ryan Zimmerman have been bad. Jayson Werth’s been worse than that. But perhaps the biggest disappointment has been the team’s shortstop, Ian Desmond, who was projected for the second-highest WAR among Nationals hitters by ZiPS. Desmond’s .229/.279/.384 batting line has put him within spitting distance of replacement level — a far cry from his preseason ZiPS forecast of 4.0 WAR.

Despite his struggles, the Nationals stuck with Desmond over the season’s first four-and-a-half months, trotting him out there in 119 of their 123 games this season. But on Friday, the team began to diverge from the status quo. After weeks of speculation, the Nats finally summoned prospect Trea Turner to the big leagues to help solidify the shortstop position from here on out.

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When faced with batters on base, Milwaukee Brewers righty Taylor Jungmann goes to his sinker more and throws lower in the zone. He hasn’t given up a home run on the sinker, and the pitch produces ground balls nearly three-quarters of the time. So why doesn’t Jungmann go to the sinker more often?

“What makes the sinker better is that I don’t throw it as much,” Jungmann told me before a game against San Francisco. “It makes it that much more effective because they aren’t looking for it. If I threw it every single pitch, my four-seamer would be better.”

Right now, Jungmann has found the right uses for his sinker. If he used it more, he’d get less value from each additional sinker. This is what makes evaluating pitches by their peripherals so difficult, especially in small samples. Sure, Mat Latos has gotten six whiffs on 24 changeups this year — for a percentage that’s almost twice the average changeup whiff rate — but that doesn’t make the pitch good.

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