Even though the existence of this piece is based on opinions relayed to me by multiple players, none of those players’ actual name appear within it. Why? Because nobody wants to go on record about the strike zone. They do have feelings about that zone, though. Especially lefties. And there’s evidence that the lefty strike zone is changing.

One lefty slugger was recently telling me about his approach and then made sure that we were off the record to throw in an aside: “… because they’re calling the lefty zone more true on the inside these days.” A catcher was adamant that he’d heard from umpire crew chiefs that there was an added emphasis on those pitches in to lefties. Another catcher echoed the sentiment and added that umpires were looking harder at the bottom of the zone. One lefty hitter called it garbage. A third catcher just shook his head at the whole thing.

Though none of these players would put their name to the complaint — fair, since they have to interact with the umpires going forward and wouldn’t want to poison that conversation and put a bullseye on their backs — there was enough smoke here to investigate the situation for fire.

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As one of the flag bearers of the fly-ball revolution — or the air-ball revolution as Daniel Murphy has suggested rebranding it — I thought it would be appropriate to check in on the status of the batted-ball trends after we’ve reached a stabilization point for air balls. And for many regular position players, we have reached a stabilization points for line-drive, fly-ball, and ground-ball rates.

I provided an update midway through April after a barrage of posts about the subject this spring.

Across the majors, fly balls (35.7%) are up 1.1 percentage points from last season and 1.9 points from 2015*. Ground-ball rate (44.3%) is down slightly and at its lowest level since 2011. Ground balls are down from 0.4 points from last season and 1.0 point from 2015. In an industry always looking for an extra 2%, the emergence of even slightly a slightly higher air-ball rate might be indicative of something — particularly since pitches in the bottom part of the strike zone have increased by more than three points this season. Those are pitches that should be even more difficult to lift.

*Numbers entering play Monday.

Moreover, average launch angle is up a tick (to 10.9 degrees) this season, compared to 10.8 degrees last season and 10.0 degrees in 2015, launch angle on pitches in the lower third of the strike zone has increased from 5.1 degrees in 2015, to 5.8 degrees in 2016, to 6.0 degrees this season, according to Statcast data.

While the slight increase in air balls league wide is perhaps explained by something else — or perhaps by many other things — or is perhaps just the product of random variance, there are definitely individual batters who’ve made a concerted effort to changing their swing planes. Which players, specifically, have meaningful altered their batted-ball distributions?

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Yasmani Grandal and I will be forever connected.

Despite his paltry traditional offensive numbers a year ago — including a .229 batting average, 49 runs scored, and 72 runs batted in — I placed Grandal seventh on my NL MVP ballot. I was the only writer to cast a vote for Grandal. I wrote about why I did this back in January when I was still new on the job here at FanGraphs. In summary, I gave a lot of value to Grandal’s framing, batting eye, and power from each side of the plate.

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“What’s going on with the cutter and the slider?” I asked Jeff Samardzija the other day in the clubhouse. “I’m turning less,” said the Giants’ big right-hander. I started laughing, thinking he was talking about turning and watching the ball leave the yard. He arched an eyebrow, and didn’t follow suit. I had to explain myself. Now he was the one laughing. “No, no, that was last year. That’s why I started throwing the curveball,” he said. The good news is that turning less in one way has allowed him to turn less in another. The other good news is, Samardzija isn’t currently angry with me.

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The television camera changes everything. Imagine being broadcast at work, at school, at your local coffee shop or bar, or wherever you spend most of your time in public. Were every move to be recorded, one’s behavior (I presume) would be inclined to change. My behavior certainly would. I would want the world most often to see the best of me. It’s human nature to be liked, to be accepted, to avoid controversy.

So it was quite unusual to see Buster Posey become so publicly annoyed with a teammate on Saturday because (a) we rarely see players exhibit such emotion on television and (b) Posey’s public face is generally one of mild-mannered tranquility.

But Posey isn’t accustomed to this much losing. He knows that the Giants are in a tough spot, already 10 games back in the NL West and seven games under .500, with the Rockies and Diamondbacks looking like legitimate postseason contenders in addition to the favored Dodgers. The Giants are, of course, also without their ace Madison Bumgarner. Perhaps Posey’s tolerance threshold for nonsense and mental errors — and this is pure speculation — has been diminished.

So in the ninth inning Saturday night, Posey lost any concern for appearances. He had enough with Brandon Belt apparently zoning out and failing to keep the runner — in this case, Stephen Piscotty — close to the bag. Piscotty went on to steal second in a relatively close game. Always pay attention to Buster.

Despite knowing that every movement is being documented, Posey didn’t hide his indignation and wait for the privacy of the clubhouse to protect a teammate from public rebuke:

This isn’t the face of a pleased catcher:

Nor was this the first instance of on-field discord between Posey and Belt — a point noted by longtime Giants beat writer Henry Schulman noted after the game:

Matt Carpenter flied out to end the game, Belt gave Posey an icy stare in the handshake line, after which Posey apparently turned to say something to the first baseman.

This was not the first time the cameras caught Posey expressing displeasure with Belt.

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PITTSBURGH — I entered the visiting Washington Nationals’ clubhouse at PNC Park with a theory in need of vetting earlier this week. I suspected the most likely explanation behind Ryan Zimmerman’s success this season was that he had joined the merry band of fly-ball revolutionaries.

I was suspicious because one of the early adopters, Daniel Murphy, is of course a teammate. I was suspicious that Zimmerman had changed something because he ranks as the game’s ninth-most valuable position player to date — ahead of early-season sensation Eric Thames, for example.

I was convinced that something dramatic had occurred because his setup looks different this season…

… than it did a year ago:

Moreover, his slugging-percentage heat maps (per swing) certainly have changed, as Zimmerman has expanded the area in which he does damage.

2016:

2017:

I felt quite certain Zimmerman would tell me that he made some dramatic change. But when I approached Zimmerman and asked him about his white-hot start to the season, he was nearly apologetic for not having a more interesting story behind his success.

“I feel like my swing is pretty much the same,” Zimmerman said. “Baseball is the game of adjustments, obviously. I make adjustments between every pitch. So to say you haven’t changed anything, I think, I don’t think anyone does not change anything… But it’s not like this offseason I went and completely remade my swing. If you looked at my swing and position, I would think it would be pretty much the same.

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People love experiencing rarities. We flock to see Halley’s Comet when it comes around every 75 years, and to botanical gardens to see the blossoming of a flower that smells like death. There’s a thrill to seeing — or in the case of the flower, smelling — something that few others have. It’s not a unique experience, but it’s close. We likely experience many of little moments like this every day without realizing it. We only register the major events, like comets or death flowers, or Joey Votto pop ups.

Since he first entered the big leagues in 2007, Joey Votto boasts the lowest infield-fly-ball rate among all qualified batters at 1.3%. That figure was slightly lower before yesterday’s game against the Cubs, when he did this.

That’s the first batted ball that Votto has popped up to an infielder in fair territory since September 16th, 2016 — and that previous pop up was caught on the outfield grass, what Play Index describes as being in the “Deep SS-3B hole.” In fact, every pop up to an infielder by Votto in 2016 was described as deep in the hole. To find Votto’s last pop up that was caught by an infielder in fair territory that was actually in the infield, you’d have to go all the way back to May 24th of 2015, when Trevor Bauer got him to pop up to second base.

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Round bat, round ball, traveling in different directions: the eight-word story of hitting really captures some of the difficulty of that practice. When you get into the art of choking up — moving the hands up the barrel and shortening the bat — you uncover a whole world of players attempting to address that difficulty. David Kagan examined the physics of choking up today at The Hardball Times. Here, we ask the practitioners what they think. It turns out, the players serve up some conventional wisdom, but also some insight into the reasoning behind the practice.

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On Tuesday, I discussed MLB’s expected wOBA (or xwOBA) metric and one of its problems — namely, that guys with great speed might have the ability to outperform their xwOBA on a regular basis. I also pointed out that, despite this drawback, xwOBA should have considerable utility. This post looks at one potential aspect of that utility when it comes to projecting future performance when we have only completed just a small portion of the season.

Comparing wxOBA and wOBA for individual players over the course of a season, one find a pretty strong relationship — a point which I establish in that Tuesday post. To take things a step further, I’d like to look here at the relationships of these stats over the course of a couple seasons and see how they correlate from year to year. In order to establish a baseline, let’s look at how players with at least 400 at-bats in both 2015 and 2016 fared by wOBA.

So we see a decent relationship between wOBA marks in consecutive season. It certainly would be strange if there weren’t some relationship between a player’s offensive statistics from year to year, as players generally don’t get a lot better or a lot worse in such a short span of time — even if the players who do meet those criteria make for more interesting stories and analysis. So we see that, from 2015 to 2016, there is a relationship with wOBA. What about xwOBA?

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A frequently asked question this spring in FanGraphs chats, and presumably around water coolers inside and outside the Beltway, concerned which Bryce Harper we would see in 2017.

Would we see the 2015, Ted Williams-like, Griffey Jr.-in-his-prime, Hall-of-Fame-trajectory version? Or would we see something closer to the perplexing, if still productive, 2016 version. (Harper must have been restricted by nagging injuries last season, right?)

So far it seems like the answer is more likely the former, but perhaps it is neither. Instead of settling for somewhere between those outcomes, perhaps what Harper has really set out to do is to exceed the extremely high bar he set in 2015.

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