So I don’t want to make too much of a couple swings early in spring training but…

Here’s Bryce Harper’s first at-bat of the spring from last week.

And here’s his second homer in nine spring at-bats, an event having taken place on Thursday.

In Harper’s first four spring games, he’s gone 4-of-9 with two homers and three walks against two strikeouts. It’s really early. This might not mean anything. But after last season’s dramatic decline from his 10-win, MVP-earning 2015 campaign, maybe it’s something. There were whispers about Harper playing through a shoulder injury last season, and his agent Scott Boras said last month that there was “an issue” with which Harper dealt. There sure seemed to be something not quite right.

His average exit velocity on fly balls and line drives fell from 94.5 mph in 2015 to 92.7 last season. Here’s his rolling 2015 exit velocity compared to the league average from Baseball Savant…

And his 2016 average exit velocity…

Or maybe the Cubs just got in Harper’s head in early May, walking him 13 times in a four-game series, three times intentionally. After a 19% walk rate during the first half of last season, that mark slipped to 14.7% in the second half. At the same time, his strikeout rate rose from 15.8% to 22.8%. But this is a player who posted a 20% walk rate in 2015. He’s used to being pitched around. So maybe Harper was playing through injury, though he or the Nationals never acknowledged that. Maybe he fell out of a good approach and comfort level at the plate. Maybe it was a combination of factors.

Whatever the reason, his very different 2015 and 2016 seasons make him one of the more interesting players to watch early this season. And if you believe he was hurting after an outstanding April last season, he sure looks healthy right now.

The expectations for 2017 are tempered surrounding a player who is considered to be a generational talent. PECOTA is projecting a four-win season, a .270/.375/.501 slash line, and 27 homers in 575 plate appearances. ZiPS forecasts 4.4 WAR, 29 homers, and a .280/.406/.521 slash line over 600 plate appearances. The Fans projections have Harper being about equal in value to Gary Sanchez.

While Harper’s 2015 was fueled by to some extent by an overperformance on fly balls, pulling a Tyler Naquin, it was still an all-time great season.

And while it’s dangerous to make something of a few spring at bats, sometimes they can mean something. And if these two swings indicate Harper is healthier than he was a year ago, then perhaps he’s a good bet to exceed his projections, and do some in dramatically.

The Scott Boras influence on the Nationals’ roster is “inescapable” wrote Washington Post scribe Barry Svrluga on Monday.

Svrluga calculates that, after the Matt Wieters signing, nine players on the Nationals’ projected Opening Day roster will almost certainly be Boras clients, their contracts totaling $551.4 million.

When Dave Cameron examined the curious signing of Wieters by the Nationals earlier this month the FanGraphs editor wrote:

The lesson, as always; if you’re not sure where a Scott Boras client is going to sign, Washington is always a safe guess.

At the plate, Wieters isn’t clearly better than Norris, even with the latter’s miserable 2016 as our most recent data point. …. Statcorner has Norris at +22.5 runs from framing in his career, while Wieters is at -20.9. Prorated to 10,000 pitches, that’s roughly +6.5 per season for Norris and -3.2 for Wieters, so about a 10 run swing between them per year.

The Nationals needed help. They needed to bolster their bench, they required bullpen help, and reportedly added Joe Blanton Tuesday. What they didn’t need was Wieters, a poor receiver with a middling bat. With Wieters, Boras appears to have sold ice to an arctic village. It was a surprising fit, only it wasn’t, as Boras and Nationals owner Ted Lerner have developed something of a deal-making relationship.

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Before today, the last post containing information about Joe Blanton on the baseball news aggregator MLB Trade Rumors went up on February 2nd. He was one of the seven remaining players in the right-handed reliever section of the site’s list of free agents, alongside players like Jerome Williams and Jonathan Papelbon who have fallen victim to the passage of time. Blanton is 36 years old, with 1723.1 regular-season innings’ worth of mileage on his right arm. Our Depth Charts projection system looked into its cybernetic crystal ball and foresaw just 0.7 WAR for him this year. In a way, it’s not surprising that Blanton didn’t have an employer until today, when he signed with the Nationals.

But it’s also quite strange that he couldn’t find a deal until now, and that he didn’t find more than $4 million for a year (and, in typical Washington fashion, $3 million of that sum is deferred). He’s been just as valuable as Shawn Kelley these last two years, ever since he was reborn from the pitching ashes as a reliever. Blanton’s career was through, collapsed under the groaning weight of home runs surrendered. He didn’t appear in a big-league game in 2014, and then reappeared as a member of the Royals’ bullpen the following year. He’s been a valuable relief workhorse ever since.

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In baseball, luck is a tricky concept. In some cases, it’s used to describe an event that’s within the normal distribution of outcomes but far from the mean. In other cases, what we call luck might actually be the first signs of an outlying skill for which we simply lack a sufficiently large sample to identify.

We’ve developed a new understanding on one kind of luck in recent years — namely, the sort that occurs with a batted ball. With Statcast data, we can look at the shape and size of a ball in play and try to decide what the batter “deserved” from that sort of ball in play. Then we compare it to actual outcomes. The difference between the observed and expected outcome is luck.

What if you want to look at a luck on a specific pitch type, though? How would you do it? You could look at the results on the pitch and basically use the Statcast-type process from the other side of the ball. What sorts of balls in play did that pitch produce, and what sort of results should those balls in play have produced? The problem with that approach is that you’re slicing a pitcher’s repertoire into small samples when you start talking about balls in play off a specific pitch. Even David Price, for example — who led the majors in innings last year — allowed fewer than 300 balls in play on his most frequently thrown pitch, the fastball. Secondary pitches are, almost by definition, thrown much less often. Variance isn’t the exception in such cases, but the rule.

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For most of the offseason, industry speculation suggested that the Nationals were the most likely landing spot for Matt Wieters. They were losing Wilson Ramos to free agency, which created a hole at the catcher spot, and Wieters was already comfortable with the geographic area, having spent his entire career in Baltimore to that point.

But all winter, the team didn’t seem to show much interest. At the beginning of December, Washington traded for Derek Norris, who had a terrible 2016 but has plenty of signs pointing to a 2017 bounce-back. With Norris and Jose Lobaton in the fold, they had a perfectly capable pair of receivers, both of whom rated as well above average in Statcorner’s catcher framing metrics. Catching wasn’t the strength of the team, but neither was it some glaring weakness like their bench, and if ownership was going to allow for more spending, there seemed to be plenty of other places for the Nationals to upgrade.

But today, the winter of industry speculation proved prescient, as the Nationals have reportedly signed Wieters, giving him $21 million in guaranteed money over two years along with an opt-out after the first year. The lesson, as always; if you’re not sure where a Scott Boras client is going to sign, Washington is always a safe guess.

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Yesterday, we identified Jeremy Jeffress as a pitcher who benefited greatly from dropping his arm slot, adding more sink and fade to his two-seamer. The idea was that his four-seamer was straight and possessed below-average spin, so moving from that pitch to a sinker, while dropping the slot, gave him a better foundational fastball. There’s a roadmap there. Let’s follow it.

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You can learn a lot about a hitter by the way he gets pitched to. Granted, you can also learn a lot about a hitter by the way that he hits, but when you look at the approach, you learn something about perception. You learn how opponents see the hitter. Two useful measures: fastball rate, and zone rate. You could of course go deeper than this, but fastball rate tells you something about fear. The same goes for zone rate. If someone keeps getting fastballs in the zone, the pitchers probably aren’t afraid. If someone rarely sees fastballs or pitches in the zone, well, something else is going on.

Some 2016 numbers, for reference:

You can see how aggressively pitchers are attacked by other pitchers. The fastball rate skyrockets, and you get five out of nine pitches in the strike zone. More powerful hitters see fewer fastballs, and fewer strikes. Less powerful hitters see more fastballs, and more strikes. This is all easy and intuitive, and although there are other variables to consider, we’ve touched on the big stuff.

Using these statistics, we can attempt to quantify a hitter’s intimidation. No, it’s not perfect, but I’ve still run the math, calculating z-scores for both of the rates. The last step is just adding the two z-scores together. In this table, the least intimidating hitters in baseball in 2016, given a minimum of 200 plate appearances.

It’s Ben Revere! And it’s Ben Revere by a mile. Revere just saw 70% fastballs, and he saw 52% of all pitches in the strike zone. That’s not quite where pitchers wound up, collectively, but Revere was nearly pitched like a pitcher, and that certainly sends a message. No one was afraid of him, and not coincidentally, Revere finished with a 47 wRC+. He did, though, smack a couple of dingers.

For some context, I calculated numbers for individual hitter-seasons throughout the PITCHf/x era, stretching back to 2008. Where did Revere’s season rank in terms of its unintimidatingness?

Not a bad showing — fifth place, out of 3,148 hitter-seasons. David Eckstein occupies the top two spots, and, sure, of course he does. Because I’m sure you’d wonder, the lowest combined score is -6.7, belonging to 2012 Josh Hamilton. Pitchers definitely didn’t want to throw him any fastballs, and they didn’t want to risk anything he’d find particularly hittable.

Back to Revere. There was an article on Nationals.com after the home run embedded above, which was Revere’s first of the season. Said Dusty Baker, unironically, or maybe ironically, how should I know:

“I’m just hoping he doesn’t get that dreadful disease of home run-itis,” Baker said.

Said Revere, referring to same:

“If I try to hit it in the air, I’ll probably be at .250 or a Mendoza-line .200 hitter. But if I hit the ball on the ground or line drives, I’ll be .300 for a long time.”

Revere ran the same ground-ball rate he had as a regular in 2015, when he hit .306. He finished the year batting .217.

Right-handed reliever David Robertson is earning $12 million per year on a rebuilding Chicago White Sox team that has little need for a high-priced closer. The Washington Nationals, meanwhile, might need a closer if they aren’t comfortable with internal options who, whatever their qualifications, lack proven closer experience. As a result, it isn’t surprising to find that the two teams have been discussing a trade. Robertson is owed $25 million over the next two years, a relatively reasonable fee given the cost of closers on the free-agent market. If the White Sox are looking to dump salary, Robertson might make sense for multiple teams, but if the Sox want prospects back, both Chicago and Robertson’s suitors might be better off waiting until July, even if the price for relievers is higher at that time.

From 2011 to -15, Robertson was one of the very best relievers in baseball. During that time, he averaged nearly two wins above replacement per season. The only relievers with a higher total WAR during that time frame were Aroldis Chapman, Greg Holland, Kenley Jansen, and Craig Kimbrel. That 2015 campaign, Robertson’s first with the White Sox, was also arguably the best of his career. He struck out 34% of batters while walking just 5%. A very low 66% left-on-base percentage gave him just a 3.41 ERA (compared to his 2.52 FIP), but the results were fine nonetheless. Entering the 2016 season, Robertson was again set to be one of the very best relievers in the game, earning a 1.9-WAR projection on our Depth Charts projection. The season didn’t go as well as expected.

Robertson put together a solid season, recording a good 3.58 FIP (82 FIP-) and a similar 3.47 ERA (82 ERA-). The result: a 1.0-WAR season, making him one of just a dozen full-time closers to hit the one-win mark last year. The results were good, but they represented a decline from his elite numbers the five years prior to 2016. His strikeout rate dropped from 34% to 28%; his walk rate more than doubled, up to 12%, after having remained below 9% since the 2011 season. Last season might be an outlier. It’s possible that Robertson return to form this year. It could be a new normal for Robertson going forward, though — or, worse, it could represent a decline that could continue into this season. The problem is that nobody really knows.

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There are different ways to turn a team around. That’s probably an obvious thing to say, but it’s true. Another thing that’s obvious and true: teams are made of humans. Because of that, no turnaround is entirely uniform in nature.

Even so, a team might emphasize certain traits when attempting to rebuild or improve. On-base skills, power, etc. Some of those turnarounds are easy to follow; others, less so.

Given the relatively short history of defensive metrics, the turnaround of team defense hasn’t been thoroughly chronicled, and yet teams have certainly made it a priority. Just last year, the Astros and Indians exhibited improvements in the field in a way rarely matched. Looking further back, it’s possible to find other teams that have accomplished the same feat. The question, though: how did they it? Maybe it’s possible to use past successes as a road map for current teams! So, let’s find the next Indians and Astros.

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I love it when research underlines conventional wisdom. Like when Mitchel Lichtman found that, the more pitches a pitcher had in his arsenal, the better his chances the third time through the order. Even if it was only on the order of a few points of weighted on base average, it was a real finding that functions as a virtual nod towards all those scouts and pitching coaches who’ve wondered about a pitchers’ third and fourth options. You might not need a changeup specifically, but you need other pitches if just to put more doubt in the hitter’s mind.

Given that finding, I thought it might be fun to try and use it in reverse. Who were the worst pitchers in baseball last season when it came to the third time through the order? Who saw their talent drop off the most upon seeing a batter the third time?

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