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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If we can just be up front about things — I don’t think the Twins are very good. Chances are, you don’t think the Twins are very good, either. They didn’t come in as a consensus contender, and even now, the rest of the way, our projections have the Twins as the second-worst team in the American League. If they’re good, actually good, well, I know at least I will need a lot more convincing. That’s enough of that. Let’s get to the positive stuff.

I don’t know how much longer it’ll last, but right now one can find the Twins at the top of the AL Central. It’s not a division many expected to be good, but it *is* a division that includes the defending AL champs, so seeing the Twins where they are is a surprise. As long as the Twins are successful, they’re worth our attention, and for now I’d like to bring your attention to something about the team’s hitters. Recently, I noted that the Twins have experienced something of a defensive turnaround. There are also signs of progress on the offensive front. Stick with me, because you know I have plots.

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There’s an argument to be made that we’re exposed to too much Statcast data. It’s kind of a silly argument, and it’s easy enough to avoid, but there might indeed be overuse, or at least over-citation. It’s a function, I think, of enthusiasm; think about the data we have access to now. Not very long ago, such an amount of information would’ve been unimaginable. Now we have everything. It’s no wonder some people want to refer to it all the time. It’s an information miracle. Sometimes the enthusiasm can go a little overboard.

What I personally don’t have much use for is the normal stuff. I don’t care about regular pitches, or regular home runs. A home run, by its very existence, has to be hit pretty hard, at a vertical angle. I don’t need to hear that some guy hit a homer 105 miles per hour. I’m intrigued when the home runs are particularly fast. I’m even more intrigued when the home runs are particularly slow. That brings us to Wednesday.

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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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Yesterday, Nick Stellini noted that there might be an AL East bidding war for third basemen this summer. The Red Sox’ current third basemen are a collection of misfits, while the Orioles could choose to shift Manny Machado back to shortstop to replace J.J. Hardy if they find there aren’t that many appealing options in the shortstop trade market. Both teams are playing well enough to expect to be buyers, and in some form, the left side of the infield looks like a place both teams could make real improvements.

But if I’m Dave Dombrowski, I’m probably not planning on trading for a third baseman this summer. I think there’s a pretty decent chance that the Red Sox’ stretch-run third baseman is already in the organization.

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Gareth Morgan’s BABIP went down on Tuesday. On the balls in play that he recorded, the Seattle Mariners outfield prospect grounded out, flew out, and singled. He had other at-bats, as well. In one of them, he fanned for the 46th time on the season. In the other two, he homered.

Morgan’s stat sheet is… intriguing. The 2014 second-round pick is slashing a solid .291/.352/.473, with four long balls, in 122 trips to the plate. He’s put up those robust numbers despite a 39.3% strikeout rate.

And then there’s his ball-in-play fortune. Prior to the aforementioned dip, it stood at .491, the highest mark in professional baseball. (He now ranks third, at .475, having been leapfrogged by Clinton Lumber Kings teammate Anthony Jimenez and Blue Jays prospect Bo Bichette.)

The 21-year-old native of Toronto, Ontario, wasn’t aware of that statistical factoid when I spoke to him after Tuesday’s game. Nor could he offer an easy explanation for the mix of whiffs and safe landings.

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