Usually, these things tend to go in one direction. We talk about a player who seems underrated, and then, in time, that player becomes rated more or less appropriately. We’ve seen this happen with, say, Jose Quintana, who used to be considered a nobody even while he was pitching out of his mind. A lot more people now know how good Kyle Seager is. People know how good Starling Marte is. People have even figured out how good Kevin Kiermaier is, basically. Obligatory Ben Zobrist mention. Great players don’t stay hidden too long. I should note that I’m open to the argument Mike Trout remains underrated, but that’s different, because his ability is impossible for humans to understand.

You don’t see many players go from underrated to understood to underrated again. Such a sequence ordinarily wouldn’t make any sense. Yet, sometimes, there are just atypical circumstances. Of course there’s no infallible metric for underratedness. I know that I can’t prove anything, so we can get that out of the way up front. But I’m just here to remind you about A.J. Pollock. Pollock was once criminally underrated, and then, as time passed, he was recognized as one of the greats. Then he missed almost an entire baseball season. Out of sight, out of mind — that is how we work. So Pollock is back to where he was, preparing for camp as Arizona’s neglected star.

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Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about Matt Wieters and debunk Scott Boras, then preview the Cubs’ 2017 season with Sahadev Sharma of the The Athletic Chicago and the Brewers’ 2017 season with Jack Moore of the The Hardball Times.

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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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Matt Wieters is a free agent right now, but he won’t be for long. Spring training is right around the corner, and Wieters is a legitimate big-league backstop, so at some point his expectations and a team’s open-mindedness will come into alignment. These things can drag out sometimes. A few years ago, people thought Prince Fielder was screwed. He signed for $214 million in the last week of January. Scott Boras is good. He should pretty much always get the benefit of the doubt.

Yet in the case of Wieters, you can see why he’s still out there. This is all prompted by a Ken Rosenthal article titled: “Why is veteran catcher Matt Wieters still on the free-agent market?” Boras is quoted within, and, what the hell, let’s just get right to it. Boras obviously has his agenda, but it isn’t hard to pull his argument apart.

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It’s been quite a while since we kicked off our position-by-position look at 2016 hitter contact quality, which arrives at its last official installment today. (There will be a small number of add-on articles covering pitchers and hitters who didn’t quite qualify as “regulars.”) We looked at AL catchers earlier this week; today we move on to the NL crop, again utilizing granular exit-speed and launch-angle data in the analysis.

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Major League Baseball has been floating a bunch of different ideas lately to help improve the game: automatic intentional walks, starting a runner on second in extra innings, and one that would likely have the most impact, raising the lower bounds of the strike zone.

If you feel like you’ve heard that last one before, it’s because you almost definitely have. Jon Roegele has been chronicling the expansion of the strike zone for years. It’s not just him, though. Just last year, there were reports that MLB planned to raise the strike zone. In response, August Fagerstrom discussed who might be affected the most. August isn’t around these parts anymore, so consider this post your update on the pitchers who might be negatively affected by a slightly higher strike zone.

First, consider the visuals below. They’re from a 2014 piece by Roegele and were reproduced by Fagerstrom last year. They documents how the strike zone has expanded downward over the last decade.

It’s pretty obvious from these graphs that pitches in the lower part of the zone were being called strikes more often in 2014 than five years earlier. But these images are from a couple seasons ago. Is it possible, given the talk last season about raising the strike zone, that umpires took it upon themselves to do it? To compensate for the lower-zone creep happening of late?

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If you haven’t read Ben Lindbergh’s piece on the baseball’s ever expiring secrets, I suggest you free up 15 minutes at work (or elsewhere) today.

Lindbergh’s closing point:

Maybe that’s the lesson to take from this whole sordid story. We’ve known for some time that Correa’s crimes were illegal, unethical, and punishable by many months in prison. What we might not have known makes the story sadder still: In baseball’s current climate, it’s not even clear how much hacking helps.

If you haven’t read Dave Cameron’s related post on the devaluation of ideas, I recommend you do so, because it hits on one of the greatest market inefficiencies in the game today: communication.

Wrote Cameron:

At this point, it seems the value is less in the quality or proprietary nature of a team’s ideas, and more in the vehicles that move those ideas around…. With ideas themselves no longer conveying huge advantages, it’s the ability to turn even somewhat obvious beliefs into actual action that can give an organization a legitimate, sustainable edge.

Ideas are quickly adopted today and I agree that communication is something of a market inefficiency. After all, an idea has no value without implementation. It was a salient point in my book Big Data Baseball. And it’s not always about effective top-down communication either, a front office sending an analytically based idea to be adopted by the coaching staff and players. Effective communication must also include a bottom-up channel. For instance, it was Texas Rangers manager Jeff Banister, the Pirates bench coach from 2013 to -15, who told me in reporting for the book that it was the coaches who initiated an important, data-backed tactic in 2013. It was the assistant coaches who asked data analysts to quantify a hunch they had: they wanted to know if certain pitch sequences in certain locations could make batters more uncomfortable, leading to a greater ground-ball rate.

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