Pittsburgh Pirates: Three Players Who Have Made Dramatic Improvements

The Pittsburgh Pirates are off to a great start, but these three players have been major contributors to their early season success because of dramatic improvements in their play

The Pittsburgh Pirates are off to one of the best starts to a season in about a decade. Much of their success so far has been because some key players have shown some massive improvement at the dish. Sure, it's early, and all statistics are a small sample size, but there's no denying there are at least some promising developments for some players.

That's the kind of development I want to look at today: players who have improved to a noticeable degree. We're mostly going to be looking at under-the-hood metrics. Sure, it's easy to look at a guy's triple-slash and say he's doing better than last year, but I want to look into why a player is performing better than in previous seasons.