It’s the annual exercise: Every year, right before the baseball that counts, there are six weeks of baseball that doesn’t count, but still many of us watch it closely. As we do so, we’re always trying to figure out which indications might be of something real, and which might be misleading. Predicting baseball is impossible work. Projecting baseball is near-impossible work. But we have just enough successes to keep doing it, each time trying to be better. At the end of the day, even when you get something wrong as you think about spring training, at least you’re thinking about baseball. That’s basically the point.

Study after study after study has shown that individual spring-training stats are unreliable. You know all the reasons why, and this is why the most interesting stuff usually has to do with, say, velocity changes. Hits, you can luck into. Higher velocity, you either can reach or you can’t. So we don’t talk all that often about spring-training statistics. Not on the player level, and not on the team level. But there’s a funny thing about league-wide numbers. There’s real signal in there. When you put all the spring numbers together, you really can get a glimpse of the future.

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Here’s a list of the last 11 players selected first overall in the draft, in order of most recent to least:

• Dansby Swanson
• Brady Aiken
• Mark Appel
• Carlos Correa
• Gerrit Cole
• Bryce Harper
• Stephen Strasburg
• Tim Beckham
• David Price
• Luke Hochevar
• Justin Upton

A couple of the guys are too young to fairly judge, but for the most part this is a list of star players. And Luke Hochevar. He’s on there, too. When a team picks first overall, their chances of getting, not just a major leaguer, but a star, are the highest among any spot in the draft. Which makes sense. But even in the most advantageous position with which to draft a star, teams make mistakes, and take the wrong guy. The Royals took Hochevar over Evan Longoria, Clayton Kershaw, and Max Scherzer. The Rays took Beckham over Posey. The Astros took Appel over Kris Bryant. So it doesn’t always work out.

And then there’s the draft that I left out. The year before the Diamondbacks picked Justin Upton, the San Diego Padres had the first pick. There was a right-hander out of Old Dominion University in Virginia who was well regarded, but the Padres didn’t take Justin Verlander. Instead they took a local high-school shortstop named Matt Bush. Bush wasn’t the consensus best player available, but he was highly thought of, still a legit first-round pick if not a first-overall selection.

So the Padres picked him. He stood on the stage, smiled the smile of an 18-year-old who has no idea what’s in store for him, and modeled a Padres jersey. Things went downhill from there. Since that day, the greatest in his young life but the first of what was supposed to be many great days, Bush has spent more time in jail than on a major-league roster. He’s been arrested multiple times for offenses as serious as assault and battery, drunk driving, and hit-and-run while drunk driving. His life has been, to put it gently, a damn mess. He’s a man with personal demons and he’s let those demons define his life, destroy his career, and injure those unlucky enough to be situated nearby.

But Bush could always throw, and even at 30, his arm is apparently still present. He signed with the Rangers two months after being released from prison and he’s opened some eyes during spring training with his plus-plus velocity from the mound.

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Colin Walsh might be the best story of the spring. Yesterday, it was announced that the 26-year-old infielder/outfielder will be on Milwaukee’s opening-day roster. His path to the big leagues has been both uneven and unique.

A Rule 5 pick this winter from the Oakland organization, Walsh began his career with the Cardinals, who selected him in the 13th round of the 2010 draft. He hit well in short-season ball, but began the following year in extended spring training after failing to earn a spot on a full-season club. When he did reach low-A, he failed to impress.

Walsh returned to low-A in 2012, where he initially served as the designated hitter. As he put it, “They didn’t have a position for me; I was just kind of on the team.” Eventually splitting time between second base and left field, the switch-hitter went on to slash .314/.419/.530 in 425 plate appearances.

In 2013, he backslid. He put up so-so numbers in High-A, then hit just .220 after being promoted to Double-A. The following spring, he was released and picked up by Oakland. After putting up solid-but-nothing-special numbers between three levels, Walsh went into last season wondering if it would be his last in professional baseball.

That didn’t turn out to be the case. Playing for Double-A Midland, he hit an eye-opening .302/.447/.470 with 39 doubles and 13 home runs. Displaying elite plate discipline, he drew 124 bases on balls. In December, the Brewers selected the Stanford grad — Walsh has a masters degree in civil engineering — in the Rule 5 draft.

Walsh talked about his circuitous road to The Show, and the specificity of his hitting approach, late last week.

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Walsh on being cut by the Cardinals two years ago: “I came to spring training assuming I’d be going back to Double-A and starting every day at second base. That didn’t happen. On the last day, I got called in and was told I was no longer in baseball. They said it was a numbers game — there were too many guys for too few spots — and I was the last guy out.

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A few weeks ago, I ventured into the topic of whether the 2016 Cleveland Indians’ starting rotation had a chance at breaking the league-adjusted team strikeout rate record held by the 1990 Mets. Those Mets (comprising a front four of Dwight Gooden, David Cone, Frank Viola, and Sid Fernandez) struck out 47% more batters than a 1990 league-average rotation. That was ridiculously good in 1990, and today, it’d be even more incredible were a team able to do it, given the increase in strikeouts league-wide and the expectation that there probably is a ceiling to the strikeout trend. (Because there has to be, right?)

The reason we focused on Cleveland was simple: they almost reached the level of those Mets for a few months in the beginning of the 2015 season. In April and May, they were striking out around 27% of the batters they faced, a mark which nearly approximated the sort of video-game numbers required to match the league-adjusted total of the 1990 Mets. Though they finished first in baseball by striking out 24.2% of batters (which was also the highest strikeout rate for a starting rotation in baseball history), they finished only 41st-best in terms of yearly league-adjusted K rate. Ho-hum. The conclusion of that previous article was, unsurprisingly, that Cleveland would have to outperform their expectations by a sizeable amount to have a chance at the 1990 Mets.

But one of you astute, noble readers was not entirely satisfied with that rational answer. Instead, phoenix2042 challenged us by putting forth a question: what would a starting rotation that could beat that record look like in the modern game? Which 2016 personnel would a team require in order to best a strikeout rate that’s 47% better than the league average? Well, phoenix2042 — and the rest of you wondering readers — this piece aims to answer that question. We will build rotations worthy of a video game, and they will best the 1990 Mets.

First, as before, let’s look at what rotation-wide strikeout rates would be required to break the record in this coming season. I’ve taken the average yearly increase in rotation strikeout rate for each league: over the past 30 years, strikeout rates for starting rotations have increased by about 0.2% per year, on average, and at a slightly higher rate in the past 10 years. Averaging this trend, I calculated the so-called “holy grail” strikeout rate of just over the 1990 Mets (i.e. >47% above league average):

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Dan Straily needed to see a doctor. He wasn’t running a fever or suffering from strep throat; he had a bum shoulder. The symptoms of his malady were decreased velocity and general ineffectiveness. He initiated some independent research, and upon the recommendation of Houston Astros pitching coach Brent Strom and bullpen coach Craig Bjornson, Straily, 27, picked his practitioner.

After sitting in the waiting room that is Triple-A for much of the 2015 season, Straily paid a visit to Driveline Baseball in Seattle, where he met with Kyle Boddy. Boddy — the subject of a recent post here by Eno Sarris — isn’t an M.D., but you can think of him like a pitching doctor. Straily showed up, rattled off his ailments, and named his desired health benchmarks.

Straily told Boddy he needed to get his fastball back to sitting at 92 mph, with the ability to touch 94. That’s where he was when he first came up as an exciting, 23-year-old pitching prospect with Oakland back in 2012. Lately, his fastball had been sitting 89, and he struggled to touch 92 at all, and his effectiveness plummeted. The reason was the shoulder; he needed to get that healthy. And his breaking ball, he told Boddy, needed sharpening up.

Straily’s average fastball velocity by year

Boddy listened to his patient, and ran the preliminary examinations. That meant a trip to the biomechanics lab to analyze Straily’s delivery, and some tests to measure the movement and spin rate on his pitches. The doc came back with good news.

“I brought everything back and I said, ‘You know, your breaking ball is actually fine. I think that problem will go away if you throw 94 and sit 92,’” Boddy said. “And [Straily] said, ‘Alright, perfect.’ So we were on the same page from the get-go.”

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With the start of the regular season just four days away, we find ourselves in the thick of preview season. No matter where you look, it all boils down to the question: what’s 2016 going to look like? At FanGraphs, we’ve just wrapped up our yearly Positional Power Rankings that assess the season through the lens of each position.

As you might have noticed, each team is made up of the sum of these positional projections and they will all start playing together as 30 units in nine-inning contests next week. If you’re into that sort of thing, we offer Playoff Odds that estimates each club’s shot at postseason baseball (explained here).

It’s important to remember, for all the reasons cited in the previous link, that these projected standings are incapable of total precision. In reality, even with a perfect model for individual player projections, you still wouldn’t hit on every team. And we don’t have anything close to a perfect model for individual players. Yet these projections do offer an objective reading of where the teams stand relative to one another based on what we know. They might wind up being wrong, but they’ll be wrong because they’re flawed not because they’re trying to write an interesting narrative.

Despite clear signs of parity, especially in the American League, our projections think only one division is going to be particularly close: the National League East.

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There’s not a lot of footage out there of Garrett Richards throwing a changeup. This is because he would pretty much never throw a changeup, and this is because doing so never made him feel all that comfortable. So, in the past, Richards wouldn’t throw many changeups, but, below, you can see Richards throw a changeup from just a few weeks ago. As a bonus, I’ll also include an additional changeup, thrown on Tuesday.

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Episode 642
Dave Cameron is both (a) the managing editor of FanGraphs and (b) the guest on this particular edition of FanGraphs Audio, during which edition he examines Rusney Castillo‘s role (or lack thereof) with Boston, Hyun-soo Kim‘s role (or lack thereof) with Baltimore, and whether Jesus Montero’s career trajectory suggests that there’s also no such a thing as a hitting prospect (it doesn’t suggest that).

This episode of the program is sponsored by SeatGeek, which site removes both the work and also the hassle from the process of shopping for tickets.

Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @cistulli on Twitter.

You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or other feeder things.

Audio after the jump. (Approximately 54 min play time.)

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Ben and Sam banter about a listener-suggested expression, then answer listener emails about Albert Pujols’ impact on the Cardinals, rooting against incentive clauses, what a lack of analytics looks like, and more.

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