Every player in baseball is having a good year. I mean it! No one’s had time to screw it up yet. Every prospect is going to be a star. The pitchers will all remain healthy. Any veteran whose career took a nosedive last year is on track to regain his old form. All the guys who played over their head have shown no indication they can’t maintain last year’s pace. Spring Training games don’t even count!

And all of the hulking 23-year-olds with tools through the roof and devastating contact problems haven’t swung and missed one time yet! What contact problems?

It’s only natural, as the fake-games begin and the regular season breaches the horizon, that we develop irresponsible fixations upon certain players. The way I see it is this: players have upside, and they have downside. Upside is always present — it’s like this mythological thing that cannot be seen or touched or heard or felt, but we know that it exists. But with the regular season comes meaningful games, and meaningful games present scenarios that remind you of your fixation’s flaws, the very things that will prevent Him from reaching His upside. During the offseason, those flaws cannot be seen; only upside exists, and we dream big.

I’m here to talk about Domingo Santana. But first, I want to talk about George Springer.

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Other clubs: Angels, Astros, Braves, Cubs, Diamondbacks, Indians, Orioles, Reds, Red Sox, Rockies, Royals, Tigers, White Sox.

To start off, a brief programming note: I’m going out of alphabetical order here, as inside information trickles in at different rates. I’ll be jumping around to different teams as soon as I get a suitable amount of corroborating sources for each.

With regard to the Marlins, specifically, they don’t have a ton of impact offense waiting in the wings, but there is a plethora of pitching reinforcements — mostly in terms of depth but some with high ceilings — at all levels of the minors. It’s interesting to think about what this group will do in the next few years, having enough potential to turn out a number of surprise contributors but not enough blue-chippers to rank highly among the league’s best farm systems.

Tyler Kolek has struggled a bit as a professional, but his talent makes him the best prospect in the organization. It seems I’m the high guy on Chris Paddack, but his placement only sticks out here because of the lack of certainty among other prospects around him. There aren’t a ton of other surprises elswhere, with a reasonable argument to be made about anyone outside the top-four or -five guys to either be in the top 10 or at the bottom of the list.

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This is going to have a lot of caveats, so I should try to sell you on it first. Team depth — is it important? The correct answer is, “sometimes, yeah, although not all the times.” See, depth is no one’s primary weapon. A team comes first with its stars, with its everyday regulars. But depth is one of those things that commonly becomes important, because bad things happen, and they happen indiscriminately. Depth is basically like health insurance, and while a team can have a successful season without very much of it, the odds are eventually it’s going to come into play. Which is why some teams talk openly about trying to accumulate it.

A few front offices this past winter talked about how the average team needs way more than five starting pitchers. I think by now we all have a good understanding of that. Then sometimes you also get teams like the 2015 Mets, who wound up in need of position-player depth. Ideally a team will begin a season with plenty of in-house support, and below, I’ve made an attempt to quantify what teams currently have. It’s not a perfect, inarguable attempt. It’s just the attempt you’re reading right now.

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Ben and Sam play a quick player guessing game, banter about pitching-coach projects and Coors Field fences, and answer listener emails about the Cubs and personal catchers, irrational fan beliefs, Mike Trout, and more.

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The one conversation we continue to have about the Royals to this day is whether there’s just something about them that the numbers aren’t seeing. I think we’ve all agreed the Royals have deserved to be pretty good of late, but to be as good as they’ve been — let’s face it, the pro-Royals side has plenty of ammunition. They’ve played like something greater than the sum of the roster’s parts, and that’s where there could be a disconnect. One idea is that a team is the sum of its parts, plus or minus however much randomness. A counter-idea is we’re missing some kind of human element, in our haste to try to see the future. This would be where the Royals have perfected a magic formula.

If there’s one player who might adequately represent the Royals in a nutshell, it’s Salvador Perez. You could always try to go with Alcides Escobar, on account of #EskyMagic, and that’s fine, but I think Perez is a little more fitting. Perez is still young, and he’s obviously talented. Looking at his numbers, there are things for us to like, and there are things for us to not like. Objectively, Perez appears to be a good but flawed player, yet if you listen to the Royals themselves, they think of him as the heart and soul. They see him as the most important player on the roster, and over the last three years, the Royals have won 57% of the time when Perez has started, and they’ve won 49% of the time when Perez has been on the bench. Just as there might be something about the Royals, there might be something about Salvador Perez. It’s just another conversation for all of us to have.

One conversation we never needed to have: whether Perez’s old multi-year contract was team-friendly. It was stupid team-friendly. More than maybe any other deal, depending on your own Perez evaluation. Teams don’t often willingly amend such lopsided agreements, but the Royals wanted to keep Perez happy. So now that old contract has been torn up, and Perez has been more adequately rewarded for everything that he’s meant.

Call it a smart and atypical move, on the Royals’ part. Call it a necessary move, on the Royals’ part. There are plenty of team-friendly contracts out there, but not many to such an extent, so we don’t have a lot of situational comps. All that’s really important here is that Perez is being treated fairly. Maybe this is something the Rays would’ve been willing to do, and maybe it’s not. Perez just cares that the Royals did it.

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As the calendar mercifully flips to March, it won’t be long until meaningful major league baseball games will be played in a ballpark near you. Meanwhile, let’s continue our series of position-by-position looks at the ball-in-play (BIP) profiles of 2015 regulars and semi-regulars. We’ve already looked at all the various infield positions, so today we’ll begin our outfield review in left field.

First, let’s review some ground rules. To come up with an overall player population roughly equal to one player per team per position, the minimum number of batted balls with Statcast readings was set at 164. Players were listed at the position at which they played the most games. There is more than one player per team at some positions and less at others, like catcher and DH. Players are listed in descending OPS+ order. Let’s begin with the AL left fielders.

BIP Overview – AL LF

Name	Avg MPH	FB/LD MPH	GB MPH	POP%	FLY%	LD%	GB%	CON	K%	BB%	OPS+	Pull%	Cent%	Opp%
Cespedes	93.18	96.53	89.46	3.4%	34.5%	20.4%	41.7%	156	20.9%	4.9%	137	43.7%	34.8%	21.5%
Brantley	89.11	91.93	87.35	1.7%	30.0%	22.5%	45.8%	107	8.6%	10.1%	130	42.7%	32.7%	24.6%
Gordon	89.00	91.50	86.61	3.0%	34.6%	24.8%	37.6%	123	21.8%	11.6%	120	45.7%	36.3%	18.0%
S.Smith	89.41	91.86	88.29	0.7%	37.3%	19.7%	42.3%	112	21.9%	10.4%	117	38.7%	34.8%	26.5%
Guyer	86.72	90.73	84.81	6.0%	28.6%	21.2%	44.2%	95	15.8%	6.5%	115	44.7%	32.7%	22.6%
Rasmus	90.24	93.42	84.02	5.1%	46.5%	20.0%	28.4%	159	31.8%	9.7%	113	52.8%	27.0%	20.2%
Gardner	88.22	91.69	86.48	2.1%	31.8%	20.8%	45.3%	101	20.6%	10.4%	105	34.9%	34.5%	30.7%
De Aza	86.63	89.12	83.31	0.9%	36.8%	23.4%	39.0%	118	23.0%	8.5%	104	37.1%	39.2%	23.7%
Dv.Murphy	88.79	90.24	87.98	4.1%	28.4%	16.7%	50.8%	92	12.5%	5.1%	101	38.7%	39.6%	21.7%
E.Rosario	87.90	91.11	83.52	4.8%	35.8%	20.3%	39.1%	129	24.9%	3.2%	99	39.0%	35.8%	25.2%
Tucker	90.55	91.38	90.90	4.8%	31.0%	17.7%	46.6%	106	21.1%	6.2%	99	43.1%	33.6%	23.3%
Me.Cabrera	90.19	91.11	91.38	2.7%	27.2%	23.9%	46.3%	84	12.9%	5.9%	97	36.9%	35.4%	27.7%
H.Ramirez	91.16	95.39	89.24	3.6%	26.0%	20.4%	50.0%	91	16.5%	4.9%	90	37.1%	39.5%	23.4%
DeJesus	87.87	91.16	85.21	3.0%	29.8%	23.5%	43.7%	68	16.4%	6.6%	76	42.0%	33.2%	24.8%
Aviles	87.10	88.20	87.75	4.3%	30.2%	16.3%	49.2%	56	12.0%	6.3%	61	38.0%	36.8%	25.2%
AVERAGE	89.07	91.69	87.09	3.3%	32.6%	20.8%	43.3%	106	18.7%	7.4%	104	41.0%	35.1%	23.9%

Most of the column headers are self explanatory, including average BIP speed (overall and by BIP type), BIP type frequency, K and BB rates, and BIP by field sector (pull, central, opposite). Each player’s OPS and Unadjusted Contact Score (CON) is also listed. For those of you who have not read my articles on the topic, Contact Score is derived by removing Ks and BBs from hitters’ batting lines, assigning run values to all other events, and comparing them to a league average of 100.

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To be honest, I didn’t want to write about the “tanking” story anymore. After Buster Olney and Jayson Stark both wrote extensively about the issue in December and January, I published something of a rebuttal, and since then, follow-up discussions haven’t proven particularly useful, as both sides seem pretty entrenched in their interpretations. Olney and Stark are firmly in the camp that this is a huge systematic problem for Major League Baseball, and others — such as Joel Sherman — have also published pieces suggesting that MLB needs to intervene, so this issue isn’t going away.

Yesterday, Stark wrote another piece on the issue, soliciting comments from Tony Clark on whether the MLBPA is going to make this an issue in the CBA. Clark was diplomatic, keeping his options open, but didn’t really say anything particularly newsworthy. But there was an interesting comment in Stark’s column, from Stark himself, that I think is worth discussing.

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Determining profits and losses for baseball franchises is a speculative task. When teams say they’re losing money, we can take them at their word or ignore them. They don’t open their books, so how much money teams make or lose is subject to factors outside of publicly available knowledge — and, therefore, equally subject to a lot of potential “massaging” on the part of the teams themselves.

That state of affairs might change slightly in the near future, however. Liberty Media, owners of the Atlanta Braves — as well as a majority stake in Sirius XM and a substantial stake in Live Nation Entertainment — are planning to offer stock in their separate divisions. As a result, they’ll have to provide more information to the public on the Braves’ operations. The Braves are claiming losses over the past few years, although in a cash sense, those losses are a bit deceiving, and the team is set to make money this season after slashing payroll.

There was a time, not all that long ago, that almost all Atlanta Braves games were broadcast nationally on TBS. The cable network, owned ostensibly by the same person who owned the Braves, Ted Turner, used the Braves to get publicity for his cable network, and the Braves were able to reach a broader base of fans. In the middle of the Braves’ great run of success, Time Warner bought Turner’s broadcasting company and the Braves, and the new owners continued to put Braves games on TBS. Changes to this once symbiotic partnership, however, brought an end to TBS’s almost daily Braves telecasts and saw the team enter one of the worst television contracts of the last few decades.

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