After having typically appeared in the very famous pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have been released at FanGraphs the past few years. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Texas Rangers. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Other Projections: Arizona / Atlanta / Baltimore / Boston / Chicago AL / Chicago NL / Cleveland / Detroit / Houston / Kansas City / Los Angeles AL / Los Angeles NL / Milwaukee / Minnesota / New York AL / Miami / Oakland / Pittsburgh / St. Louis / San Diego / San Francisco / Seattle / Tampa Bay / Toronto / Washington.

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The Texas Rangers added catcher Jonathan Lucroy (510 PA, 3.7 zWAR) at the trade deadline last year. A brief examination of the projections below reveals that Lucroy is forecast to produce more wins than any other Rangers field player in 2017. This would seem to be a harbinger of good things for Texas: a club that won its division by nine games just a year ago, and which has retained basically all its principal characters from the previous season, will now benefit from an even better principal character.

None of that is actually false. What that line of reasoning fails to acknowledge, however, is that the 2016 edition of the Texas Rangers was very likely the most fortunate club in the majors. On the one hand, they won 95 games. On the other, the salient indicators — in this case, represented by BaseRuns — suggest they played more like an 82-win club.

Unsurprisingly, the ZiPS projections here seem to call for something more like an average team than an elite one. Only three starting field players besides Lucroy receive a forecast for more than two wins. Three positions — first base, left field, and right field — are expected to contribute just a single win each.

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In two months or so, we’ll roll out our 2017 positional power rankings. Between now and then, not a whole lot should change, so perhaps I shouldn’t go out of my way to issue spoilers. But, what the hell, here’s our current ranking of the catchers. The Giants are in first. Buster Posey is amazing! The Rockies are in last. Their catchers are also amazing, but less amazing relative to all the other amazing catchers in the majors.

Maybe this is a good way to sum it up: Tony Wolters is expected to get the bulk of the playing time behind the plate, and 11 months ago the Rockies grabbed him off waivers from the Indians. Wolters isn’t projected to hit much, because he’s never hit much, because he’s not much of a hitter.

What he is, though, is a defender. He emerged last year as one of the better pitch-framers in the league. And now the Rockies overall project to get quite good pitch-framing in the season ahead. This is the silver lining — perhaps the Rockies catchers won’t hit so much, but it looks like they could combine to provide the best receiving skills the Rockies have ever had.

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The Angels control a beautiful and valuable thing, Mike Trout’s age-25 to -28 seasons, what should mark his prime. The baseball world awaits to see what the club is able to do with this precious asset, and how the Angels will supplement it. If the club holds Trout and struggles to compete in the AL West, it would be akin to purchasing Cezanne’s “The Card Players” and then proceeding to lock the painting in a secure storage facility for few to enjoy.

Baseball, and the Angels, would do well to have Trout involved in postseason games.

Will the Angels help Trout to his first postseason at-bats since 2014 this October? We’ll see. FanGraphs’ projections have the Angels as an 84-win team at the moment, which is tied for the second-best mark in the AL West after the Astros, who are projected to win 90 games.

The projections foresee a logjam after the respective division favorite Red Sox, Indians and Astros. The forecast has the Angels tied with the Mariners and Blue Jays for the fourth-best mark in the AL, the Tigers and Rangers with 83 wins, and the Yankees and Rays with 82.

It’s a January forecast of October. Presumably, much can and will go wrong with it. But perhaps what we can take from it is that there could potentially be a crowded Wild Card field, and the Angels could be in the middle of it. That potential scenario means every transaction, every decision, could carry significance for a team like the Angels. Not only are the Angels in a position where each additional win could be immensely valuable, but we also know that they can’t expect much help from a thin farm system to provide depth.

That brings us to Luis Valbuena, who officially signed a two-year, $15 million deal with the Angels on Tuesday. For a player who has averaged 2.1 WAR during the last four seasons, it seems like a solid investment for the club. Dave Cameron wrote that Valbuena is similar in value to Mark Trumbo, who earned more than twice the guaranteed dollars of Valbuena’s agreement in his new deal.

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The other day, I asked you to participate in a community project. The polling was both simple and very complicated — there was one poll for every team, and I asked each of you to issue a rating for your favorite team, based on basically everything. There were six options, going from 0 to 5, with 0 being the worst, and 5 being the best. I wanted to end up with a landscape of organizational health. Ratings were to be based on both short-term and long-term considerations, and while I know that crowdsourcing doesn’t always suss out the truth, we can’t know the *actual* truths. So we might as well see what the community thinks.

The polling and ensuing conversation is always fun, but there’s nothing quite like the analysis, whenever I run a community polling project. For this one, this morning, I collected all the votes and calculated all the necessary numbers. Below, your FanGraphs community organizational ratings, as of this very week in January 2017.

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Yesterday, Greg Holland reportedly agreed to sign with the Colorado Rockies. As a guy coming off arm surgery, looking to re-establish himself as a premier reliever and rebuild his value, going to Denver seems to be an odd choice. As Travis Sawchik noted this morning, the recent history of pitchers escaping Colorado and finding significant paychecks are not great, and of course, because of how the park plays, Holland’s numbers are likely to be worse this year than if he had agreed to sign closer to sea level.

Generally, we’re used to players looking for big contracts next year signing in venues that fit their skills, and these type of one year deals are often called “pillow contracts”, but there’s nothing soft and comfortable about pitching in Coors Field. Maybe we need a new name for Holland’s choice? “A bed of nails contract” doesn’t roll off the tongue quite so easily, but more accurately portrays the situation Holland seemingly placed himself in.

But in thinking about why Holland would go to Colorado, I think we need to acknowledge that the game has evolved, and the methodologies for evaluating player performances have changed dramatically. And given those changes, maybe Holland didn’t just take a short-term cash-grab that puts him in a worse position for next year; maybe he made a choice that could actually be beneficial to his future earnings.

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We’re beginning to count down the days to spring training as we enter the latter stages of our position-by-position look at 2016 hitter contact quality. In the last installment, we looked at NL center fielders. Today, our review of regular right fielders gets underway in the American League. As a reminder, we are using granular exit-speed and launch-angle data to determine how 2016 regulars “should have” performed.

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While perhaps not universally accepted, it is generally acknowledged that Ozzie Smith is the greatest defensive player of all time. With 13 Gold Gloves at the most important defensive position that doesn’t require extra equipment, his ability to generate outs was second to none. Back when we had few defensive stats, eight times Smith led the league in assists and still has the record among shortstops with more than 8,000 in his career.

Omar Vizquel was not quite Ozzie Smith as a fielder. He did receive 11 Gold Gloves. He also played in 200 more games at shortstop than Smith, which is the record, and he’s third all-time in assists by a shortstop — around 700 behind Ozzie. Vizquel comes up on the Hall of Fame ballot a year from now, and he’s likely to be regarded as nearly, but quite, Smith’s equal as a defender.

Being nearly as good as Ozzie Smith might be enough to get Vizquel in the Hall of Fame, given just how good Smith was, but there are considerable questions regarding Vizquel’s bat.

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Coors Field is typically not the arena upon which pitchers settle to rebuild their value. They go there because they were conscripted into service, having been drafted by the Rockies. They go there because the Rockies offered them a considerable sum for their services.

For years, Coors Field has been one of baseball’s most difficult places to pitch. It remains that way in the present.

Which brings us to Greg Holland and his curious decision to sign with the Rockies. Nicolas Stellini covered all the details of the one-year deal with a vesting option already. What I’d like to consider here is the wisdom of the deal from Holland’s perspective.

Greg Holland is either a very confident man or the Rockies’ offer to him represented the best that he’d received this offseason or, perhaps, both. There was other reported interest from the Dodgers, Cubs, Nationals, Rays, and Reds.

As a free-agent pitcher recovering either from injury or a poor season works down his preference list of those places he’d like to salvage his career, Coors Field typically comes up near the end.

And there’s evidence to support that line of thinking. Consider: of the 80 most lucrative contracts in the sport’s history, most being free-agent deals, none was awarded to a pitcher who had most recently pitched for the Rockies.

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