The Yankees were trying last year, as silly as that may have been. They lacked the rotation muscle or offensive firepower to truly compete, but damn if they didn’t have a bullpen. That bullpen, combined with a largely mediocre roster, kept them just within spitting distance of relevancy until the very end. Even after trading Carlos Beltran, Aroldis Chapman, Andrew Miller, and Ivan Nova, the Yankees still managed to hang around and win 84 games.

They didn’t make the playoffs, of course. They did make Gary Sanchez into a national sensation, and they did bring Tyler Clippard and Adam Warren back into the fold for this year’s bullpen. Chapman came back, and then they signed two sluggers (Chris Carter and Matt Holliday) to extremely tradable one-year deals. The Yankees are the Yankees, so they brought back their well-known closer and his 100 mph fastball. They need to have star power at all times and must, at least, give the appearance of trying to compete. Those are the expectations that come with being the Yankees and having an owner named Steinbrenner. According to reports, they came very close to buying instead of selling last year.

An inspection of the team’s roster tells a different story. Last year’s team was brimming with veterans. It was a poor man’s win-now team built around the bullpen, Masahiro Tanaka, and hope. This year, it’s built around a weaker bullpen, Masahiro Tanaka, whatever’s left in Holliday’s bat, and hope that Sanchez can continue to terrorize opposing pitchers while Greg Bird immediately rebounds to 2015 form. That’s all while having an even weaker rotation than last year.

It’s probably not going to happen. Our projections have the Yankees finishing at .500 and tied for last place, and PECOTA foresees an ever-so-slightly better 82-80 finish. Basically, the Yankees appear to be the very definition of mediocre right now. They can try to sell fans on the idea that they’re going to be competitive, and in a way that’s sort of true. The team probably won’t be a total pushover, and if a few things here and there fall the right way, maybe they’re once again on the precipice of being interesting at midsummer’s time. New York would need their many young and relatively untested players all to hit the ground running if they really want to make the playoffs, and they’ll likely need a firecracker of a debut from Clint Frazier, too.

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In baseball, luck is a tricky concept. In some cases, it’s used to describe an event that’s within the normal distribution of outcomes but far from the mean. In other cases, what we call luck might actually be the first signs of an outlying skill for which we simply lack a sufficiently large sample to identify.

We’ve developed a new understanding on one kind of luck in recent years — namely, the sort that occurs with a batted ball. With Statcast data, we can look at the shape and size of a ball in play and try to decide what the batter “deserved” from that sort of ball in play. Then we compare it to actual outcomes. The difference between the observed and expected outcome is luck.

What if you want to look at a luck on a specific pitch type, though? How would you do it? You could look at the results on the pitch and basically use the Statcast-type process from the other side of the ball. What sorts of balls in play did that pitch produce, and what sort of results should those balls in play have produced? The problem with that approach is that you’re slicing a pitcher’s repertoire into small samples when you start talking about balls in play off a specific pitch. Even David Price, for example — who led the majors in innings last year — allowed fewer than 300 balls in play on his most frequently thrown pitch, the fastball. Secondary pitches are, almost by definition, thrown much less often. Variance isn’t the exception in such cases, but the rule.

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You’re probably aware of the Dellin Betances arbitration case and the interesting comments Yankees president Randy Levine made afterward. FanGraphs’ Nicolas Stellini wrote about the situation over the weekend.

No player or team likes going through the arbitration. Both parties try to avoid the process if at all possible, as it can create animosity between the camps.

And if you’re a player, you’re perhaps increasingly motivated to avoid allowing a panel of arbitrators determine your salary. Historically, teams beat players in the majority of arbitration cases, according to data compiled by Maury Brown:

Moreover, Brown reported this week that the advantage in favor of the owners has widened in recent years. The process increasingly seems to favor clubs — in part, perhaps, because arbitrators remain behind the times in how they evaluate performance.

Consider this David Laurila Baseball Prospectus Q&A from 2012 with long-time arbitrator Roger Abrams. Abrams suggests that the information presented to arbitrators is typically “not quite sabermetrics” and that arbitrators are not “baseball specialists.”

DL: You used the phrase “not quite sabermetrics,” but can it be assumed that more advanced statistics are presented today than in years past?

RA: It’s a mixed bag. What you don’t want to do is confuse the arbitrators, and some of the sabermetric stuff can be rather confusing. On the other hand, arbitrators can understand the importance of a strikeout-to-walk ratio. They can understand why ERA is a critical stat as opposed to wins and losses, which are meaningless–the pitcher doesn’t win or lose the game; the club wins or loses the game. The pitcher is responsible for earned runs. That is very simple-minded sabermetrics, and that is helpful in salary arbitration. Of course, it’s all glossied up in the submissions, which, frankly, you don’t have enough time to read within 24 hours, let alone digest.

Now, maybe arbitrators are slowly changing how they evaluate performance, but, at best, it’s a slow process that’s probably not caught up to better ways of understanding and measuring player value.

At a time when owners are making gains in percentage of revenue share, the arbitration process — especially in early arbitration years — is one more force working against players.

So does that mean everybody would be OK just eliminating the arbitration system? I’m guessing the answer is “No,” but I do think the players union would benefit from replacing the current system with something that exists in other major pro sports — namely, restricted free agency.

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Time to kick off the latest edition of what’s always my favorite polling project every year. For a while, on the site, we’ve been showing you the Steamer projections. Just in the last day or two, we’ve folded in all the ZiPS data, meaning now we’ve got projections that shouldn’t budge anymore, barring injuries or roster moves. Here is the projected American League landscape!

Overall, I assume things look more or less acceptable. Every division has a clear favorite, and we know the White Sox have initiated a rebuild that’s likely to cause them to suck in the short-term. The Twins, also, could suck in the short-term. The A’s and Rays are forever projecting to play around .500. And so on and so forth. But every year I like to see what the community thinks, because there isn’t otherwise an easy way to express disagreement with the numbers being provided. Do some of the projections just feel wrong to you? Say that in the polls below. We’ll look at the National League on Wednesday, and then I’ll examine all the results at the end of the week.

Something I’d like for you to keep in mind: Please vote according to what we know now. Don’t vote anticipating midseason additions or subtractions. It’s one thing if you think a team will or will not call up a top prospect, but don’t vote planning on trades. I think everything else is self-explanatory, so, have fun. For each team and each poll, I’ll offer brief commentary that serves little purpose since I don’t want to actually bias anything myself. I think that’s it for the intro. Thank you and I love you!

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In the middle of last July, rumors started to spread that, come free agency, Eric Hosmer could seek a 10-year deal. Then, in the second half of the season, Hosmer batted .225, with a 76 wRC+. Now, in a new article from Ken Rosenthal, it’s expressed the Royals believe Eric Hosmer could seek a 10-year deal.

Hosmer is represented by Scott Boras, and you can see here how Boras effortlessly presupposes Hosmer’s significance:

“We all know that Hos is a franchise player, a world champion. He’s done all this at a very young age,” Boras said.

World champion? Sure, that happened. Very young age? Hosmer is still only 27 years old. But, there’s that first thing. We don’t all know that Hosmer is a franchise player. The majority of people would actually disagree with that notion. This is a phenomenally easy idea to argue against.

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Over the last couple years, the author has published a periodic statistical report designed to serve as a mostly responsible shorthand for people who, like the author, possess more enthusiasm for collegiate baseball than expert knowledge of it. Those reports integrated concepts central to much of the analysis found at FanGraphs — regarding sample size and regression, for example — to provide something not unlike a “true talent” leaderboard for hitters and pitchers in select conferences.

What follows represents the first such report for the 2017 college campaign, which began last Friday.

As in the original edition of this same thing, what I’ve done here is to utilize principles introduced by Chris Mitchell on forecasting future major-league performance with minor-league stats.

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Over at the fantasy blog, they’ll be publishing their annual bold predictions soon. Those posts, as usual, will cater to the roto side of things. They’re fun to write. And, even though I’m no longer editing RotoGraphs anymore, I’d like to continue the tradition. So I’ve decided to do a version that’s aimed more at the real game.

Let’s stretch our imagination and make some predictions that are a little bit sane (they should be rooted in reality to some extent), but also a little bit insane (since the insane happens in baseball every year anyway). Back when I did this for fantasy, I hit 3-for-10 most years. Doubt I do it again, for some reason.

What follows are my 10 bold predictions for 2017.

1. Dylan Bundy will be the ace he was always supposed to be.
Once picked fourth overall and pegged as the future ace of the Orioles, Bundy had a terrible time in the minor leagues. Over five years, he managed only 111 innings between injuries. There was Tommy John, of course, but lat strains, shoulder-calcification issues and between-start bouts of elbow soreness have dogged him throughout, as well. At least he was good while he was in, with an ERA in the low twos and great rates to support those results.

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For most of the offseason, industry speculation suggested that the Nationals were the most likely landing spot for Matt Wieters. They were losing Wilson Ramos to free agency, which created a hole at the catcher spot, and Wieters was already comfortable with the geographic area, having spent his entire career in Baltimore to that point.

But all winter, the team didn’t seem to show much interest. At the beginning of December, Washington traded for Derek Norris, who had a terrible 2016 but has plenty of signs pointing to a 2017 bounce-back. With Norris and Jose Lobaton in the fold, they had a perfectly capable pair of receivers, both of whom rated as well above average in Statcorner’s catcher framing metrics. Catching wasn’t the strength of the team, but neither was it some glaring weakness like their bench, and if ownership was going to allow for more spending, there seemed to be plenty of other places for the Nationals to upgrade.

But today, the winter of industry speculation proved prescient, as the Nationals have reportedly signed Wieters, giving him $21 million in guaranteed money over two years along with an opt-out after the first year. The lesson, as always; if you’re not sure where a Scott Boras client is going to sign, Washington is always a safe guess.

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