The most recent World Series, of course, was won by the Astros, and the previous World Series, of course, was won by the Cubs. Those teams have had the most successful examples of recent rebuilds, and although things don’t always go that well, the ideal rebuild goes through three phases. First, you tear down, exchanging shorter-term players for longer-term players. Then, you develop, with more talent accumulation along the way. Finally, there’s the push, the re-investment in trying to win. That’s when the rebuild is basically over. That’s when a team has climbed back in the race.

I don’t know what marked the Astros’ transition to phase three. Perhaps it was trading for Evan Gattis. Perhaps it was trading for Scott Kazmir, or for Carlos Gomez. On the Cubs’ side, there was the signing of Jon Lester, and there was the acquisition of Dexter Fowler. When the Astros and Cubs decided they were ready to win, the change was unmistakable. And now, hoping to follow in their footsteps, we have the Brewers. The Brewers have entered phase three.

To their credit, the Brewers didn’t let the process bottom out. After finishing above .500 in 2014, they spent just two years out of the hunt. Last season, they were an overachieving surprise. And now they’ve pulled off a major one-two punch. Thursday afternoon, they traded for Christian Yelich. Only a short time later, they signed Lorenzo Cain. Yelich cost four prospects. Cain got five years. But there’s no missing the message: The Brewers are ready.

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Two days ago, this author politely asked a major-league team — really any major-league team — to sign free-agent outfielder Lorenzo Cain. Tonight, Brewers general manager David Stearns and team ownership obliged.

This author — and others, too, including former FanGraphs editor Dave Cameron — tabbed Cain as the top value play in free agency, assuming the terms of his contract emerged as expected. The crowd and Dave each predicted a four-year, $68-million deal.

At a reported five years and $80 million, Cain is a bit less of a bargain than expected. There was no New Year’s discount for his services, for example. Nonetheless, the Brewers on Thursday night added two impact outfielders in Christian Yelich (about whom Jeff Sullivan is writing at this moment) and Cain, the top position-player free-agent available.

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Here’s a table! It includes every team in baseball, and it shows how many regular-season games each team has won over the past five years. The Dodgers have been very good. The Phillies have not. Come to FanGraphs.com for all of your groundbreaking baseball analysis.

Lately I’ve been thinking about a few different questions. The main thrust of one: Which team is best positioned to be good for a while? The main thrust of the other: Which team seems to be the most screwed? We all, I think, have our suspicions, and the first one has maybe been talked to death. I’m not sure. Situations are always changing. But I couldn’t quite think of the right way to approach the subjects. I’ve also known I’ve wanted to gauge community opinions. And so we come to this, which is just another FanGraphs community polling project. I think I’ve settled on an appropriate question.

Above, for every team, you see five-year win totals, through 2017. Below, there are 30 polls — one for each team — and I’m looking for your rough combined win projections for 2018 through 2022. It’s relatively easy to project one season ahead, but for these purposes, I don’t think that accomplishes enough. It asks a different question. By focusing on five years, instead of one, I’m not just asking about the strength of the current roster. It forces you to consider the front office, and the farm system, and the player development, and the overall resources. In theory, we could go beyond five years, but then it’s all effectively unknowable. I mean, even the fifth year is probably unknowable, but just give it your best shot, based on what you understand about your team. As always, I’ll do a follow-up analysis post, so that we can evaluate the whole spread of the landscape.

I recognize that these polling projects are usually easier. This one requires some basic math. For reference, an average of 81 wins over the next five years would yield a combined total of 405. An average of 90 wins over the next five years would yield a combined total of 450. An average of 75 wins over the next five years would yield a combined total of 375. Those might give you some useful targets. You can also refer to the table at the start. It’s not fun to have to do math just in order to respond to an internet poll, but I think the results of this could be really interesting. It’s a question we’re frequently thinking about, yet I’ve never polled in this way. Given sufficient participation, we can assess every team’s short- and medium-term strength in league context.

Thank you in advance for your help. I can’t wait to see what the numbers reveal.

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Congratulations to Vladimir Guerrero, Trevor Hoffman, Chipper Jones, and Jim Thome. That quartet of fine players all received word yesterday that they’d earned a place in baseball’s Hall of Fame, each receiving more than 75% of the BBWAA’s vote.

If you think the day after one year’s results are announced is too early to start thinking about the next year’s ballot, that’s fair. If you believe next year’s ballot is fair game, however, come with me as I consider what might happen next January.

First, a point regarding the sheer number of candidates. No players on this year’s ballot were in their 10th and final year of voting, so nobody was removed due to time constraints. That means that every player who was not elected this year and who also received at least 5% of the vote will be on next year’s ballot. Four players were inducted this year, though. Last year, it was three. The size of those two classes alone helps clear out the logjam of eligible candidates a bit.

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This is the time of year when top-100 lists begin to emerge. Baseball America and Keith Law, for example, have both released their annual lists just in the past week. Other outlets will follow soon.

While our eyes tend to look for new additions, for the players who have zoomed to the top — Ronald Acuna and Shohei Ohtani are sexy names, after all — there are also players who drop off the lists each year. Maybe most visible this year was Mickey Moniak, who fell off the Baseball America top-100 list entirely after appearing 17th there last year. Maybe he’ll recover; it wouldn’t be the first time. And even if he doesn’t, maybe there will be the slight solace that his won’t be the biggest such decline in list history.

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The moderator, MLBNetwork’s Jon Morosi, suggested slyly at one point that if any of the panelists cared to consummate a trade, the event could be paused in order for them to do so. He then proposed that maybe “Miami could spin Christian Yelich to the Rockies.”

Amid appreciative laughter from the audience, the question “What would it take?” rang out. Marlins president of baseball operations Michael Hill, sitting immediately to Morosi’s left, responded with a smile: “Back up the truck.”

———

Held this past Monday at the Harvard Club of Boston, the “MLB Executive Panel Q&A” was organized by the Friends of Harvard Baseball and the Harvard Varsity Club. Along with Hill, the panelists included Colorado Rockies VP/general manager Jeff Bridich, Oakland A’s general manager David Forst, Boston Red Sox VP of player development Ben Crockett, and Peter Woodfork, a senior VP of baseball operations in the commissioner’s office. All are former members of the Harvard baseball team, while Morosi, a self-described “slap-hitting second baseman on a team of slap-hitting second basemen” — played on the junior varsity.

Not everything said on Monday night was on the record, but several of the stories that were shared can be repeated to the population at large. Along with the aforementioned exchange, here are some of them.

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Below is an analysis of the prospects in the Los Angeles Angels farm system. Scouting reports are compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as from our own (both Eric Longenhagen’s and Kiley McDaniel’s) observations. The KATOH (stats-only) statistical projections, probable-outcome graphs, and (further down) Mahalanobis comps have been provided by Chris Mitchell. For more information on the 20-80 scouting scale by which all of our prospect content is governed you can click here. For further explanation of the merits and drawbacks of Future Value, read this.

70 FV Prospects

Where to begin? First, it’s worth discussing why Ohtani is even included within these rankings in the first place. There’s a pretty good argument that he doesn’t belong here: he’s an MLB-ready product who probably won’t take a minor-league bus ride in his life. Nevertheless, we felt that a few facts about him merit his inclusion.

1. He’s younger than many of the players who appear throughout our lists.
2. He was an amateur international free agent literally weeks ago.
3. He’ll be providing the Angels with a prospect’s surplus value. (He’d be worth at least $250 million on the open market but will be making league minimum in 2017. So, great job, MLBPA.)
4. Because of Ohtani’s geographic location, the injury issues that made him hard to see in 2017, and the inexact nature of NPB/MLB statistical equivalencies, most of what we know about Ohtani comes from him being scouted very heavily during the last two years.

Shohei Ohtani is perhaps the most talented all-around baseball player on the planet. He is a toolsy, but volatile, prospect as a hitter with plus-plus raw power and plus speed; he could also immediately be one of the best pitchers in baseball because of the elite quality of his stuff. Teams have been on Ohtani since he was in high school. The Dodgers, Giants, Rangers, and Red Sox all pursued him during that time, and the threat that Ohtani would go to MLB right out of high school created a buzz in Japan. (This was in 2012 and 2013, during the time of soft international bonus caps. Ohtani said publicly at this time that he wanted to go right to MLB.) NPB teams (specifically the Hokkaido Fighters, who picked first overall in the 2012 draft) were forced to play chicken with Ohtani’s MLB suitors. There was risk he’d be picked up at the top of the NPB draft and just leave, but Hokkaido took him and convinced him to stay.

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Between 2008 and 2013, the only team to win more games than the Rays was the Yankees. Think about what that means. Over the span of six years, only the richest franchise in baseball could out-perform one of the poorest. The Rays ranked in second, with 550 wins, 14 fewer than the Yankees, but 12 more than the Phillies. The Rays made the playoffs on four occasions, once, of course, getting as far as the World Series. The Rays were a model organization. At least, the Rays were a model, provided you had an organization with comparatively limited resources. It was a minor miracle how much they were able to accomplish.

The recent years haven’t been so rosy. Which, in some ways, is hardly surprising — not only are success cycles cyclical by definition, but the Rays are also at a massive financial disadvantage, at a time when more and more front offices are beginning to think like they do. There’s a popular theory out there that it used to be way easier to build good baseball teams on the cheap. It’s probably true! So one could use the recent Rays as evidence that parity is beginning to slip away. Small-market teams might be increasingly screwed. It wasn’t long ago we saw the Rays trade away the face of the franchise. It’s possible Chris Archer could be next.

There’s no question the Rays aren’t what they were. There’s no question they’ve been on the outside of the playoff picture looking in. And yet, with the benefit of hindsight, it’s interesting to look at what the Rays have been, and at what they’ve almost been. By one measure, the Rays haven’t had that much of a dip.

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In this slowest of markets, one of the players who might be most adversely affected is Mike Moustakas.

Some thought it was possible, as the offseason began, that Moustakas might receive a $100-million deal this winter. Not only was he a third baseman who’d just authored a 38-homer season, but he was also still on the right side of 30. Of course, that sort of deal hasn’t emerged. It seems increasingly unlikely to emerge with each day.

Dave predicted a five-year, $95-million pact for Moustakas. The crowd predicted a five-year deal, as well, for $10 million fewer overall. Neither option seems probable at the moment: no free agent to date has secured more than a three-year contract, and there hasn’t been much reported interested in Moustakas.

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