Over the last couple of weeks, we published our annual season preview series by going position by position around the league. If you missed any of the posts, they can be accessed by that helpful widget up above. Today, we’re also going to summarize the results of the series. Let’s start by diving right into the results of the ordinal ranks, which we’ll break into three tables for easier digestion. Infield first!

There’s a reason we use projected value and not just average ranking by position when talking about a team’s strength, since the margins between ranks can be deceptive. But this also gives you a decent idea of the amount of balance a team has across positions, and right away, it’s hard not to notice the Astros. Not only are they at the top of both middle-infield lists, but they’re No. 5 on the catcher list, No. 10 on the third-base list, and No. 15 on the first-base list.

Houston projects to get average or better production at every infield spot, something that can also only be claimed by the Cubs, Dodgers, and Indians, three of the very best teams in baseball. The Giants are close to joining that group, with only third base falling a little bit short, and the Blue Jays would be in this mix if they had a real first baseman.

Read the rest of this entry »

Over the weekend, Cleveland made a point of locking up another one of their young core players, signing Jose Ramirez to a five-year, $26 million contract that gives him significant guaranteed income in exchange for control over his first three free-agent years. Ramirez joins Corey Kluber, Jason Kipnis, Michael Brantley, Yan Gomes, Carlos Carrasco, and Carlos Santana as members of the team’s core who have signed long-term deals with the club before reaching free agency, and Cleveland’s ability to get these guys signed before they get expensive is one of the reasons they were able to sign Edwin Encarnacion to be a $20 million DH this winter.

Cleveland isn’t a traditional big spender in free agency, but with so many players signed to early-career contracts, they had the flexibility to be a buyer this winter, and they took advantage of it. While they’ve done a lot of things right, this is one of the primary reasons Cleveland has built a contender out of a modest payroll and a farm system that hasn’t generally been ranked among the game’s best. The thing they’ve done very well is develop good players from guys who weren’t considered great prospects, and then get them signed long-term as soon as possible.

Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

The Shelby Miller trade. Those four words haunt the Arizona Diamondbacks, and that one deal probably cost the last Arizona front office their jobs. It’s the worst transaction any team has made in recent history, and it was widely panned before Miller fell apart last year; having him fail so spectacularly certainly didn’t help the perception of the deal.

But Miller apparently isn’t content to just let his name become synonymous with bad decisions. Coming off the worst year of his career, Miller looks like he’s trying to change his narrative, and the easiest way to do that is become a wholly different pitcher.

Read the rest of this entry »

(Thanks to Eno Sarris and Nick Stellini for their help on this post.)

The corner outfielder posts yesterday were kind of depressing, but I have good news; I’ve found all the talented outfielders that were missing from the LF and RF posts. The best outfielders in the game mostly play center field now.

Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

A couple of years ago, the Blue Jays were blown away by the spring training performances of a couple of 20-year-old flamethrowers, and because they were the team’s two best pitchers in the Grapefruit League, the team decided to carry both Roberto Osuna and Miguel Castro on the Opening Day roster. Castro even took over as the team’s closer for the third game of the season; the Blue Jays bet big on talent over experience, and while Castro is a reminder that spring training success doesn’t always carry over to the regular season, the team struck gold with Osuna, who has been one of the game’s best relievers the last two years.

There aren’t any 20-year-olds threatening to crack the end of a contender’s bullpen this year, but over in Washington, the Nationals do look like they’re giving strong consideration to handing the ninth inning job to rookie Koda Glover, who turns 24 a week after the season starts. Like Castro and Osuna, Glover is opening eyes with elite velocity and a fine spring training performance, and since Dusty Baker seems to prefer Shawn Kelley and Blake Treinen in setup roles, Glover is the guy who most looks like a traditional closer, even if he doesn’t have the type of experience that is usually required before earning the job.

Unlike the Toronto pair, Glover already did his A-ball to the Majors climb last year, pitching well at every stop on the minor league ladder before scuffling a bit in the big leagues. But while he ran an ERA over 5.00 in the Majors, and failed to record as many strikeouts as you’d expect with his stuff, it’s also not like he got lit up last year; opposing batters hit just .200/.277/.387 against him, good for just a .284 wOBA. Glover’s minor league performances also suggest the team has some reason to think that this plan might work, as both ZIPS and Steamer think he’s effectively as good as anyone in that bullpen besides Kelley.

And spring training dominance, while often overstated in value, isn’t worth ignoring entirely. As Dan Rosenheck showed a couple of years ago, you can improve pre-season projections by incorporating spring training data, and the effects are largest for young players on whom we have the least amount of big league data, meaning the projections have more room for error. And Glover’s spring numbers thus far are exactly the types of numbers Rosenheck identified as potentially worthwhile predictors of a performance that could be better than the current projections state.

His grapefruit league line, to this point.

8 IP, 4 H, 1 R, 1 BB, 11 K.

The hit and run categories don’t matter much, but that 39% strikeout rate? That’s something to pay attention to. Rosenheck’s study showed that big spikes in spring training strikeout rate did tend to suggest better pitching performances in-season, and all Glover really needs to do to become a high-end reliever is miss more bats. The fact that he’s destroying opposing hitters in spring training should be a very encouraging sign.

But there’s a caveat here, because Dusty Baker has decided to get Glover ready to pitch the ninth inning by having him actually pitch the ninth inning, rather than getting his work in earlier in the game. This means that by the time Glover has pitched, he’s generally been facing minor league hitters, since big leaguers aren’t playing all nine innings in the Grapefruit League. Because MLB.com helpfully has game logs for spring training, we can actually go through and look at the 28 batters he’s faced so far this spring. So let’s do just that.

3/20, NYY: Clint Frazier, Pete Kozma, Billy Mckinney, Kyle Higashioka
3/18, HOU: Max Stassi, Colin Moran, Alejandro Garcia, A.J. Reed
3/16, NYM: Ricardo Cespedes, Jacob Zanon, Andres Gimenez
3/13, DET: Steven Moya, Mike Gerber, Juan Perez, John Hicks
3/10, STL: Breyvic Valera, Wilfredo Tovar, Chad Huffman
3/7, BOS: Mitch Moreland, Chris Young, Jackie Bradley Jr
3/3, MIA: Ryan Jackson, Matt Juengel, Austin Nola, Destin Hood
2/28, HOU: Juan Centeno, Jake Marisnick, Andrew Apin

Among those 28 opponents, exactly four are likely to break camp with a big league team this year, and one of those four is Jake Marisnick, who hits like a minor leaguer. The good news is that, when asked to face the bottom of Boston’s line-up, he struck out all three of the Red Sox big leaguers. The bad news is that I don’t know how much the Nationals have really learned about Glover in the other 24 at-bats, given that we already knew he was capable of blowing minor leaguers away.

So, while it’s better that Glover is carving up the likes of Juan Perez and Matt Juengel than if he was struggling against them, we probably can’t apply Rosenheck’s study directly to Glover’s performance, since most of the players in that study faced mostly big leaguers by playing in the early innings of spring training games. And while Glover didn’t need a big spring training adjustment in order to be a decent enough option to close, the quality of competition should temper the excitement about what he’s done this month.

With a mid-90s fastball and a slider that looks like an out-pitch, the big question facing Glover is probably how well he’ll handle left-handed hitters, which could be the difference between him succeeding as a closer and being more suited to a match-up role. If the Nationals wanted to gather the most pertinent information to help them evaluate his readiness for the closer’s role, they probably should have had Glover face as many big league lefties as possible this spring.

With a few weeks of spring training left, there’s still time for Baker to shift his usage plan, and test Glover against the kinds of guys he’ll actually have to get out if he wants to pitch the ninth inning in D.C. this year. But until that adjustment happens, we probably shouldn’t put too much stock in Glover’s dominant spring training numbers. We already knew he could get low-quality hitters out. If he’s going to be the closer for a contending team, the Nationals need to figure out if he can get big leaguers out too.

With two weeks left until Opening Day, it’s time for the annual FanGraphs season preview series, which we do a little differently around here. While plenty of other talented writers and publications put out previews by team or by division, we prefer to go position by position, which lets us cover pretty much every roster spot on every team in baseball. While traditional team previews focus mostly on the top end of a roster, the difference in making the postseason is often how well the end of the roster performs, and how much value teams get from their non-stars. By breaking down every position from 1 to 30, we can emphasize where every team looks strong — or a little less so — heading into the season.

The rankings themselves are based on the forecasted depth charts we host here on FanGraphs, which combine projections for rate stats from ZIPS and Steamer with manually curated playing-time forecasts. While forecasting systems have been shown to do better than most humans at forecasting production, humans win out when it comes to allocating playing time, so our depth charts try and leverage the best of both worlds. Of course, no projection system is perfect, and humans are prone to errors, so we don’t think these forecasts should be taken as gospel, but they do give you a good overview of what our site thinks about each team’s expected production at this point in the season.

Certainly, things will change between now and October. Players get hurt, prospects come up and make an unexpected splash, guys change their swings and become entirely different hitters overnight; the final season rankings by position won’t look exactly like these forecasts. That’s one of the things that is great about baseball.

But in general, there’s an upper limit to how many things can break right for a team in a given season. If your favorite team consistently ranks at or near the bottom of all these positional breakdowns, it’s probably fair to assume that they’re not going to win a lot of games this year.

One of the other benefits of doing our previews by position is that we can compare job-shares against full-time players, noting where a platoon might be more effective than a traditional everyday player even though both players in the platoon have obvious flaws. For corner outfield, first base, and designated hitter — where platoons are most common — the ability to look at the expected production from everyone who is allocated playing time at that spot helps give a better view of a team’s strength than simply looking at a team’s starters and bench separately.

That said, doing the posts by position also means that you might see some things that appear a little weird on the surface. For instance, the Cubs willingness to shift players around means that we’re projecting guys like Kris Bryant, Ben Zobrist, and Javier Baez to split their time between multiple positions, and thus, their overall value won’t show up entirely in any one of these posts. If you see a guy who plays several positions, and you think his forecast at one of those spots seems low, check the post for the other positions he plays; it’s probably being accounted for over there.

Additionally, because we only keep one overall value for projected fielding performance, players who play multiple positions will be displayed with the same FLD forecast at every position, even though a guy who splits time between shortstop and second base will probably run better defensive numbers at second base. The FLD projection includes the split in playing time, so the player’s overall forecasted value is correct, but just a heads up that you might see some odd FLD numbers for guys who bounce around.

Finally, let’s get the annual disclaimer out of the way: we don’t game these numbers at all to get any kind of desired result. The authors who are writing the content for each team’s summary don’t get to move teams around based on their own personal preference, and we’re not rigging the forecasts in the background to make sure that certain teams look better than the others. The results are simply the output of the ZIPS/Steamer forecasts and our playing time projections. If your team’s shortstops are ranked 14th and you think they should be ranked 8th, it’s not because we hate your team. This is just what the forecasts think in mid-March.

And really, for many of these positions, ordinal ranking is the wrong number to look at anyway. Often times, the differences between a dozen teams in the middle is a fraction of a forecasted WAR, and everyone within that tier should be considered on mostly even ground, even if one ranks 8th and the other 19th. We’ll include a graphical display of the overall team values at the top of each post, and it’s probably more helpful to look at which tier a team ranks in rather than the specific spot on the list. There are going to be lists where No. 2 and No. 3 aren’t anywhere near each other, while Nos. 3 and 12 are mostly interchangeable.

So, don’t freak out overall a particular ranking, especially if you could just change the number after decimal and a team would go up or down 10 spots. And really, it’s probably better to not freak out in general; your team is going to do whatever they’re going to do, regardless of our preseason projections, and all we’re attempting to provide is a realistic preseason baseline. But there’s enough variance in baseball that most teams, even the ones that don’t look great in March, could be playing meaningful baseball in September.

If you want to review last year’s forecasts while you’re waiting for the series to start — the catcher post will kick off the series in a few hours — then you can peruse each post from the helpful widget that Sean Dolinar created to link the posts together. That widget will make it easier for you to bounce from post to post as they go up. And if you’re just looking for something fun to look at, go check out the graph on last year’s center-fielder post, and then prepare yourself for an even more ridiculous center-field graph this year.

We’ll run through the position players this week and tackle pitchers next week, and wrap up the series with an overview of where everyone stands a few days before the 2017 season officially kicks off. We hope you enjoy these posts, since they are a mountain of work for our writers, and they help you get a better feel for where every team stands heading into the year.

In 2017, I am probably more interested in Adam Eaton than I am any other player in baseball. As the centerpiece of a controversial blockbuster, coming off a monster season where a lot of his value was tied a huge swing in his defensive value, Eaton was always going to be a fascinating experiment for paying a perceived premium price for outfield defense. But it gets even more interesting, because the Nationals are switching him from right field back to center field, so we throw a position switch in the mix as well, and get another data point on whether his weird splits between RF and CF actually mean anything.

So when the MLBAM guys released their outfield catch probability leaderboard last weekend, Eaton was naturally one of the first players to examine. And when Jeff took an early look at the published 2015-2016 data, he found that Eaton ranked seventh in Catch+, or whatever we might want to call plays made above the averages of the buckets they had opportunities in. And when he looked at the catch data relative to the range portions of UZR and DRS, he actually found that the Statcast data showed that Eaton had the largest positive difference, suggesting that, by hang time and distance traveled variables, Eaton may have been even better defensively than the public defensive metrics thought.

So yeah, Eaton is really interesting. But the more I dig into Eaton’s defensive data, the more remarkable it all gets.

Read the rest of this entry »

Next week, we’re bringing back our annual Positional Power Rankings season preview, where we go through every team’s depth charts, position by position, to identify strengths and weaknesses. In preparation for the PPRs, we spend a lot of time checking over every team’s depth chart here on the site to try and make the playing time distributions as accurate as possible, and make sure we’re incorporating the most recent available information. In most cases, distributing at-bats is pretty easy, and there is a logical combination of players to fill starter/reserve or platoon roles for each team.

But then there’s the Orioles outfield. If you know how to make this group fit together, I’d love to hear it.

Read the rest of this entry »