Tonight, the 2016 MLB draft kicks off, with the first couple of rounds being broadcast on MLB Network (and MLB.com) starting at 7 pm eastern. For the next few days, teams are going to make their best educated guesses as to what players might develop into in four or five years, and down the line, we’ll look back at these few days as a big turning point for some organization. Someone is going to hit a home run in the draft tonight, and end up with a franchise-altering class of talent that could propel them forward for years to come. Teams put a lot of resources and energy into trying to make their picks as effective as possible because the long-term impact of quality drafting can be tremendous.

But the reality is that we’re not going to know, tonight, who is hitting a home run as they’re taking their swings. The draft is an exercise in forecasting, but it’s the most difficult kind of forecasting to do; projecting long-term futures based on incomplete or unreliable information. At the very top of the draft, there’s usually enough information to provide some confidence that the players being picked are the cream of this particular crop, but beyond those first few picks, it becomes very difficult to parse the differences. This isn’t a knock on scouts or scouting; it’s just that this particular job of identifying future production so far out is just really hard.

But, interestingly, even with the tremendous uncertainty that goes along with these picks, one term has stuck in the draft and prospect lexicon that suggests that we know more than we actually do, and you’re going to hear that term a lot tonight. For almost every pick, you’re going to hear about a players “ceiling”, or upside, or some other term for the upper limit of his potential. Big guys with big fastballs are given heigh ceiling grades, and diminutive college hitters with contact skills but lacking in power will be labeled as role players or utility guys, and by and large, you’ll find a lot more high-end players in the first group than the latter one.

But when you look at the current major league leaderboard, it should become pretty clear that the idea of an actual ceiling for any player is a significant overestimation of our ability to project their skills this far out.

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Today, MLB Advanced Media is making a pretty exciting announcement, as they’ve brought in Tom Tango — who created many of the metrics we use here on FanGraphs, and is probably the closest thing this generation has had to Bill James in terms of advancing the understanding of the game — to serve as their Senior Database Architect of Stats. In other words, he’ll help facilitate the development and deployment of Statcast data.

While the league has previously been somewhat reserved in discussions about which direction they would take this technology, the fact that MLB has brought in one of the game’s most respected public analysts, and is putting him in a position to develop tools for the public, seems like a great sign for the future of the data.

To help put some context behind this announcement, I conducted a Q&A with Tango via email last week, and I think his answers were quite encouraging. Our conversation is below, and if you’re interested in hearing more, Tango also recorded an episode of the Statcast Podcast with Mike Petriello, which will be up shortly. On to the Q&A.

DC: First off, congratulations on the new gig.

TT: Thank you, I’ve been waiting for this day to officially arrive.

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Last night, Yordano Ventura once again lived down to his reputation. The video at MLB.com shows not just the 99 mph fastball that drilled Manny Machado in the back in the 5th inning, but the 2nd inning pitches that led Ventura to decide to throw at the Orioles best player. If you haven’t seen the context that precipitated the brawl, this is worth watching.

As referenced by the announcers, this is nothing new for Ventura. Last April, he was unhappy with Mike Trout, and caused the benches to clear by mouthing off after pitching poorly. He was then ejected from his next start for hitting Brett Lawrie with a fastball, and in the start after that, he got the benches to clear by yelling at Adam Eaton after a groundball back to the mound.

As Jeff Passan — who lives in Kansas City and knows more about the Royals than most national writers — noted this morning, Ventura’s act has worn thin, not just with everyone else in baseball, but his own organization as well.

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In the winter of 2013, the Yankees faced a decision on star second baseman Robinson Cano, and after years of getting burned with big contracts for aging players, the team drew the line in the sand when Cano asked for a 10 year deal. After maxing out their offer to Cano at $175 million over seven years, the Yankees let Cano leave for Seattle, but then promptly reallocated most of the money earmarked for their second baseman to center fielder Jacoby Ellsbury; he signed with New York for $153 million over seven years a week after Cano signed with the Mariners.

Because of the similarities of the offers and the timing of when they occurred, Ellsbury is always going to be linked to Cano, and comparisons between the two have become a frequent source of conversation. That was especially true back in April, when Cano got off to a blistering start to the season while Ellsbury struggled tremendously. A few days into the season, ESPN ran this story from Andrew Marchand.

Jacoby Ellsbury could go down as one of the worst free agent signings in Yankee history https://t.co/2EXsqLKfur

— Andrew Marchand (@AndrewMarchand) April 8, 2016

Similar stories followed over the next month, as Ellsbury limped to a .235/.278/.341 line over the first month of the season. The slow came on the heels of a miserable second half to the 2015 season, and by the time April ended, Ellsbury had hit just .241/.293/.338 (a 71 wRC+) over the past calendar year, spanning a total of 498 plate appearances. It was pretty easy to write Ellsbury off as a washed-up and overpaid mistake.

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Last week, I wrote a piece about where the struggling Diamondbacks go from here, given their current position in the NL West race despite high hopes for their season. This week, on the back of the Padres dumping what they could of James Shields‘ remaining contract, it’s time to talk about the other NL West team whose hopes of contention have been dashed on the harsh rocks of reality.

During the Diamondbacks big splashy off-season, comparisons between Arizona and San Diego have been pretty common, as the Padres spent the prior winter making big moves in an attempt to skip the rebuilding line and get back to the winner’s circle. The moves mostly failed, though, with the Padres finishing 74-88 despite the roster makeover, and 2016 isn’t going any better; they’re currently 23-35 and just agreed to pay $31 million to make James Shields pitch for someone else over the next few years. But even as I write a piece with the same headline as the one that I wrote about the Diamondbacks last week, it’s important to note that the D’Backs and Padres aren’t really in the same boat. In fact, at this point, it’s not actually clear that the Padres even have a boat.

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Over the last few years, sports conferences have become a popular endeavor. Inspired mostly by the success of the Sloan Sports and Analytics Conference held each spring, others have seen an opportunity to gather a bunch of interesting speakers and host a series of Q&As, and you now have a host of options to pick from if you want to attend one of these shindigs throughout the year.

But for baseball fans who are reading FanGraphs on a Friday in June, there’s one conference that remains the gold standard: The Saber Seminar.

The official name of the event is Sabermetrics, Scouting, and the Science of Baseball, and the two-day conference lives up to that title, providing speakers from a wide range of backgrounds, including team executives, analysts, and scouts, independent researchers, academics, members of the media, and people just breaking into the realm of trying to discover truths about the game. Over the course of a weekend, the event provides a wide range of different talks, spanning just about every type of analysis there is in baseball. It is, without fail, one of my favorite weekends of the year.

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Yesterday, MLB announced that Marlon Byrd has been suspended 162 games for failing a second PED test, which will effectively end his big league career. As a guy who turns 39 in a few months, he was already nearing the end of his days as a productive player anyway, and with a chunk of the suspension carrying over to next season, it’s unlikely any team will offer him a contract this winter. So this is probably it for Marlon Byrd.

But having his career end like this isn’t much solace for the pitchers that Byrd faced, or the teams that lost games in which the Indians gained an advantage from having him on the field. For instance, here’s Dan Haren’s comments in the wake of the news coming out yesterday.

@Ken_Rosenthal can I get back all the home runs he hit off me please? Thanks

— dan haren (@ithrow88) June 1, 2016

Also last year magically returned from a broken wrist in 16 days, at age 38. Proceeded to homer off me that day. https://t.co/7ubQOpskCk

— dan haren (@ithrow88) June 1, 2016

This is one of the issues the current system can’t really address. Sure, Byrd’s career is likely over, but maybe it would have been over four years ago had he not started looking for chemical assistance, and so what did he really lose by taking the banned substances? For players in his position, on the bubble of the major leagues, the incentive to use will always be larger than the costs of getting caught as long as one doesn’t care too terribly much about their reputation.

So every time a player fails a test and gets suspended, there’s a push for a different set of punishments, ones that would try to reduce the financial incentive to take PEDs, or at least increase the cost of getting caught. The most common suggestion is to allow teams to void the contracts of players who fail drug tests, so that players can’t use the money to secure a large financial commitment, then benefit from that commitment even after the suspension ends. Unfortunately, this suggestion is highly problematic.

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Last night, in Baltimore, Mookie Betts did this.

Those three home runs pushed his season total to 12, putting him in a tie with guys like Mike Trout, Miguel Cabrera, Giancarlo Stanton, and George Springer, among others, and ahead of a group that includes Jose Bautista, J.D. Martinez, and Miguel Sano. Through the first two months of the season, Betts is hitting for the kind of power you expect from a slugging cleanup hitter, not a diminutive leadoff guy. And while Betts hasn’t had any three-homer nights before, this power surge isn’t that new.

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