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It’s our turn to Positionally Power Rank the second baseman. If you’re not familiar with this series, read the introduction, and then come back for a walk through the league’s most homogenous spot on the field. By which I mean that the keystone position in MLB is an eclectic mix of young contact hitters, aging contact hitters, contact hitters with some power, and Jonathan Schoop. But hey, let’s sort out which of these contact hitters are better than the others, and we’ll do that right now.

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We’re now officially two weeks from Opening Day, which means you’re about to be inundated with season previews. Some places will go team by team, others will group by divisions, but basically every outlet that covers baseball will roll out overviews of the 2016 season. In an attempt to provide something a little bit different here at FanGraphs, we do our season previews on a positional basis, and we call them the Positional Power Rankings. This is now our fifth crack at these things — you can see the archived versions of 2012, 2013, 2014, and 2015 by clicking on those links — and we hope that they’re getting better each time we do them.

From my perspective, one of the primary benefits of previewing the season from a positional perspective is that we can spend a bit more time discussing a team’s overall depth. Most team-based previews aren’t going to spend a lot of time on the bench pieces or the minor leaguers who will get first crack at playing time should an injury occur, especially on a contender; no one clicks on a story about the Nationals 2016 season to read about Jose Lobaton, for instance. But depth matters, and often times, the difference between making the postseason or watching October baseball from home is the performance of a team’s role players, and with many teams moving towards a balanced roster approach over betting on a few big-name stars, we think breaking down every team’s projections at each position on the field gives you guys a better understanding of where the various strengths and weaknesses lie.

How does a platoon stack up against having one regular everyday guy? What is the magnitude of the improvement a team will get from swapping out a veteran placeholder with a top prospect in May or June? These are the kinds of things we think the Positional Power Rankings are helpful at identifying, and because our previews are based on strength at a certain spot, non-contenders get a chance to shine if they have a particularly strength as well. So we know it’s different than most places, but hopefully it’s different in a good way, providing you with information you won’t get elsewhere, or at least provides information in a format that makes you see a team’s pros and cons in a different light.

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We’re about two weeks away from Opening Day, and with teams starting to get a sense for what they have — and more importantly, what they don’t have — we’re likely to see some trade talk pick up soon. Mostly, spring trades revolve around out-of-options guys or bench players who played their way out of an organization, but occasionally, teams find common ground on a major trade that reshapes their roster right before the season starts. Last year, the Padres were involved in just such a deal, acquiring Craig Kimbrel and Melvin Upton from the Braves right before the season started. And I think they should make another big trade before the season starts this year.

Over the last few days, talk has picked up that the Rangers have interest in acquiring Derek Norris, the Padres starting catcher. The Rangers don’t really have much catching depth, while the Padres have three catchers after their off-season of Christian Bethancourt, so a deal between the two teams makes a decent amount of sense. But rather than making a small deal in which the Rangers pick up Norris for some mid-level prospect or two, there’s a case to be made that the two sides should expand the talk and make a legitimate blockbuster.

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So, on Tuesday, I announced a meetup I’d be hosting in Toronto on April 8th, for those of you who won’t be attending the home opener to get together at a bar and watch the game. The space we had reserved at Tallboys had room for 30 people, and you guys bought up all the available spots in less than a few hours. In order to try and accommodate more people who expressed interest in attending, we’re moving the get together to a different bar: Firken on King.

This new space has room for 100 people, so we’re opening up 70 more spots as of today. If you purchased a ticket on Tuesday, don’t worry, that will still be honored, and you don’t have to buy a new ticket to get into the event. Because of the larger space, however, we’ve had to up the price slightly for this second round of tickets; the cost is now $8, but still includes your first beer, so it’s still close to free to attend. The event will start at 6 pm, and we’ll hang out and talk baseball before the game starts, then settle in and watch the game together starting at 7. For space reasons, you’ll need to be at Firken by 6:30 in order to have your space guaranteed, as they’ll be opening up the area to walk-ins after that point.

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A week ago, the St. Louis Cardinals learned they were going to be without Jhonny Peralta for the first couple of months of the season, after he required surgery to repair a torn ligament in his thumb. Because the Cardinals have been participating in a multi-year experiment to see if you can win games without a viable backup shortstop on the roster, speculation immediately turned to outside acquisitions, since no one thinks running Jedd Gyorko out there on an everyday basis is a good idea. While Erick Aybar was floated as a natural fit, given that he’s in a walk year on a rebuilding team, the Braves quickly hung a high price tag on him, making a deal between the teams unlikely.

Instead, the Cardinals seem likely to make a more minor move, not wanting to create a mid-season playing time problem when Peralta does return. And on the minor acquisition spectrum, there was always one name who made a decent amount of sense: Ruben Tejada.

The signing of Asdrubal Cabrera made Tejada superfluous for the Mets, pushing him into a third-string shortstop role that probably wouldn’t have resulted in a lot of playing time. Even with Cabrera having his own health problems, the Mets still seemed perfectly content to let someone else have Tejada if they wanted him, and his availability was no secret around the league. And then today, the Mets made the speculation official, putting Tejada on waivers, and giving any team the chance to take him if they so desire. While Tejada doesn’t yet have a new uniform, his days as a Met are over, and now we simply wait for the seemingly inevitable announcement that he’ll be signing with the Cardinals.

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Torontoians! Torontites! Torontians! Whatever you call yourselves, I have some news for you.

The guys behind the PITCH Talks series have invited me to come up for their event — already sold out, sorry about that — on Thursday, April 7th, but in addition to that Q&A, we’re going to do a meetup while I’m in town as well. Along with former FanGraphs writer Drew Fairservice and his pal Andrew Stoeten, I’m going to hang out at TallBoys Craft Beer House where you can join us to watch the Blue Jays home opener together. So if you don’t have tickets to the team’s first home game of the season, you can come hang out with us and watch it on the big screen, and drink for much cheaper than those who will be at the Rogers Centre.

Because we’ll be using Tall Boys private room space, we are selling tickets to this meetup, but that’s just for headcount reasons, really; the ticket is only $5 and you get a free Steamwhistle beer with your purchase, so it’s effectively free. The doors for the event will open at 6 pm, so we’ll have an hour or so to hang out and chat before the game starts, and then we’ll hang out and watch the game. So, come hang out with us and watch the Blue Jays first home game of the season with a bunch of other Blue Jays fans.

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The Houston Astros are, in some ways, an odd team. Their best hitter is their 21 year old shortstop, and then their next best hitters are a toolsy outfielder and a 5’5 second baseman. Pretty much around the field, the team has stockpiled well-rounded players, and they have a lot of good athletes who are also good hitters, giving them significant depth in their line-up. In fact, our depth charts project them to get average or better production from seven of their nine spots, and gives them one of the best up-the-middle groups in all of baseball.

But their line-up also has a couple of notable weak spots: first base and designated hitter. These are ostensibly the two easiest positions on the diamond to fill, given that you can focus primarily on offensive production at those spots, widening the pool of available options, but while the Astros have found quality performers at every other spot, they’ve struggled to find guys who specialize in just hitting. Last year, the team got just a 104 wRC+ from their first baseman, and a 101 wRC+ from their designated hitters, ranking in the bottom tier in the league at both positions.

Incumbent first baseman Chris Carter was non-tendered for his lack of production, but interestingly, the team didn’t really make any moves to replace him, and will instead rely on an in-house mix of candidates while looking to get better production than they did a year ago. While there weren’t a lot of quality first baseman moving around this winter, they could have theoretically gotten involved in the Todd Frazier bidding, or gone for a lower-upside play like Yonder Alonso or Adam Lind. But the team was apparently comfortable with what they had internally, and are now using spring training to sort out who is going to grab the jobs at the two bat-first positions. Let’s take a look at those options.

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Over at ESPN today, they published a feature on Bryce Harper. It’s really good, and you should read the whole thing, but there’s one section that stands out; the part where the story shifts from the view of Harper as a person or a player, and to his view of baseball needs to evolve.

He wants to change the game. He wants to change the perception of baseball players, to become a single-name icon like LeBron and Beckham and Cam. “I don’t know much about Bryce,” says his new manager, Dusty Baker, “but I know he’s one of the hippest kids around.” Harper wants to elevate his sport’s profile through his play, through his fashion, through the charisma of his personality, maybe even through the fascination with the size of the first free agent contract ($400 million? $500 million?) that he’ll sign shortly after his 26th birthday. Is this a prodigy’s natural urge to innovate or a sign of youthful hubris?

“Endorsements, fashion — it’s something baseball doesn’t see,” he says. “In soccer, it’s Beckham or Ronaldo. In basketball, it’s Curry and LeBron. In football, it’s Cam. Football and basketball have such good fashion.”

There are impediments endemic to the sport. Everyone knows about Russell Westbrook’s unique couture because he’s wearing it in an interview room. The baseball player, on the other hand, is interviewed at his locker, often shirtless and sporting a hat head that can ruin even Harper’s unique follicle landscaping. As Nationals first baseman Ryan Zimmerman says, “We’re uniformed personnel.”

And then there’s the larger obstacle: the game’s stern code. Case in point: Papelbon vs. Harper. It started when Orioles third baseman Manny Machado hit a home run against the Nationals last September and reacted with too much excitement, so Jonathan Papelbon drilled him the next time Machado came to bat, which caused Harper to suggest to reporters that baseball’s code is “tired,” which led to Papelbon berating and then choking Harper four days later after the closer found his teammate’s hustle lacking — a Rube Goldberg display of baseball’s grim underside.

Harper has admitted fault in going to reporters instead of speaking to Papelbon directly (“If I had a problem with Pap, I should have gone up to Pap,” he says), and both men say it didn’t last beyond that day. But that’s not what Harper wants to talk about now.

“Baseball’s tired,” he says. “It’s a tired sport, because you can’t express yourself. You can’t do what people in other sports do. I’m not saying baseball is, you know, boring or anything like that, but it’s the excitement of the young guys who are coming into the game now who have flair. If that’s Matt Harvey or Jacob deGrom or Manny Machado or Joc Pederson or Andrew McCutchen or Yasiel Puig — there’s so many guys in the game now who are so much fun.

“Jose Fernandez is a great example. Jose Fernandez will strike you out and stare you down into the dugout and pump his fist. And if you hit a homer and pimp it? He doesn’t care. Because you got him. That’s part of the game. It’s not the old feeling — hoorah … if you pimp a homer, I’m going to hit you right in the teeth. No. If a guy pimps a homer for a game-winning shot … I mean — sorry.”

He stops, looks around. The hell with it, he’s all in.

“If a guy pumps his fist at me on the mound, I’m going to go, ‘Yeah, you got me. Good for you. Hopefully I get you next time.’ That’s what makes the game fun. You want kids to play the game, right? What are kids playing these days? Football, basketball. Look at those players — Steph Curry, LeBron James. It’s exciting to see those players in those sports. Cam Newton — I love the way Cam goes about it. He smiles, he laughs. It’s that flair. The dramatic.”

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