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Yesterday, the Orioles agreed to terms with Pedro Alvarez, potentially bringing him in — though we’ve learned to not count our chickens with Baltimore signings — to add some additional left-handed power to their line-up. As August noted this morning, Alvarez is a weird fit for the Orioles, because the Orioles needed an outfielder, and Alvarez is a DH. Signing Alvarez forces Mark Trumbo to right field, where he’s terrible, the effect of weakening the team’s defense probably will cancel out most of the offensive gain Alvarez might bring at the plate, making this a non-upgrade, or at least an inconsequential one.

But there’s also another potential story with the Alvarez signing. Pedro Alvarez strikes out a lot. In that way, the Orioles are a natural fit for Alvarez, because the Orioles clearly don’t mind strikeouts. They have Chris Davis, after all, and they traded for Mark Trumbo, and most of their role players don’t make a lot of contact either. Last year, the Orioles ranked third in the majors in strikeout rate (22.2%), and with Alvarez and Trumbo now in the fold, that number is probably going up in 2016.

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As you probably have heard by now, our projection systems don’t like the Royals, again. Our Playoff Odds page has them forecasted for just 77 wins, with only an 8% of reaching the postseason, the lowest of any team in the American League. ZIPS and Steamer just aren’t that high on the team’s individual players, and since the projections are context-neutral, there’s no adjustment being made for the fact that the team has won more than expected in recent years. The Royals have relied heavily on context-specific performance to reach the postseason, and projection systems assume that’s not a sustainable skill, wiping it away at the start of each season.

On Friday, I posed a question to you guys, based on the crowd’s overwhelming response that they believe the projection systems are underrating the 2016 Royals. The response to my question was also overwhelming; you guys believe that the Royals are going to significantly outperform their BaseRuns record once again. The top four answers selected in the poll were the four options that had them beating their BaseRuns record, with 78% of those voting selecting one of the options that suggested the Royals have an inherent skill that BaseRuns isn’t accounting for.

Overall, by weighting the results by the proportion of people who voted for each option, you guys project that the Royals will beat their BaseRuns expected record by 3.4 wins in 2016, accounting for about three-fourths of the difference that Jeff Sullivan found when he polled the crowd about expected record versus the projections. Given that the Royals have beaten BaseRuns by an aggregate 25 wins over the last three years, our readers believe that there’s some real skill there. You don’t expect that they’ll get the same type of bump as they have the last few years, but you’re willing to assume that, at this point, BaseRuns is just missing something about how they play, and the forecasts are low by 3.4 wins because of it.

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This morning, Jeff Sullivan posted the results of his team projection polls, and not surprisingly, you guys don’t buy into the 77-win forecast that our Playoff Odds are currently giving the Royals. The aggregate projection from the readers in Jeff’s poll put the Royals at 83 wins, and 71 percent of the people who voted believed that our forecast was at least four wins too low. Which is perfectly understandable, given that they just won the World Series and all, and it is no easy task trying to justify why a team that has won the AL pennant two years in a row might now be the worst team in the league.

So I want to follow up on Jeff’s poll, because while he collected the expected win total, he didn’t gather any information about how they’re going to get there. And the how is one of the most interesting parts of the Royals. Last year, they won 95 games, but their BaseRuns expected record was only 84-78, which is one of the primary reasons the projections are down on their 2016 chances. Forecasting systems only project context-neutral performance, and assume that the timing of events — which is what drives the difference from BaseRuns expected record — will be equal for all teams.

Since you guys believe the Royals are significantly better than ZIPS and Steamer believe, I’m curious how much of that is due to the belief that the projections are simply incorrectly forecasting individual performance, or whether you believe the Royals roster has inherent traits that will allow it to beat context-neutral expectations. Because looking at the difference between the forecasts and the FANS projections — created by the collective balloting of readers here on FanGraphs — doesn’t necessarily support the idea of the projections badly missing on the individual performances.

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Over the last few years, the Dodgers have made it pretty clear that, when it comes to pitching, they’re willing to take some health risks in order to get talent upside. To that end, they’ve signed pitchers like Scott Kazmir, Brett Anderson, Brandon McCarthy, and Brandon Beachy as free agents, all of whom have put up very good performances at times, but all of whom have had significant medical issues throughout their careers. This winter, they attempted to sign Hisashi Iwakuma, but backed off due to concerns with his physical, and then signed an incentive-laden deal with Kenta Maeda, who reportedly had some pretty ugly medicals himself. And this doesn’t even count Hyun-Jin Ryu — who wasn’t recently acquired, but is returning from shoulder surgery — or Alex Wood, a pitcher with a delivery so awkward that his long-term health was one of the main reasons the Braves traded him to Los Angeles to begin with.

The 2016 Dodgers rotation was essentially Clayton Kershaw and then some combination of four high-risk pitchers with health problems. We’re only a couple of weeks into spring training, but the downside of pursuing this strategy is already starting to show through the cracks.

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To be honest, I didn’t want to write about the “tanking” story anymore. After Buster Olney and Jayson Stark both wrote extensively about the issue in December and January, I published something of a rebuttal, and since then, follow-up discussions haven’t proven particularly useful, as both sides seem pretty entrenched in their interpretations. Olney and Stark are firmly in the camp that this is a huge systematic problem for Major League Baseball, and others — such as Joel Sherman — have also published pieces suggesting that MLB needs to intervene, so this issue isn’t going away.

Yesterday, Stark wrote another piece on the issue, soliciting comments from Tony Clark on whether the MLBPA is going to make this an issue in the CBA. Clark was diplomatic, keeping his options open, but didn’t really say anything particularly newsworthy. But there was an interesting comment in Stark’s column, from Stark himself, that I think is worth discussing.

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Over the weekend, Pirates ace Gerrit Cole expressed some unhappiness with the organization based on his 2016 salary.

On Saturday, Cole grudgingly signed a deal for $541,000 in base salary. That’s the same amount he made last year — $531,000 in base pay play a $10,000 bonus for making the All-Star team.

According to Cole, the team’s initial offer last week was for $538,000 – which was less than his total pay last year. The team refused to go higher than $541,000.

“They even threatened a salary reduction to the league minimum if I did not agree,” Cole said.

As a pre-arb player, Cole’s salary is dictated to him by management, and per the rules of the Collective Bargaining Agreement, he has no recourse but to accept whatever they offer. If he chose not to sign for the $541,000 they offered him, they had the power to unilaterally renew his contract at whatever price they wanted, even down to that $507,500 league-minimum number. Until a player reaches arbitration eligibility, they have no negotiating power whatsoever, so even elite players like Cole make something close to the league minimum.

MLB’s pay scale is intentionally designed to restrict the earnings of young players, with the resultant savings being passed on to veterans who are free to negotiate their wages in free agency. As with many unions, length of service is a larger factor than performance in determining wages, with younger players subsidizing the wages of older workers. Cole understands this system, and his grief doesn’t appear to be with the wage scale itself, as much as the Pirates’ implementation of their system of pre-arb raises.

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Yesterday, Dexter Fowler re-signed with the Cubs, taking $13 million for one year, or $2.8 million less than he would have made had he accepted the qualifying offer back at the beginning of free agency. Along with Yovani Gallardo and Howie Kendrick, Fowler became the third QO-offered player to accept a deal that was worse than the one they passed up, and Ian Desmond seems likely to join them in that group when he signs as well. These four players were crushed by the draft pick compensation that the QO attaches, as teams were reluctant to give them long-term deals based on perceived risks with their skillsets, but also didn’t want to surrender a valuable draft pick for a short-term asset.

The qualifying offer has worked for MLB teams, driving down free agent prices by serving as a tax on salaries for a select group of players, but because it’s so regressive in nature — and is inequitably applied — it is highly unpopular, and will almost certainly be revised in some way in the next CBA. There have been any number of suggestions for how to amend the system; I suggested removing the seven-day acceptance window a few years ago, and Nathaniel Grow pointed out that the system could work better if it moved to a multi-year offer, instead of a one-year tender that players are loathe to accept before testing the market. There’s also a pretty rational argument that the system should just go away entirely.

But those are big changes. Big changes are difficult, and often have unintended consequences, so more frequently, people prefer to make tweaks rather than overhauls. So if we look at the current qualifying offer system, agree that it needs adjusting, but limit the potential solutions to things that would be easier to agree upon and wouldn’t be a dramatic shift from what is already in existence, is there a way to make it so that players like Fowler, Kendrick, Gallardo, and Desmond don’t get stuck in free-agent limbo after they learn that the market isn’t going to give them the long-term deal they were seeking?

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A year ago, the Arizona Diamondbacks went 79-83. Over the winter, they signed Zack Greinke and Tyler Clippard as free agents, plus they notably traded for Shelby Miller and Jean Segura. Reinforced with one of the game’s best pitchers, a quality starter, a good reliever, and a middle infielder with a pulse, we currently have the 2016 Diamondbacks projected to go… 79-83. And not surprisingly, Arizona’s GM doesn’t think we’re going to be right on this one.

Q: Does that make any sense to you? You add Greinke, you add Miller, and the math boys say you are not going to win any more games?

Stewart: “Jack, I think out there there are a lot of people that don’t want us to win. For those people that don’t want us to win, that’s OK. We’re still going to play the game the same way. We embrace the challenge every day of coming out and playing and doing the things that we’re capable of doing. And those who think that we’re a 78-win team, you know what? That’s what they think. When you start making predictions like that and you keep coming up wrong, you lose credibility.”

Q: Why do you think there are people who want you to lose?

Stewart: “I think the way that we do things. We’re a baseball team here. We believe in our team and how we play the game. I just think, in everything, there is always everyone who doesn’t want to see you do well. Obviously, anybody who says we can only win 78 games, they’re either not thinking or they’re not believing that what we have here is a team that’s capable of winning more games than that. So when I say that there are people out there who do not want us to win, that’s a prime example of that. To think we will only win 78 games? That’s a joke.”

Q: Do you think they are taking a shot at the old school, fundamental approach?

Stewart: “I try not to even think with people like that. I try to think with the people who think logically. And if you are thinking logically and we won 79 games last year, with the additions of Greinke, Miller, Clippard, Segura, people that make your team better, I think it is impossible for us to only win 78 games. Like I said, they predicted we would lose 96 last year.”

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