The 2017-2018 offseason was not one of the more exciting winters in memory, to put it mildly. A large part of that, no doubt, was the result of a relatively undistinguished free-agent class and the absence of some larger clubs from the market, teams saving their ammunition for the likely more exciting 2018-2019 period. Add into that the hard-to-gauge effects of more unanimity among front offices in how to evaluate veteran players and the whispered rumors of the collusion poltergeist, and it was a formula for not a lot happening. And not a lot happened.

For about three weeks around the holidays, the only news in town was the rumbling surrounding Eric Hosmer’s new home. Now, in most offseasons, Eric Hosmer wouldn’t be one of the marquee free agents, having been a rather up-and-down first baseman with some high points, but also some low ones, enough so that he entered the 2018 campaign having never strung together consecutive years of one or more wins. The 2017 season was one of the highlights, however, with Hosmer avoiding those half-long slumps that doomed 2014 and 2016 to sub-mediocrity. It was a legitimately excellent season, Hosmer hitting .318/.385/.498, to the tune of a 135 wRC+, and reaching that four-win mark that serves as an informal threshold for an All-Star season.

In the end, the Royals attempted to retain Hosmer, though the truth of whether he was actually offered $147 million, as the rumors went, will probably be lost in history unless Scott Boras writes a tell-all book after his retirement. San Diego, a team in the middle of their own rebuild, signed Hosmer to an eight-year, $144 million contract, with an opt-out clause exercisable by Hosmer, allowing him to forgo the last three years and $39 million for free agency. To get an estimate, here are the full ZiPS projections for the Hosmer contract at the time.

One thing to note is that there is a bit of a discrepancy between the zWAR (ZiPS WAR) and FanGraphs WAR figures, as we haven’t always used the exact same park and league factors for future seasons and have utilized a slightly different methodology. For next year’s ZiPS, I hope to report both zWAR and fWAR to reduce this occasional confusion. But for right now, I’m still figuring out how to not break FanGraphs.

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Great teams may dream of winning 116 games in a season, but for losers, whether of the lovable or non-lovable stripe, 120 is the number at which they gaze, gimlet-eyed. The 1962 Mets, with their inaugural band of cast-offs, left behind a legacy of being great at being not-so-great, losing 120 games and planting their flag in the Mt. Everest of Terrible.

Yes, 120 losses isn’t actually the MLB record, that feat being accomplished by the 1899 Cleveland Spiders, who lost 134 of their 154 depressing games. But it took a bit of chicanery to reach that sum. Frank and Stanley Robison owned both the Cleveland Spiders and St. Louis Perfectos and transferred most of the good 1898 Spiders over to St. Louis in an attempt to build one superteam and one comedy legend. Cleveland was doomed by design, though the Perfectos failed to be a superteam.

Incidentally, the Brooklyn Superbas pulled this off more successfully, looting the Baltimore Orioles to put together a 101-win roster (though I’d have penalized them a few wins for the confusing team name, which was swiped from an acrobatic act of the time and awkwardly made into a plural noun).

The 1962 Mets earned their infamy on the square and now serve as the gold standard for seasonal ineptitude. But as we head towards the trade deadline, we have two teams trying to make it interesting, the 25-66 Baltimore Orioles and the 25-65 Kansas City Royals.

Both teams stand slightly behind the Mets’ fierce pace, with winning percentages that round to 45-117, tantalizingly close to bleak greatness, but not quite there. Like when a batter tries to hit .400 over the course of the season, you want to have a cushion over the mark, since the natural course of regression will stamp down on the extremes.

But there’s at least a chance, which is really all that matters. What fun is a record if it’s likely to be surmounted? And it gives an additional layer of excitement to losing seasons when you need a break from wondering in what wacky way the Baltimore Orioles will mess up a Manny Machado trade or being astounded that the Royals actually advertise that it took them years to spare the roster from even a single game of Alcides Escobar’s services.

Powering up the ZiPS SuperComputer (it’s really just a regular computer), I cranked up the old simulations to get the latest probabilities that either the Royals or Orioles pull off the 120-loss feat.

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Journalism is necessarily a job in which many need to act as mercenaries, but as mercenaries go, I make a rather poor one. Going back to 2001, there are only two places for which I’ve primarily written: ESPN.com and Baseball Think Factory née Baseball Primer. I joined both of these places not just because they were interested in my work or, in the case of the former, also wanted to give me money, but because I believed in their mission statement.

Starting today, I’ve taken a new role in another project I believe in, joining the FanGraphs team as a full-time, senior writer.

I’ve always been a fan of FanGraphs and, even more importantly, the group of people that David Appelman has assembled over the last decade. (Even Carson, at least until I find the rest of his horcruxes.) I haven’t had the opportunity yet to meet everyone involved — baseball analytics is a much larger world than when I first became involved 20 years ago — but I consider many of the FanGraphs writers personal friends and all of them valued colleagues.

What cemented FanGraphs for me in my mind as a great place to work was at Sabermetrics Day for the Staten Island Yankees in 2016. For those who weren’t around or just don’t remember, the Staten Island Yankees had a special theme day in June of that year, inviting Carson, Dave Cameron, Jonah Keri, Ben Lindbergh, Meg Rowley, Emma Span, and myself for a panel and a barbecue. Apples brought the whole crew along, so while I was familiar with FanGraphs writers, many of whom I had known for a very long time (20 years in the case of D-Cam), I had never seen FanGraphs work together as a unit.

One thing I noticed was how much this group of writers enjoyed working with each other, respected each other, and even if they don’t all come to the party with the same point-of-view, have this incredibly collaborative vibe. My traveling companion, who is not at all into baseball and has never quite figured out what it is I do — a full story for another time, but she was once under the mistaken impression that I was part of a composite of characters that Jonah Hill played in Moneyball — came into that weekend feeling a bit of an outsider. Despite this, the FanGraphs crew made a real effort to make her feel included in the festivities, completely unasked, something which has always touched me.

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