The positional power rankings return this afternoon. If you’re unfamiliar with this series, Jeff Sullivan provided an introduction to it on Monday morning. Basically, this is FanGraphs’ means to previewing the season.

Catcher and first-base positional rankings are already complete and accessible via the widget above. Here, I’ll be examining third base.

Third basemen may be underrepresented in the Hall of Fame, but right now, the position is among the game’s strongest. Last year, five of the top-14 players in WAR — all with at least 5.5 — hailed from the hot corner, and over the past two years, the count is six of the top 12 and nine of the top 25. Manny Machado has since moved back to his natural position of shortstop, but Jose Ramirez has settled in, and Adrian Beltre, the lone player here assured of a berth in Cooperstown, is still going quite strong.

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It took Ed Charles a long time to get his chance, but he persisted, and made the most of it. Born into segregation and poverty in Daytona Beach, Florida, in 1933, he was inspired by seeing Jackie Robinson in spring training with the Montreal Royals in 1946, a moment dramatized (with some artistic license) in the 2013 movie 42. Signed by the Boston Braves in 1952, Charles didn’t make the major leagues until a decade later with the Kansas City A’s. He played eight years in the bigs, the last three of them with the Mets, earning the nickname “The Glider” for his fluid, economical defense and providing a steadying veteran presence for an upstart team that won the World Series.

Before Roger Angell and Vin Scully, Charles was also hailed as “The Poet Laureate of Baseball,” having begun crafting verse while toiling in the minors. When he passed away on Thursday at the age of 84, his New York Times obituary called him “the heart and soul of the Miracle Mets of 1969.” That’s a life well lived.

One of nine children in a broken home, Charles could not afford a ticket to see the Dodgers and Royals (their top minor-league affiliate) play at Daytona’s City Island Park, but he watched through a chain-link fence in left field as baseball’s color line begin to crumble. Via Chris Lamb’s Blackout: The Untold Story of Jackie Robinson’s First Spring Training:

We watched him play that day and finally believed what we had read in the papers, that one of us was out there on the ball field. When [spring training] was over, we kids followed Jackie as he walked with his teammates down to the train station, and when the train pulled out, we ran down the tracks listening for the sounds as far as we could. And when we finally couldn’t hear it any longer, we ran some more and finally stopped and put our ears to the tracks so we could feel the vibrations of that train carrying Jackie Robinson. We wanted to be a part of him as long as we could.

In the movie, the young Charles is depicted receiving an autographed ball from Robinson at the train station, but as Bruce Markusen wrote for The Hardball Times in 2013, that particular moment never happened. Nevertheless, Charles, who dropped out of school after eighth grade and finally returned after going to live with his older sister in St. Petersburg, became the captain of the Gibbs High School baseball team and signed a professional contract in 1952. Though they weren’t as innovative or aggressive as the Dodgers, the Braves (along with the Giants) were well ahead of the curve in integrating the majors. Rickey signed such a surplus of black talent that he dealt outfielder Sam Jethroe to Boston in 1949, and the following year, “Jet” won NL Rookie of the Year, the third of six black NL players to win the award in its first seven years.

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It’s not a stretch to say that Hanley Ramirez’s four-year, $88 million contract with the Red Sox hasn’t worked out well through its first three years. He’s moved off of shortstop to unfamiliar positions at which he’s struggled, namely left field (2015) and first base (2016). He’s battled injuries — particularly problems with both shoulders — to the point of averaging just 128 games per year. And in two of his three seasons, he’s finished with a sub-zero WAR (-1.7 in 2015, -0.4 last year). With the addition of J.D. Martinez to the crowded Boston roster, he stands to lose playing time. Even so, his chipper disposition in this Boston Herald piece earlier this week was eye-catching, even if it marks the 34-year-old slugger’s entry into the “Best Shape of His Life” genre.

After hitting just .242/.320/.429 with 23 homers and a 93 wRC+ last year, Ramirez underwent surgery to debride his left shoulder (the one that required season-ending surgery in 2011) in November. He spent the winter working out with Martinez in Miami, reported to camp (allegedly) 15 pounds lighter thanks to a new diet and fitness regimen, and has been playing first base in Grapefruit League games with no reported difficulties. Via the Herald’s Mike Silverman, Ramirez has been telling reporters he’ll go 30-30 this year — 30 homers and 30 steals, a pairing he achieved in 2008 after missing by one homer the year before. It certainly seems unlikely given that he stole just one base last year and has needed the past four seasons to total exactly 30.

Nobody’s about to bet on that. The big question is how much playing time he’ll get under new manager Alex Cora, who will have his hands full. With an outfield of 23-year-old Andrew Benintendi in left, 28-year-old Jackie Bradley in center, and 25-year-old Mookie Betts in right — a defensively adept group that combined for 48 DRS and 26 UZR last year — it’s not like it makes a ton of sense to shoehorn Martinez (-8 UZR in rightfield last year, -5.8 per 150 games in the two corners career-wise) into an outfield corner instead of DH-ing him. Perhaps the lefty-swinging Benintendi’s struggles against same-side pitching (60 wRC+ in 140 career PA) provide an opening, albeit at the risk of impeding the younger player’s development and forcing Martinez to play the Green Monster. The Red Sox have discussed what amounts to a home-road platoon with Martinez-Bradley-Betts at Fenway and Benintendi-Betts-Martinez elsewhere, but that’s a lot of time riding pine for Bradley as well as Benintendi, who just a year ago was touted as a Rookie of the Year candidate.

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By most measures, the 2017 season was a very good one for the Brewers. On the heels of back-to-back sub-.500 seasons, the first of which saw them shift into rebuilding mode, they spent over two months atop the NL Central, from mid-May to late July, and remained in the Wild Card hunt until the season’s final weekend. Their 86 wins and second-place finish in the NL Central represented the franchise’s best showing since 2011. They made a big splash in late January, signing free-agent center fielder Lorenzo Cain and trading for left fielder Christian Yelich. They made some lower-cost moves as well, most notably adding a solid starter, Jhoulys Chacin, to a rotation that finished in the NL’s top five in ERA and WAR.

It’s not unreasonable to think that those improvements would put a team that missed a playoff spot by a single game in the thick of this year’s race. Yet, as of publication, the Brewers are projected to finish just 78-84. What in the name of Bernie Brewer is going on?

It bears repeating that projections are not destiny and that, at the team level, the error bars on a given year of preseason projections tend to average six to eight wins in either direction. The 2017 Brewers were one of those teams that push such averages higher, because as of Opening Day last year, they were forecast to win just 70 games. In terms of overachievement, they matched the Diamondbacks (77 projected wins, 93 actual wins) for the majors’ largest discrepancy; the Giants, projected for 88 wins but finishing with 64, had the largest discrepancy in the other direction.

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The combination of a Cy Young award, a strong postseason track record, a relatively low total of innings thrown, and a history free of major arm injuries was supposed to carry Jake Arrieta to a nine-figure free-agent deal this winter. Agent Scott Boras was said to eye Justin Verlander‘s $180 million extension and Max Scherzer’s $210 million free-agent contract as ballpark figures for and templates for Arrieta. But in a winter during which the hot stove’s pilot light went out, the 32-year-old righty didn’t come anywhere close to landing such a megadeal. Instead, he settled for a three-year, $75 million contract with the Phillies, albeit one with some bells and whistles that could make it considerably more lucrative.

Via FanRag Sports’ Jon Heyman, Arrieta will make $30 million in 2018 and $25 million in 2019, before having a chance to opt out. If he doesn’t opt out, he’ll make $20 million in 2020. If he does opt out, the team has the option to override that by triggering a two-year extension at a minimum of $20 million per year, with incentives (whose exact parameters are unknown at this writing) based on 2018-19 games started that could take those years to $25 million, and further incentives based on Cy Young finishes that could take them to $30 million. The maximum deal becomes five years and $135 million.

Nobody is going to weep for Arrieta, but based upon the guaranteed money, it does appear that Boras overplayed his hand. In early January, USA Today’s Bob Nightengale reported that the Cubs, for whom Arrieta pitched from mid-2013 through 2017, were willing to bring Arrieta back via a four-year deal “for about $110 million,” which represents a higher average annual value ($27.5 million) than he ultimately got, unless one simply assumes he’ll opt out without the Phillies overriding. A month ago, just before they closed a six-year, $126 million deal with Yu Darvish, the Cubs reportedly circled back to Arrieta with a similar offer. As he had done when the team tried to secure him via long-term extensions in 2016 and 2017, Arrieta declined.

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A rough winter and spring got rougher for the Rays this week, as the team learned that Jose De Leon has suffered a torn ulnar collateral ligament and will require Tommy John surgery. Acquired from the Dodgers in January 2017 in exchange for Logan Forsythe, the now 25-year-old righty ranked among the game’s top-40 prospects by multiple outlets heading into both the 2016 and 2017 seasons. Alas, a trio of stints on the disabled list for a variety of arm ailments limited him to just 41 innings last year, 2.2 of them in his lone major-league outing.

De Leon is the second Rays pitching prospect to require Tommy John surgery this spring, 22-year-old righty Brent Honeywell, a consensus top-15 prospect (including 15th on the FanGraphs Top 100 list), having become the first. The loss of those two righties isn’t the only reason that the Rays plan to work with a modified four-man rotation. Their teardown, which includes the departure of Alex Cobb via free agency and the trade of Jake Odorizzi to the Twins, has led the team to try something different and cost-efficient with the fifth-starter spot, an experiment that could have larger ramifications around the game.

Because De Leon and Honeywell belong to the same team and because their injuries occurred during the same spring — one in which just two other professional pitchers have had Tommy Johnsurgery thus far — it’s natural to wonder if the Rays have a problem in this area. Historically speaking, it seems, quite the opposite has been true. According to the data in the Tommy John Surgery List kept by Jon Roegele, Rays major- and minor-league pitchers have undergone fewer TJs than any other organization since the start of 2010:

Roegele classifies every pitcher in organized ball who undergoes the surgery by the last level at which he pitched prior to going under the knife (in De Leon’s case, High-A via a rehab assignment). For the purposes of this accounting, I excluded all of the hurlers classified as high school or college because of the discrepancies in surgical timing. Consider the cases of a pair of 2015 first-round picks, Brady Aiken and Walker Buehler. Aiken underwent March 2015 surgery before being (re)drafted by the Indians, while Buehler had surgery in August of that year, after being selected by the Dodgers but before throwing a professional pitch. Neither injury is attributable to their respective teams. I chose to start with 2010 because that’s where Travis Sawchik’s recent illustration of declining league-wide levels of TJ surgeries cut off as well. More on that shortly.

Including De Leon (who hasn’t actually undergone the procedure yet), the Rays’ total of 10 surgeries in that span is the majors’ lowest, less than one-third that of the MLB-leading Mets — who, to be fair, haven’t had a pitcher above A-ball suffer that fate since 2015. Even so, using the start of 2016 as a cutoff, the Mets organization’s six TJs, though all from the low minors, place them third among the 30 teams, behind the Giants’ eight and the Reds’ seven. No other team has more than three, which is where the Rays will sit once De Leon goes under the knife.

Returning to the larger data set, one finds this: of the eight other pitchers in the Rays organization who’ve undergone TJ since the start of 2010, four have never reached the majors, including 2011 first-round pick Taylor Guerrieri and supplemental first-rounder Grayson Garvin. Two others had pitched elsewhere in the majors prior to going down — namely Burch Smith (April 2015 surgery; 10 appearances for the 2013 Padres) and Shawn Tolleson (May 2017 surgery; 215 appearances for the Dodgers and Rangers from 2012-16). The other two homegrown products who became rotation staples were Matt Moore (April 2014) and Cobb (May 2015).

Even without the 2010 cutoff, the Rays’ track record in this area is rather remarkable. As I noted at SI.com at the time of Moore’s surgery, the last Rays major leaguer to undergo the procedure before him, and the only one since the beginning of 2007, was Jason Isringhausen in 2009. Izzy was 36 at the time and particularly battle-scarred, having endured at least six previous arm surgeries, including 1998 and 2008 TJs, while with the Mets and Cardinals, respectively.

The Rays’ low total of TJs is said to owe something to the fact that Dr. James Andrews is their team physician. Andrews, of course, is one of the industry’s leading orthopedic surgeons and, according to Roegele’s data, the all-time leader in TJs performed (193, or 110 more than runner-up Dr. Lewis Yocum and 159 more than the procedure’s creator, Dr. Frank Jobe). Andrews is also the co-founder of the American Sports Medicine Institute, which has worked to dispel common myths about the surgery and offer recommendations for keeping youth, amateur, and professional pitchers healthy.

Until the end of last season, the Rays also employed Josh Kalk, an analyst who in February 2009 wrote for The Hardball Times about using PITCHf/x data in a neural network to identify injuries and very soon afterwards was hired by the team, eventually rising to the rank of director of pitching research and development. The Tampa Bay Times‘ Marc Topkin described Kalk as “an expert in PITCHf/x data and injury prevention studies and modeling” at the time of his departure from the organization. (He landed with the Twins.) From Yahoo Sports’ Jeff Passan we learn that, in 2015, the Rays broke ground by installing Kinatrax, a markerless system of capturing biomechanical data, at Tropicana Field. (The Cubs followed suit in 2016, and at least one other team has done so as well.)

Back to Sawchik’s work. Two months ago, he asked via his article title, “Have we Reached Peak Tommy John?” The whole piece is worth a read, but here’s a simplified presentation of the data he cited, with position players and the aforementioned high-school and college hurlers weeded out:

At the major-league level, 18 pitchers underwent TJ last year, one fewer than in 2016. The high total in this span was 35 in 2012, and it was 30 as recently as 2014. In terms of all professional pitchers, last year’s total of 69 TJs was down 12.7% from 2016 and 36.7% from 2015. We can hope that the industry may be past that two-year spike, though it’s probably too early to tell whether it’s just randomness as opposed to better means of prevention.

Which isn’t to say that there haven’t been advances or successes that could be having an effect, thanks not only to the efforts of Kalk and (presumably) other analysts but also other routes of treatment. For example, where platelet-rich plasma injections once appeared to be a Hail Mary when it came to avoiding Tommy John surgery, recent years have seen Masahiro Tanaka (diagnosed with a UCL tear in mid-2014) and Aaron Nola (mid-2016) flourish at the MLB level without surgery. Seth Maness underwent a modified Tommy John procedure called primary repair surgery that allowed him to return to the majors inside of nine months.

Maybe the industry is turning the corner, but if history is any guide, the next few weeks will feature more stories like those of De Leon’s, as pitchers face the hard facts that they just can’t continue without repair. Just under 30% of the surgeries from the past four seasons took place in March or April, with the figure varying only between 25-30% in that span; last year, it was 19 out of 69. Within the next two months, we’ll have a better idea of the trend’s direction.

The Mariners made the Ichiro Suzuki signing official on Wednesday, returning the 44-year-old outfielder to the team for whom he starred from 2001 until mid-2012, when he was traded to the Yankees. Aside from a genuinely useful 2016 season in a part-time role — highlighted by his 3,000th major league hit — he hasn’t been a very productive player over the past five years, totaling 2.5 WAR over the span, and he may not have much to offer the Mariners beyond wisdom, leadership, warm fuzzies, and other soft factors. Still, there are worse ways to end a storied career, as Rian Watt pointed out when the news of Ichiro’s westward return first broke.

The history of such homecomings among Hall of Fame-bound players isn’t filled with many resounding successes, and in Seattle’s case, the most immediate example that comes to mind represents a worst-case scenario in this realm: an old, underperforming player outright embarrassing himself in some way, as Ken Griffey Jr. did in 2010. Junior hit just .184/.250/.204 without a homer before being released on June 2, shortly after he allegedly fell asleep in the clubhouse and missed a pinch-hitting opportunity. That’s no way to go, whether or not you’re a member of the 600 home-run club.

Via a quick skim through annals of the game, I counted 13 other stints in which a Hall of Famer wrapped up his career with a return to his original team, plus one that deserves an asterisk. That count doesn’t include players who finished with the team for whom they became stars after previously breaking in elsewhere, as was the case with Early Wynn coming back to the Indians, Dennis Eckersley to the Red Sox, or Fergie Jenkins and the Cubs. Nor does it include players who moved on again after their second stint with their original team, such as Greg Maddux with the Cubs, Tim Raines with the Expos, or Ivan Rodriguez with the Rangers. Listed chronologically, these are the most noteworthy.

Eddie Collins (A’s 1906-14, 1927-30)

During his first run with the A’s, the Columbia University-educated Collins played the keystone in Connie Mack’s “$100,000 Infield,” which led the team to four pennants and three championships. But after losing the 1914 World Series to the “Miracle” Braves, Mack broke up the team for financial reasons — one of the earliest tank jobs. Sold to the White Sox for $50,000, Collins spent 12 years on the South Side, helping the team to pennants in 1917 and 1919 (he was not part of the World Series fix), becoming the sixth player to collect his 3,000th hit in 1925, and serving as player-manager for that season and the next.

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Matt Harvey’s first appearance of the spring quickly became a punchline. Back on February 8, the New York Daily News‘ Peter Botte tweeted a photo of the 28-year-old righty throwing a bullpen alongside Jacob deGrom and looking particularly paunchy thanks to the way the wind blew his t-shirt. Even this scribe couldn’t resist throwing a jab to the midsection. To be fair, Harvey hardly looks like the second coming of Bartolo Colon, and four weeks later, with the Grapefruit League season underway, he at least appears to be a hurler who can help the Mets rather than harm them.

Granted, that sense is based upon all of two early spring outings against sub-.500 teams whose offenses project to rank among the majors’ bottom-third (namely the Braves and Tigers) when at full strength. Thus far, those offenses have been patchworks of established major leaguers and career minor leaguers, with the odd prospect thrown in — all still looking to regain their timing because, you know, it’s March (or actually February 28 in the case of the Braves outing).

Facing the Tigers on Monday at Port St. Lucie, Harvey threw 48 pitches over three scoreless innings, allowing two hits, a sharp double by Derek Norris, and an infield dribbler by Jose Iglesias. He walked Miguel Cabrera in the first inning after getting squeezed on a borderline 96 mph fastball with the count at 1-2. That was his fastest pitch of the day, but he followed it with three straight balls. He struck out one, 28-year-old right fielder Jason Krizan, who’s spent the past three years bouncing between Double- and Triple-A.

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