It seems to me there are two ways of thinking about things. Baseball, as you know, is the one major sport where the playing dimensions between venues can be wildly different. Given that, I think you can either prefer neutrality and standardization, or you can choose to embrace the differences. There are limits to the latter — I don’t think anyone wants to see a stadium that makes a mockery of the contest, because you don’t have reasonable competition. But we haven’t gotten to the mockery point. So, personally, I like the quirks, even if they seem occasionally unfair.

Focus on that unfairness for a moment. If something were simply too unfair, it wouldn’t work. Fans wouldn’t support it. You couldn’t play a real baseball game with fences right behind the infield because the product wouldn’t be recognizable. I think there are certain features, currently, that approach the threshold without crossing it. Like, left field in Minute Maid Park approaches the line, because it yields a number of pretty weak home runs. It’s true, but without being out of control. On the opposite side of things, there’s straightaway center field in Minute Maid Park. If you want to conquer that, as a hitter, you have to hit the most difficult homer in baseball.

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Let’s define an ace. Together, I mean, while acknowledging it can’t really be done. Not conclusively, because of the reason leading to this post in the first place — there is no definition, and there never has been. No one has ever been in the presence of a stone tablet inscribed with a divine description of what makes an ace starting pitcher, so there’s plenty of leeway, making this one of the great baseball arguments. No one denies that there are obvious ace starting pitchers, just as no one denies that there are obvious Hall-of-Famers. The difference is where you draw the cut-off. There’s only one definition of, I don’t know, “bookshelf”. There are countless definitions of “ace”. For everyone who thinks about it, it’s a feel thing.

Neatly, though, feel things can be quantified. And that’s the goal of this post, which contains 20 very simple polls. Below, you’ll find the names of 20 starting pitchers, and then for each there’s the yes-or-no question: Is this pitcher an ace? And I want for you to reply based on however you feel. Maybe you have an immediate feeling, or maybe you want to think a little bit, in which case you’ll notice I’ve linked to the player pages. Think however much or little you want, then choose an answer and move on. You might be able to do all of them in less than a minute.

The pitchers were chosen semi-randomly, so not every good pitcher is included. Some names are surely going to get a lot more yes votes than others, and I’m interested in seeing where the support dips below 50%, assuming that it ever does. That’s my own arbitrary cutoff, but I’m keeping things simple — to me, if the majority of this community thinks a guy’s an ace, then he counts as an ace, even if he’s got one vote over half. When the results are in, then we can review them to see what makes a guy an ace, in the eyes of the community, and then why other pitchers fall short. The results won’t be inarguable, because all of this is subjective, but we can at least try to apply some logic to a nebulous idea.

It’s time to crowdsource the definition of an ace. In the end, we’ll have a definition plenty of people still disagree with. So it’s like trying to solve an unsolvable problem, but this should still be an illuminating exercise. Have fun! Or don’t. You’re your own boss.

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I don’t know if you paid much attention to Rick Porcello last year, but I bet you have made a bad pancake. You know, one of those pancakes when you wait too long before you flip it. Or maybe you tried to make a pancake without preheating the cooking surface. The parallels work as well as any parallels do — you mess things up from the start, despite the best of intentions, but then you are still able to flip the pancake, and you don’t repeat the mistake the second time. So the second half of the cooking process beats the hell out of the first, and in the end, even a messed-up pancake is still a decent enough pancake. And you feel like the next pancake is going to be a lot better.

Porcello got things turned around after it was too late for the Red Sox to get things turned around. So the progress happened quietly, as matters involving the Red Sox go, but if you want an explanation you can just browse to the top of Porcello’s FanGraphs player page. As I write this, there’s a quote from a few days ago, where Porcello talks about how he went back to going sinker-first. The four-seamers up were a neat idea, but the experiment failed, and Porcello found himself when he went back to pitching like himself. It all makes sense, and it bodes well enough for 2016.

So looking ahead, for Porcello, there’s going to be a lot of attention on his sinker. It’s a nice pitch, but I prefer to think about something else that’s gone on in plain sight. When you think Rick Porcello, you don’t usually think curveball. But over the course of last season, he did something suspicious.

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So I’m sitting here, passing a Wednesday afternoon by scrolling through players Steamer thinks are going to be worse. Most of the time, I get it. Yoenis Cespedes, sure — last year, he had almost everything go right. With Francisco Lindor, I understand bat-related skepticism. I see why a projection system thinks Joe Panik will take a step back, and the same goes for Justin Turner and Nelson Cruz. Honestly, I get it with David Peralta, too. I see why Steamer thinks what it thinks. All the reasons are right there on the player page. I just think in Peralta’s case in particular, there are positive traits that should lift the expectations. Allow me to make the argument.

We haven’t written that often about Peralta, although it was just a few months ago Dave suggested he might be baseball’s most underrated player. That would be fitting, since one of baseball’s other most underrated players is outfield-mate A.J. Pollock. There’s no defining or studying underratedness, so I don’t know quite where Peralta should rank, but he’s inarguably on the list. Dave pointed to some of the numbers he’d put up. I want to point to some other numbers, some numbers I think are especially encouraging.

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There’s something that should probably be acknowledged from the beginning. The Mariners have signed Dae-ho Lee to a minor-league contract. Mostly, we ignore players signed to minor-league contracts, at least before the start of spring training. The thing about Lee is that he might be a good hitter. We’ve paid very little offseason attention to, say, Chris Carter and Pedro Alvarez, who are proven above-average hitters. There’s a bias here, because Lee feels more interesting, on account of the fact that we don’t know quite what he is. Lee, in other words, is sort of a prospect, even though he’s 33 years old, and while the majority of prospects establish low ceilings, it’s fun to wonder before the establishing begins.

I don’t know if Lee is a better player than Alvarez, who is in his 20s, and who has 6 career WAR. I do know that it’s more fun to think about and write about Lee, compared to Alvarez. Maybe that’s not fair to Pedro Alvarez, but, you know what, Lee is in the news today, and this is his post, and it seems like he can do some neat things. I can’t worry all the time about fairness.

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I’m not sure if baseball is that much of a copycat league, but even if it is, the Royals make things a little tricky, because they’re the defending champs, but they didn’t exactly have just one identity. Think about the various team strengths. Some people think of the Royals as being the team with the defense that catches everything. Some people think of the Royals as being the team with the bullpen that doesn’t ever budge. And some people think of the Royals as being the team with the lineup that puts everything in play. Really, they’re all true — the Royals have played good defense, and they’ve relieved well, and they’ve kept opposing defenses on their toes. If you’re looking to copy the Royals, you have some decisions to make.

What I want to talk about here is contact, and therefore not striking out. We’ve seen teams load up on relievers, and it’s interesting. We’ve seen some other teams focus on improving the defense, although in fairness that’s been going on for a while. Contact is interesting because strikeouts have been going up, and the game just isn’t rewarding discipline like it used to. Hitters are more incentivized now to be aggressive, and though the Royals didn’t prove that, they’ve helped to drive the point home. I think, more than we’ve seen in a while, teams are searching for contact. They want to counter this undeniable trend.

It’s February now, the month in which spring training begins. Certain free agents remain available, but pretty much all the impact moves have been made. Rosters are nearly complete. Because of that, we can look at the projected strikeout landscape. Some numbers are more difficult to project, because they bounce around. I’m referring to stats like batting average. Strikeouts, though, are a good deal more stable. So which teams, right now, look like they’ll make the most and least contact?

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Billy Burns was going to be one of those interesting test cases. His numbers in the minor leagues were strong — he drew walks about 12% of the time, and he infrequently struck out. He could motor, too, adding to his value both at the plate and in the middle of the outfield. Yet he had just two professional homers to his name, over 1,800 opportunities, and we’ve seen these failures before. So the question was, could Burns get pitchers out of the zone often enough to keep his OBP respectable, or would he wilt upon being challenged?

I don’t know what you expected from Burns, but I can tell you something I didn’t expect: here was this passive, speedy minor-league outfielder, and then as a rookie he posted baseball’s fifth-highest swing rate. For the sake of comparison, the name right ahead of him was Pablo Sandoval. And Burns wasn’t just aggressive in general — he wound up with baseball’s second-highest rate of swings at first pitches. Burns cast his history aside and turned himself into a swinger, and that’s not something that happens by accident. And no one, I don’t think, would have a problem with the results.

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There’s a lot to talk about with any five-player trade. And with the trade that sent Jean Segura from the Brewers to the Diamondbacks, there are plenty of noteworthy angles. There’s the matter of Segura’s offensive upside vs. Segura’s offensive reality. There’s the matter of the Diamondbacks clutching onto their highest remaining draft pick, and there’s the matter of the successful if partial Aaron Hill salary dump, and there’s the matter of Isan Diaz being an awful interesting prospect. There’s something else the Brewers received, though, and while Chase Anderson doesn’t have Diaz’s breakout potential, you can think of him as the quieter upside play. Anderson is going into the rotation, and he could remain there for years.

Anderson’s whole presence to this point has been quiet. He’s been an unremarkable pitcher on an unremarkable team, and though he’s made just 48 big-league starts, he’s already 28 years old. He doesn’t have a top-prospect background, nor does he have a top prospect’s velocity — Anderson’s specialty has been an outstanding changeup. The numbers last year backslid, and Anderson wound up on the outside of the picture, looking in. Yet the Brewers still saw something they liked.

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I’ll tell you what this was supposed to be about. Over the weekend, Howie Kendrick was in the news, since he re-signed with the Dodgers. I was going to take the opportunity to write about how Kendrick just about never hits a pop-up. It’s one of those things that helps explain why he’s been able to run high batting averages, and even though I know I wrote about this very thing like a year ago for Fox Sports, Kendrick didn’t hit a single pop-up in the most recent season. Nor did he hit a single pop-up in the previous season. So, by our numbers, Kendrick has gone more than two regular seasons without a pop-up, which is insane and well worth re-visiting. Who doesn’t like to read about the weirdos?

But, you know, ideas evolve, especially when you give them a few days to simmer. Kendrick, pretty clearly, is exceptional in this regard. However, he’s not unique. You might be thinking right now about Joey Votto, and Votto is also pop-up averse, but this past year there were just two regular players who successfully avoided pop-ups: Kendrick and Christian Yelich. This is fitting, because over the past five years, if you set a 1,000 plate-appearance minimum, Yelich and Kendrick own the lowest pop-up rates in baseball. They both feature phenomenal bat-to-ball skills, reflected by these numbers, and they’re valuable because of the extra singles they can scratch out.

So, Kendrick doesn’t hit pop-ups. Yelich doesn’t hit pop-ups. By at least one source, neither hit a pop-up in 2015. Might it be possible to crown either the 2015 pop-up champion?

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I don’t much care for the move the Rockies made Thursday. I like Jake McGee just fine — he’s an excellent late-inning reliever — and maybe I could understand the trade under different circumstances. But the Rockies don’t actually project to be good, so it seems strange for them to add a reliever at the cost of an affordable, long-term outfielder. Not only that, but of the two prospects exchanged, I like Kevin Padlo more than German Marquez, and Padlo is joining Corey Dickerson in going from Colorado to Tampa Bay.

The trade won’t be the end of the world, and the Rockies could just decide to flip McGee in a matter of months, but for now, it’s an odd decision. This is a move you might expect from a competitive team with a thin bullpen, not a mediocre team with a thin bullpen.

So the Rays add value to the roster and to the farm, and the Rockies add late-inning impact. That’s essentially the summary, with one interesting offshoot being that this seems to set the Rays up for another outfielder trade. There’s another interesting offshoot, though, and it has to do with the Rockies, and with where they play. Sometimes it can be an easy thing to forget about, but the Rockies play baseball literally a mile above sea level, and that makes the team something of an ongoing experiment. It’s always fun to have an opportunity to investigate a new Coors Field question, and the McGee acquisition opens the door.

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