Hello! Welcome to a post with 15 polls in it. Ordinarily, when you click on a FanGraphs post, it’s the author who’s done all the work. In this case, the author has done some of the work, but the work is to be completed by you, as this is an audience exercise. I’ll explain.

You know about the Steamer team projections. We use them a lot. They’re a super tool, for purposes of discussing, say, the highly active White Sox, or the highly active Padres, or the highly active Dodgers, or the so far highly inactive Orioles. When analyzing any transaction, we want to have an idea of how a given team looks, and the linked page makes it really easy. We’re always trying to project; Steamer has already projected. The depth charts have already depth charted.

But! Sometimes people disagree with the projections. Sometimes certain teams might seem way off. That’s what I want to gauge, here, with what I think are pretty easily understandable polls. There’s a poll here for each American League team, and I want to know what you think of their projections. I understand this is just based on Steamer, since we don’t yet have full ZiPS, and I also understand there are moves yet to be made. Max Scherzer won’t be a free agent forever. But I want to know what you think right now, based on conditions right now. I think there might be a lot to be learned from this. Alternatively, maybe there’s nothing to be learned from this. But the most important thing is, here’s content, and nothing has happened in baseball for like a week and a half, so, participate, please. I want to know where you think we’re wrong. People are always saying we’re wrong! This should be fun.

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Let’s bring you up to speed, in case this has somehow eluded you: the Padres recently acquired Justin Upton, Matt Kemp, and Wil Myers. They also did more than that, too, but, as things stand, those guys project to be the Padres’ three starting outfielders, Kemp’s hip arthritis and all. (Matt Kemp reportedly has hip arthritis.) Because someone has to play center, it looks like Myers will play center. He’ll do so acceptably — Shin-Soo Choo played center for a team that won 90 games — but Myers looks like he’ll be a liability. The Padres are sacrificing outfield defense for outfield offense.

But that’s not the only defensive sacrifice they’re lined up to make. Now, before we proceed: who knows, right? Who knows what the Padres’ roster will look like in three months? Consider how the Padres’ roster looked just last month. A.J. Preller is a busy man. Answer the phone. It’s A.J. Preller. He’s calling you right now. You missed him. Preller still has moves to make, so we’ll just have to see how things look in the end, but given where things are now, the Padres are also going to be weaker behind the plate.

Coming into the offseason, the Padres had both Rene Rivera and Yasmani Grandal. At one point, they were briefly in possession of Ryan Hanigan. They were also a rumored landing spot for David Ross. All those guys have gone elsewhere. The Padres’ depth chart reads Derek Norris, supported by Tim Federowicz. Top prospect Austin Hedges remains in the system, but he’s not yet ready for the show, nor should he be for a while. The Padres right now would go into the season with Norris and Federowicz receiving.

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There are people who think we make too much of projections, and that’s with regard to hitting and pitching projections. That is to say, the more reliable projections. We pretty much never talk about defensive projections, and there’s enough controversy over defensive non-projections. People can’t even agree on what’s already happened, so it’s asking a lot to expect people to look at defensive forecasts and take them seriously. Also, hey, by the way, it’s not even Christmas yet, so there’s plenty of offseason left to go. We don’t yet know what team rosters are going to look like in April. Projections we have right now are of limited utility.

But, there’s nothing happening. It’s the holiday season, so now baseball’s moving slowly, and one of the things we offer here are team defensive projections, so, let’s look at those. They’re coming from Steamer, as usual, and they’re based on our current author-maintained depth charts, as usual. Following, a big table, which I will try my very hardest to make sortable.

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Last Friday, for Fox, I wrote something of a primer article on South Korean shortstop Jung-Ho Kang. I tried to make sure the timing coincided with an announcement, but instead, it just coincided with the closing of the posting window. We had to wait all weekend to find out which team put in the high bid, and now, Monday, we’ve got our answer: the Pirates won the bidding process for Kang, submitting a figure just north of $5 million. Now those same Pirates have an exclusive negotiating window, following the same process that Japan recently did away with. Reports say Kang is looking for about $5 million a year over four years.

The Pirates haven’t said much of anything about this, aside from an acknowledgment of the fact that they’ll be negotiating now. And because of the way this works, there is some possibility that the Pirates simply put in the high bid to block a rival. That’s not very likely. A bid intended to block someone probably would’ve been higher than $5 million, because that’s not actually very much money. The odds of this being a block aren’t 0%, but if we assume that the Pirates are serious about getting Kang locked up, then we’re free to think about the various possibilities. How would Kang fit in in Pittsburgh?

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It was an exciting thing that Phil Hughes pulled off — just last season, he finished with the best-ever ratio of strikeouts to walks. It sounds good. It is good. Strikeouts are good! Walks are bad. (For pitchers.) You want to have a lot of the former and few of the latter. There’s no taking away Hughes’ accomplishment, now that the season’s complete. But then, we have come to understand that strikeouts minus walks is more meaningful than strikeouts over walks. Ratios can go crazy with little denominators. By K-BB%, Hughes didn’t set any records. He did, though, finish in between Madison Bumgarner and Jon Lester. And he established a career-best for himself.

The story, really, isn’t that Hughes became one of the best pitchers ever. It’s just that he became a much better pitcher, which is plenty. Down the stretch, it came to public attention that Hughes finished one out shy of triggering a contract bonus. There was thought that the Twins should pay Hughes the bonus anyway, since he did enough to earn it. Turns out Hughes declined an opportunity to pitch out of the bullpen to make his extra money. And now it doesn’t even matter, because the Twins have given Hughes an extension. He’s getting an extra three years and $42 million, including an extra $1.2 million in each of the next two years. In a sense, the Twins just signed Hughes to a five-year, $58-million contract.

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A move that wasn’t a Padres move happened Friday.

Yankees send to Marlins:

• Martin Prado
• David Phelps
• $6 million

Marlins send to Yankees:

• Nathan Eovaldi
• Garrett Jones
• Domingo German

German is a prospect. Eovaldi has three more years of team control, while Jones has one. Prado has two more years of team control, and Phelps has four, although he’s a Super-Two asset. The way it’s being phrased, the Yankees are chipping in $3 million in each of the next two years to partially pay down Prado’s salary. But if you’d like, you can mentally cancel out the $6 million and German. Now, German is actually an intriguing, live-armed prospect, so his value is probably a little north of $6 million, but they’re close enough to being even. This is mostly about the major-league players, and the one who grabs your attention is Eovaldi. That’s the guy with the big, big upside.

From their end, you can see what the Marlins are doing. They didn’t need Eovaldi, and Phelps is useful enough, and Prado can play all over the place. But from the other side, the Yankees might well be ecstatic. Theirs was a roster in need of help in the rotation. It’s not often you can land an arm like Eovaldi’s without paying through the nose. It was this very player who, a few years ago, got traded for Hanley Ramirez. Eovaldi’s not even 25 years old, and he can run it up to the triple digits.

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What if I told you there’s a shortstop in his 20s, available for presumably less than Ervin Santana money, coming off a year in which he hit 40 dingers with a four-digit OPS? It’s true — all of those things are true. The shortstop’s name is Jung-Ho Kang, and he really did have such a season. It just didn’t take place where you were looking.

It did take place where several different major-league organizations were looking. Maybe you can try to think of Kang as the Troy Tulowitzki of Korea, and while that’s a stretch, it’s pretty damn promising, at least until the “of Korea” part. There’s no debating Kang’s record; the 27-year-old just batted .356 while slugging .739 for Nexen in the KBO. He owns a career OPS of .886. In 2012, he finished second in the league in OPS. In 2013, he finished ninth. In 2014, he finished first, by dozens of points. The real concern is simple: Kang is trying to become the first KBO position player to reach the major leagues. So such a transition would be unprecedented.

It’s true, we have Hyun-Jin Ryu, but then Ryu was (and is) a starting pitcher. As far as Korean hitters are concerned, Shin-Soo Choo and Hee Seop Choi have each had success, but then they were raised within big-league organizations, so they didn’t come over from the KBO as vets. That’s why so many people wonder about Kang’s potential. This is why he could be a bargain, and this is why he could be a bust.

Read the rest on Just A Bit Outside.

I think it’s safe to say we lean pretty heavily on projections here. Now, it’s important to understand we’re all always kind of making projections. The Padres acquired Wil Myers on the basis of a positive internal player projection. When we think about our favorite teams adding, say, Dee Gordon or Nelson Cruz, we’re considering what we expect them to do in the season or seasons ahead. Our enthusiasm for the coming year is based in part on a mental projection of the quality of our team. We all project, and the only real difference is that, around here, we lean on the projections by Steamer and ZiPS, instead of doing things in our heads. FanGraphs makes things really easy. What do the projections think about next year? There’s a tab you can click on. It’s a starting point.

But while projections are handy, it’s only natural to wonder: do they matter? How important are they, actually, with regard to predicting the short-term future? Tons of people have tested individual player projections, but here we also include team projections, based on manually-updated depth charts, and if there’s error in each given player projection, how much error might we see with team projections as a whole? It’s a perfectly reasonable question. It can’t even be answered conclusively, yet. There’s not enough data in the FanGraphs post archive. But I can give you at least a little bit.

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The main good thing about reaching the World Series is that it means you won your league. When you win your league, people like you a lot, and it’s a good feeling. Builds community. Another, bigger-picture good thing about reaching the World Series is that it brings in revenue, especially if you haven’t been real good for a while. New streams of money begin to flow, and preexisting streams of money flood their banks, as more people express interest in the product and other people express more interest in the product. Basically, if you get to the World Series, it’s a good thing for more than just the day or week of.

When the Royals came out of nowhere to come within a few runs of the championship, it stood to reason they’d reap an enormous benefit. An area love affair was re-kindled, as Kauffman Stadium became one of the loudest and most popular environments in the game. Estimates varied, but there was no question the World Series appearance would mean, for the team, some additional tens of millions of dollars. How much could that money mean, if re-invested in the roster? What would Dayton Moore be able to pull off, given greater financial flexibility?

The Royals re-signed Luke Hochevar for a couple of years, which seems like a good deal even given Hochevar’s operation. But lately the Royals have spent bigger money. They committed $17 million to Kendrys Morales. They committed $11 million to Alex Rios. And, most recently, they committed $20 million to Edinson Volquez. This is what the World Series has meant, in a way. It’s rather underwhelming.

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