I’m writing this about 24 hours after Shohei Ohtani pitched in his first ever major-league game. Certain things, I probably don’t even need to tell you. Maybe you made a point of watching the game live. Maybe you made a point of watching some of the highlights. Maybe you made a point of reading about Ohtani in other places today. Whatever the case, I imagine many of you know what happened. Ohtani lasted six innings, and the Angels beat the A’s. The outing was good, without being spotless.

Ohtani’s game has been written about dozens of times. Every one of his starts is going to be written about dozens of times. We can’t really worry about that, though. FanGraphs needs its own Ohtani coverage. Which is why I’m here to talk about his pitching debut. We can’t yet say much of anything about Ohtani’s bat. We don’t have the information. And, truth be told, we can’t yet say much of anything about Ohtani’s arm. In time, his numbers will reflect his ability. For now, we can only observe and extrapolate. And looking over Ohtani’s six frames, there was a whole lot of good, and some things that were less good. The Angels, I assume, are generally pleased.

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For a very long time, Greg Holland was available as a free-agent closer. For a very long time, the Cardinals appeared to be in some need of a closer. Oh, at certain points, they expressed faith in Luke Gregerson. At certain other points, they expressed faith in Dominic Leone. But Holland was always going to find some sort of job, and the Cardinals have had the best opening. And so it’s unsurprising that we’ve wound up here: Holland and the Cardinals have agreed to a one-year contract worth $14 million. Holland only has to pass his physical, and then he’ll get back to being a ninth-inning weapon.

The Cardinals have never needed Greg Holland. This isn’t something being done out of necessity. I believe the Cardinals really would’ve been comfortable going into the year with the relievers they’ve had. Yet Holland and Scott Boras also apparently backed off their multi-year wishes. The Cardinals have a new reliever now at a cost lower than that of the qualifying offer. While this means the Cardinals might now have less midseason trade flexibility, this is like making a midseason trade ahead of time. And the Cardinals are right in position to make the most use of this upgrade.

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For fans of all 30 28 26 teams, Thursday, at last, is opening day. As I write this, regular-season baseball is already underway. Literally the first real pitch of the entire season was hit for a home run. It was also a 96 mile-per-hour fastball from a pitcher few people across the country have heard of. I don’t know if you could come up with a more pithy representation of baseball in the modern era. Everything is about power, strikeouts, walks, and apparently batters getting hit by a pitch. This is how it’s been, and this is how it will be.

There’s nothing that quite compares to the feeling of opening day. I know I’m not alone when I say that, every single year, on this particular morning, I wake up with a start. Most mornings begin with a snooze or three or four, but on the morning of opening day, I arise with this internal electricity. It’s not that the games on opening day are that important. It’s that just having games is important. We’ve all spent five or six months feeling like our preferred routine was disrupted, and now we can all get back to normal. We can watch and think happily about baseball.

The start of the year is welcome for just about everyone. That much should be self-evident — as fans, we just want to watch our teams compete, and especially early on, optimism can dig its hooks in without letting go. So the question in the headline might come off as ridiculous. Who among us isn’t excited for baseball, now that it’s finally back? But this is a polling project I’ve run before, two years ago. I wish I would’ve done it in 2017. The average fan of every team is happier now than they were a few months ago. But, who’s most excited? Who’s least excited, relatively speaking? As you should all understand by now, I love collecting data covering the whole MLB landscape, and this is just another opportunity.

There’s no reason for you to think too hard. The polls ought to be very easy to answer, because the answer is already there in your gut. Let’s say you’re a fan of the Yankees. How excited are you about 2018? Let’s say, instead, you’re a fan of the Marlins. How excited are you about 2018? Are White Sox fans more or less excited than Phillies fans? Than Padres fans? Than Rangers fans? Provided you all vote honestly, in sufficient numbers, we can get answers. We can get them very easily! And your responses should be revealing.

The best polling projects, I think, are the ones with no right or wrong answer. In the poll for your favorite team below, select whichever response you feel most strongly about. And then early next week, we can have fun with the numbers, comparing contenders to contenders, and basements to basements. And contenders to basements, and so on and so forth. Baseball is back, and it’s going to be here every day. Every day at the major-league level, and every day at the minor-league level. Look, there’s something stirring within each one of us. Please respond below, if you have a moment, and thank you all in advance for your participation. I’ll never stop publishing polling projects. (I’ll never stop publishing polling projects.)

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The Marlins are probably the worst team right now in the majors. Independent of schedule, they project for the worst record. Taking the schedule into consideration, they still project for the worst record. Taking community input into consideration, also, they still project for the worst record. Of course, this isn’t surprising. This is kind of the plan. The Marlins are bad now on purpose, because they didn’t see the sense in trying to push for a competitive window. And, you know, there’s a chance the Marlins overachieve. Maybe they finish with a better record than the White Sox. Maybe they win more games than the Tigers. But, the season will be rough. It’ll be a season of development and ugly results.

Tuesday, the Marlins played a game against the University of Miami. These kinds of games happen from time to time every spring, as practice for the pros, and as fun opportunities for the amateurs. What kind of 20-year-old wouldn’t get up for the chance to play some major-leaguers on the field? For the Marlins, obviously, there was nothing to play for. I guess a little bit of pride. But the Marlins were just saying goodbye to another long spring training. The exhibition ended after the top of the seventh.

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After several posts and roughly 100,000 words, we’ve come to the end of the 2018 Positional Power Rankings. It’s our own FanGraphs version of a season preview, and in case you’ve missed anything — or in case you’ve missed everything! — you can navigate through the series using that little handy widget up above. We’ve got write-ups about every single team at every single position, informed by our own depth-charts projections. The projections don’t consider, say, character, or morale, but they do consider what players have done on the field. What players have done on the field is a great indicator of what players are likely to do on the field.

If you read all the way through the series, you might not need this post. You would already have an inkling of which teams have value, and where. All this is is a summary of what we’ve already published. Here, you can look at everything in one place, to maybe get the fullest understanding of how all the teams are presently built. If you’re game, let’s all examine some big giant tables.

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Spring training is far too long. I think just about everyone agrees on that. But spring training is also wonderful, and it’s wonderful for two reasons. One, there’s baseball to watch. Baseball free of stakes and emotion, sure, but baseball, precious live baseball. And two, new baseball means new baseball statistics. They’re statistics we hardly make anything of, and they’re statistics that can be hard to track down in the first place, but numbers are numbers, and after an offseason spent reflecting on the same data over and over, it’s good to have new figures to consider. New numbers help fill the void in between new games.

You know that, on the individual level, spring-training stats are nearly worthless. The signal is drowned out by the noise, for so very many reasons. And even on the team level, you don’t want to take anything too seriously. Yes, four of the five best spring-training records in the American League belong to the Red Sox, Astros, Indians, and Yankees. But over in the National League, the Marlins have a better record than the Nationals. The Padres have a better record than the Cubs. Why should we care about team-level results? Even the teams barely care about team-level results.

And yet, there are league-level results. League-level results, covering hundreds of games and tens of thousands of plate appearances. Only there, when you put everything together, can you find numbers that might have real meaning. To get to the point more quickly, I’m just updating something I wrote about three weeks ago. Spring training is just about complete, with opening day right around the corner, and the league-level numbers are striking, in two areas in particular.

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I think I say the same thing every year, but, I suppose, tradition is tradition. I run a lot of polling projects, crowdsourcing the FanGraphs audience, but out of all the polling projects, I enjoy this one the most. I don’t enjoy the first post; I enjoy analyzing the results. This is the results-analysis post. So often, our site supplies projections, and that’s that. If you see a projection you don’t like, you might say something in the comments or post something on Twitter, but that’s the end of it. Here, you get to have a collective voice. Not that we’re going to adjust our team projections based on this, mind you, but this is a chance to see community feedback.

Here is where you can see our best projected standings, taking schedule into account. As always, those are based on ZiPS projections, Steamer projections, and manually-maintained team depth charts. Those standings have been available now for a little while, but that doesn’t mean you have to think they’re correct. So last week, I ran a post with 30 polls, asking for your input. Is a given projection too optimistic? Is a given projection too pessimistic? I’ve got everything you said in a spreadsheet. This community is more fond of the Brewers, and it’s not so fond of the Blue Jays. That probably doesn’t surprise you. After all, you, the reader, are a part of the voting community.

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I remember, when I’ve written some positional power rankings before, I got to write about shortstops. And when I wrote about shortstops, Troy Tulowitzki ranked way above everyone else. It was always laughable at the time how much better he was than his peer group. It’s no longer so laughable because now this paragraph just serves as a reminder that we all get older and time is a monster to even the innocent. Tulowitzki is never healthy these days and we’ve entered a whole new age of young and talented super-shortstops. But anyway, I’m drifting from the point. When I wrote about prime Tulowitzki, I got a kick out of how much better he was than the next-best guy. Now I’ve gotten the chance to write about center fielders. This is the hardest I’ve laughed in days.

When this post went up a year ago, the Angels were first at 8.3 projected WAR, and the Rays were second at 4.7. And now, the gap has only grown. The gap between the Angels and the Rays is, by itself, bigger than almost every single team’s center-field WAR projection. You aren’t here because you needed to be reminded that Mike Trout is good. I’m not here because I need to remind you that Mike Trout is good. But just in case anyone was slipping — just in case you hadn’t thought about it enough recently — Mike Trout is good. Mike Trout is so good that, if you took Mike Trout, and then you removed from him enough talent to make the next-best center fielder, you’d still have enough left over to have an All-Star center fielder. Provided you took only talent, and not arms or legs or eyes. Even Trout’s career couldn’t survive the loss of one of those. (Probably.)

Below, summaries of every team’s center-field situation. Here’s the introduction to this series, in case you’re behind. If you are behind, boy, do you ever have a lot of reading to do. Cancel your plans for the weekend.