The most recent World Series, of course, was won by the Astros, and the previous World Series, of course, was won by the Cubs. Those teams have had the most successful examples of recent rebuilds, and although things don’t always go that well, the ideal rebuild goes through three phases. First, you tear down, exchanging shorter-term players for longer-term players. Then, you develop, with more talent accumulation along the way. Finally, there’s the push, the re-investment in trying to win. That’s when the rebuild is basically over. That’s when a team has climbed back in the race.

I don’t know what marked the Astros’ transition to phase three. Perhaps it was trading for Evan Gattis. Perhaps it was trading for Scott Kazmir, or for Carlos Gomez. On the Cubs’ side, there was the signing of Jon Lester, and there was the acquisition of Dexter Fowler. When the Astros and Cubs decided they were ready to win, the change was unmistakable. And now, hoping to follow in their footsteps, we have the Brewers. The Brewers have entered phase three.

To their credit, the Brewers didn’t let the process bottom out. After finishing above .500 in 2014, they spent just two years out of the hunt. Last season, they were an overachieving surprise. And now they’ve pulled off a major one-two punch. Thursday afternoon, they traded for Christian Yelich. Only a short time later, they signed Lorenzo Cain. Yelich cost four prospects. Cain got five years. But there’s no missing the message: The Brewers are ready.

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Here’s a table! It includes every team in baseball, and it shows how many regular-season games each team has won over the past five years. The Dodgers have been very good. The Phillies have not. Come to FanGraphs.com for all of your groundbreaking baseball analysis.

Lately I’ve been thinking about a few different questions. The main thrust of one: Which team is best positioned to be good for a while? The main thrust of the other: Which team seems to be the most screwed? We all, I think, have our suspicions, and the first one has maybe been talked to death. I’m not sure. Situations are always changing. But I couldn’t quite think of the right way to approach the subjects. I’ve also known I’ve wanted to gauge community opinions. And so we come to this, which is just another FanGraphs community polling project. I think I’ve settled on an appropriate question.

Above, for every team, you see five-year win totals, through 2017. Below, there are 30 polls — one for each team — and I’m looking for your rough combined win projections for 2018 through 2022. It’s relatively easy to project one season ahead, but for these purposes, I don’t think that accomplishes enough. It asks a different question. By focusing on five years, instead of one, I’m not just asking about the strength of the current roster. It forces you to consider the front office, and the farm system, and the player development, and the overall resources. In theory, we could go beyond five years, but then it’s all effectively unknowable. I mean, even the fifth year is probably unknowable, but just give it your best shot, based on what you understand about your team. As always, I’ll do a follow-up analysis post, so that we can evaluate the whole spread of the landscape.

I recognize that these polling projects are usually easier. This one requires some basic math. For reference, an average of 81 wins over the next five years would yield a combined total of 405. An average of 90 wins over the next five years would yield a combined total of 450. An average of 75 wins over the next five years would yield a combined total of 375. Those might give you some useful targets. You can also refer to the table at the start. It’s not fun to have to do math just in order to respond to an internet poll, but I think the results of this could be really interesting. It’s a question we’re frequently thinking about, yet I’ve never polled in this way. Given sufficient participation, we can assess every team’s short- and medium-term strength in league context.

Thank you in advance for your help. I can’t wait to see what the numbers reveal.

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Between 2008 and 2013, the only team to win more games than the Rays was the Yankees. Think about what that means. Over the span of six years, only the richest franchise in baseball could out-perform one of the poorest. The Rays ranked in second, with 550 wins, 14 fewer than the Yankees, but 12 more than the Phillies. The Rays made the playoffs on four occasions, once, of course, getting as far as the World Series. The Rays were a model organization. At least, the Rays were a model, provided you had an organization with comparatively limited resources. It was a minor miracle how much they were able to accomplish.

The recent years haven’t been so rosy. Which, in some ways, is hardly surprising — not only are success cycles cyclical by definition, but the Rays are also at a massive financial disadvantage, at a time when more and more front offices are beginning to think like they do. There’s a popular theory out there that it used to be way easier to build good baseball teams on the cheap. It’s probably true! So one could use the recent Rays as evidence that parity is beginning to slip away. Small-market teams might be increasingly screwed. It wasn’t long ago we saw the Rays trade away the face of the franchise. It’s possible Chris Archer could be next.

There’s no question the Rays aren’t what they were. There’s no question they’ve been on the outside of the playoff picture looking in. And yet, with the benefit of hindsight, it’s interesting to look at what the Rays have been, and at what they’ve almost been. By one measure, the Rays haven’t had that much of a dip.

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People are always going to talk about baseball, even when there isn’t much baseball to talk about. Lately, people have been talking about the fact that there isn’t much baseball to talk about, and a recurring theme is that, in this current league environment, there just aren’t enough teams showing a commitment to winning. Now, that’s a belief supported by questionable evidence, and we can only truly evaluate this offseason after it’s finished, but let me say this right now for the Brewers — the Brewers are trying. Emboldened by the success of 2017, the Brewers don’t want to take a step back.

For some time, the team has been connected to Jake Arrieta. Recently, there have been reports the Brewers have made an offer to Yu Darvish. And now the Brewers have been strongly linked to Christian Yelich.

Source : Brewers have put together a trade offer & have shown strong interest Marlins OF Christian Yelich. Other teams remain in the mix.

— Craig Mish (@CraigMish) January 23, 2018

We’re talking about one of the smaller-market clubs in the league, and the Brewers shouldn’t get too much credit for anything until something actually happens. For the time being, the Brewers’ roster remains the same. But from the sounds of things, a decision has been made that the time could be right. As the Brewers emerge from their own tear-down process, they’re ready now to bring in some stars.

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I always look forward to these posts, maybe a little too much. It’s one thing to begin a polling project, but it’s quite another to wrap up and take a look at all the community feedback. Sometimes, it isn’t surprising. I mean, we all have a sense of how the community feels about certain subjects. But every single project has something worth talking about. Let’s talk about owners, and ownership groups.

Last week, I ran a post with 30 polls, one for every team. The question: How do you feel about the people ultimately in charge? More than a month ago, I ran a very similar project, only, that time, I asked for your evaluations of the various front offices, independent of ownership. This was supposed to direct the spotlight to the other people, a follow-up project like the one I ran in January two years ago. It should be very obvious that we don’t actually know that much about the owners, or about the influences they have, but if nothing else, we have anecdotes, and we have success cycles and payrolls. Follow a team for long enough, and you’ll develop some form of an ownership opinion. I wanted to collect the community opinions.

That is what follows, down below. I’ve put all the numbers into a spreadsheet and performed some basic analysis. As it happens, for you fans of specific teams, you probably know more about your owners than I do. So, I’m not going to include very much discussion in this post — that can be carried forward in the comments. My job is just to reveal what you said! I should do that.

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A few days ago, the Blue Jays picked up a new, young, cost-controlled starting outfielder. They got him in exchange for a reliever, and for a pitching prospect with lousy peripherals. It’s not hard to see how you could spin this as a big positive for Toronto. The other side, of course, is that the Blue Jays are taking a chance on a guy who the Cardinals couldn’t make better over a number of years. It’s fine for any team to express faith in its own player-development system, but if the Cardinals can’t get a guy polished, what hope might another club have?

As is generally the case, all three players in the trade are interesting. High-level baseball players are always interesting. Randal Grichuk is interesting, because of his track record and skillset. Dominic Leone is interesting, for the way he reemerged in 2017. And Conner Greene is interesting, because of the raw quality of his stuff. The Cardinals hope they just made their bullpen better. I don’t mean to ignore their side of this. But I’d like to focus on Grichuk, and, specifically, I’d like to focus on how he hasn’t progressed. The era in which Grichuk plays today isn’t the same as the era in which he debuted.

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The timing of this post isn’t intentional, beyond the fact that I am writing it intentionally. With the market seemingly at a standstill, there’s increasing focus on the conflict between owners and the union, and when those two butt heads, my sense is the owners lose the PR battle. I’m not putting this up because of that. I’m putting this up out of curiosity.

As you might’ve guessed, this is another polling project. A little over a month ago, I asked the FanGraphs community to help me rate all the front offices. In so doing, I asked that you try to exclude the influence of ownership as much as possible. That’s not actually a possible thing to do, not all the time, but I just wanted your best guess. And I wanted to try to separate the two entities so as to allow for this follow-up. I’ve done this before, but it’s been two years. I’d like to see how things have changed, at least as far as opinions go. It’s always fun to get one set of data points, but it’s even more fun when you can look at points moving over time.

Your favorite baseball team has an owner, or it has some owners. Those owners are responsible for bankrolling the whole operation. Of course, it’s the players who are directly responsible for the outcomes on the field. And it’s usually the other front-office people who are directly responsible for those players being around in the first place. Most of the time, owners don’t want to be in the news. But your team has an owner, or owners, and you’ve got opinions. It’s simply part of being a fan.

Below, I’d like you to express those opinions, so I can collect them. Don’t worry about being right or wrong — there is no right or wrong, not as far as we can tell. Just pick the most fitting response, in your estimation, and I’m fully aware the polls are kind of strangely-worded. It should all be pretty simple, and as usual, the results allow for me to see how people feel across the whole baseball landscape. You might have a sense of how people feel about one team. How does that compare to every other team? The FanGraphs community is endlessly useful!

Do you trust the owners to make good decisions? Do you trust the owners to stay out of the way? Do you feel like the owners are sufficiently committed to winning, and winning every year? How much do the owners meddle? To what extent are the owners predictable? Are the owners approachable, or accessible? Have they placed a priority on improving the in-game ballpark experience? There are countless ways for owners to make a difference. You know more about your team’s ownership than I do. So I’m looking for you to share your information, as best as you can. Thank you in advance for your participation, and if everything goes according to plan, we’ll evaluate all the results early next week.

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The Marlins have sold off a bunch of valuable pieces this offseason. You might’ve heard. Giancarlo Stanton? Traded. Marcell Ozuna? Traded. Dee Gordon? Traded. Regardless of whether they were good baseball moves, the immediate consequences are obvious: The Marlins are going to be bad. They hope to eventually become less bad. Now, all along, the Marlins have expressed an interest in building around Christian Yelich, who’s under team control for a while, thanks to his existing long-term extension. We would’ve been able to guess how Yelich has felt about that idea, but now his feelings are just…out there.

Christian Yelich’s relationship with the Miami Marlins is “irretrievably broken,” and it would be in the best interests of both the outfielder and the organization if the Marlins trade him before the start of spring training, his agent told ESPN on Tuesday.

In truth, Yelich has only so much leverage. He has to honor the contract he signed, and it wouldn’t help him to tank his own performance out of spite. If the Marlins kept Yelich, he’d essentially have to just deal with it. But it makes sense to trade Yelich anyway, given what else has gone on. The Marlins have already had a number of conversations about sending Yelich elsewhere, and, long story short, we come to Ronald Acuna.

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I suppose what I should say is that the Gerrit Cole trade has two perception problems. One, it’s clearly just a bad look for Pittsburgh. It’s generally a bad look when a major-league team has to trade away an established major-league talent, and with Cole and then Andrew McCutchen going out the door, it’s a twin reminder of how the Pirates failed to build on a tremendous run of success. I don’t know how much more the Pirates reasonably could’ve done, but there’s forever that lingering question regarding ownership’s commitment to winning. This is nothing new. It’s a reopening of wounds that never healed.

There’s also, though, another aspect. The Pirates have been heavily criticized for the return package they got for Cole from the Astros. I have no interest in trying to figure out whether the Pirates got the best package possible. I don’t know what else was truly on the table. Maybe more would’ve been available in July; maybe Cole’s stock would’ve dropped. All we know is what the Pirates got. My read of the consensus is that the Pirates didn’t get enough. But my read is also that the Astros have a little something to do with that. Specifically because the Astros are unusually good and deep.

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