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Last Friday, Craig Edwards published a post titled “The Best One-Two Punch in Baseball.” He didn’t focus specifically on just hitters, or just pitchers — the idea was to look at every team’s projected top two players. It’s a fun exercise, and this one is similar to that one.

In this post, in short, I’d like to look at every team’s projected top five players. This is something I’ve kept track of for a while, and even though five is an arbitrary number, I like how this method can separate top-heavy teams from teams with more depth. Below, a few plotted breakdowns, followed by a table comparing the projected MLB landscape to the way things played out last season. Let’s get this over with!

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Every year we release team projections, and every year people express disagreement with them. But it’s not large-scale disagreement — typically, people differ on one or two or three specific teams. Sometimes it’s been the Royals, sometimes it’s been the Orioles, and this year it’s the Rockies. Most of the projections are considered basically fine. The FanGraphs crowd has determined that the Padres’ 2017 projection is basically fine. The Padres are projected to be the worst team in baseball, at 65-97, and we put their playoff odds at 0.1%.

But there are certain numbers I love to bring up. I have team projections going back to 2005, and since then, all the teams projected to win no more than 70 games have averaged 68 projected wins, and 68 actual wins. In that sense, the projections have been great. Yet the 2008 Marlins were projected to win 68 games, and they won 84. The 2010 Blue Jays were projected to win 65 games, and they won 85. The 2012 Orioles were projected to win 70 games, and they won 93. All of those teams were thought to be bad. All of those teams were contenders.

The Padres, right now, are thought to be bad. What if they turned into contenders? Let’s follow an 11-step process to make that happen. Let’s try to get these Padres into the playoffs, without doing anything too unrealistic.

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The masses are encouraged by Bryce Harper’s spring. Everyone’s looking for a big bounceback season, so it seems like a good thing that Harper is second in spring-training home runs, with six. Well, Greg Bird is looking for a bounceback season of his own — not because he was bad in 2016, but because he wasn’t anything in 2016. Surgery’ll do that to a player. After Wednesday, Bird is right there with Harper, at six home runs. Let’s just continue to try to ignore that Peter O’Brien is ahead of both of them, with seven.

Out of sight usually means out of mind, as fandom goes, and Bird, for a while, was sort of a forgotten young Yankee, what with the group emergence of Gary Sanchez, Aaron Judge, Tyler Austin, and so on. It’s nothing Bird could help, but labrum surgery kept him from playing, and it was all he could ask for to have a successful spring. Suffice to say Bird is back in the picture. Suffice to say he’s generating at least as much enthusiasm as anybody else. Through 47 exhibition trips to the plate, Bird’s hitting .439, with a four-digit slugging percentage. He’s been the very best spring-training hitter, and while that’s not something anyone actually cares about, there is significance here. It would sure seem that Bird’s shoulder is fine.

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In the year 2016, pitchers continued to hit, even though they are very bad at it. This is not good for the pitchers’ own teams, but this is good for science. It stands to reason the most terrifying pitcher for another pitcher to try to hit against would be Aroldis Chapman. That doesn’t happen. Among the matchups that do actually happen, it stands to reason the most terrifying pitcher for another pitcher to try to hit against would be Noah Syndergaard. Let’s look at how that just went.

Over the course of last season, including the playoffs, Syndergaard had more than 50 matchups against opposing pitchers. As this particular split is concerned, that’s a fairly large sample size. How do you think the pitchers all did? You might be tempted to believe they all struck out. No, that’s not realistic. They didn’t even go hitless! So maybe the data won’t raise your eyebrows in the least, but don’t be mistaken — Syndergaard was dominant. (Obviously.)

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The Positional Power Rankings series continues, because it would be weird if it didn’t. In here, we’re going to deal with shortstops on a team-by-team basis, wherein all the teams are ranked by projected WAR. The projected WARs, of course, will often end up different from the actual WARs, but these are basically our best estimates of positional true talent given what we know today, and the rankings are an excuse to write some commentary on everyone. I know it’s already linked up there, but here’s the series introduction, again, if you don’t know exactly what you’re looking at. It’s not that complicated! Except the projected-WAR part. That part is incredibly complicated. Here is a graph of everything:

There exists a belief that we’ve entered something of a golden age of shortstops. Relative to the league overall, shortstops just had their best offensive season on record. They also had their best collective WAR season in modern history. The belief begs for an explanation. One potential explanation would be that, no, there’s nothing here, and it’s all just random noise. That’s always one potential explanation for anything, and it’s never the fun one. Another potential explanation would be that, like so many things in baseball, it’s cyclical, and now we see shortstops on a temporary upswing.

My current preferred explanation is that teams now are more reluctant to move good players off shortstop. So many great players throughout baseball history used to be shortstops at some point. Players have been moved off because they got too big, or didn’t have enough mobility. Perhaps now teams don’t care so much about shortstop size. And it makes you wonder about the role of modern defensive shifting. It’s possible teams feel like new defensive alignments have reduced the need for extreme shortstop range. This is speculation on my part, but it’s where my mind is at the moment. Big players can stick, now more than ever. Let’s now talk about some big shortstops, and some littler shortstops. (There are still some little shortstops.) Off we go!

The place people care about most is first place, and here we have the Astros, which I’m sure will provoke something of a debate. I’ll note, though, that the only thing separating the Astros from the second-place team is the depth; the starters are projected to be virtually identical. I’ll say again, lots of teams have good shortstops. Lots of teams wouldn’t want to lose their own shortstops. The Astros are among those teams.

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Who’s going to have the better season: Bryce Harper or Manny Machado? That’s the question posed to you at the end of this post. Which means this is a poll post. Poll post!

Years ago, the debate used to be about Bryce Harper, Manny Machado, and Mike Trout. It’s safe to say Trout is now excluded from the conversation, on account of having become too good. That leaves Harper and Machado to battle, and while they’re not actually in direct competition with one another, what’s the downside here of matching them up? Below, I’ll present the respective cases, before getting to the question. This does not mean I think these are the only great players. Kris Bryant is great. Mookie Betts is great. Corey Seager and several others are great. But Harper vs. Machado is a fun one, and I think we’ll be able to learn from whatever these poll results might be.

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Just today we kicked off our annual Positional Power Rankings series, which means that, before too long, we’ll get a couple of posts about individual bullpens, looking at every single group. I’ll even be responsible for writing one of those posts, meaning maybe it works to our disadvantage to put this post up now, focusing on one bullpen in particular. But I’ve had a note here for a while, and I’m not one to let a topic go uncovered. The Rockies bullpen is of particular interest, especially at a time when the larger narrative around the team has responded negatively to recent news.

Let’s rewind. Yes, the last week or two have not been kind to the Rockies organization. The outlook for the season ahead has certainly gotten worse. Yet going back to last season, you know which team’s bullpen had — easily — the league’s worst WPA? That would be the Rockies, who made even the Reds feel proud of themselves. Although the Rockies finished at 75-87, their BaseRuns record was a more decent 80-82. With a stronger bullpen, last year’s Rockies would’ve been an average team. Their bullpen this year has the potential to be unusually dominant.

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Mike Trout’s the best. You didn’t need the reminder, but there you go. He’s the best that there is. He won’t always be the best that there is, and maybe even in this coming season someone will emerge to be better, but given what we know right now, it’s Trout, then it’s the others. Spring training is a time for universal optimism. It’s a time for seeing the best in developing players. Take a young player on your favorite team. Imagine that player at his ceiling. Mike Trout is almost certainly better than that, and he has been for five years.

Trout is insanely talented, and that’s his foundation. But to be this good and stay this good, players also need to be able to adjust. They need to see weaknesses and work to eliminate them. Trout’s done that! He used to have a high-fastball problem. Been addressed. Relatedly, he used to have a strikeout problem. Been addressed. A couple years back he didn’t do enough on the bases. Been addressed. He used to run below-average arm ratings in the outfield. Been addressed. He’s so good.

Yet I’m a professional digger, in a sense. I’m always on the hunt for unknown strengths or weaknesses, and I’ve stumbled upon something I didn’t realize. There is an area where Mike Trout was bad. Last season, I mean. Who could’ve known? Even the best have their blemishes.

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