Welcome to the 2021 positional power rankings! As is tradition, over the next week and a half, we’ll be ranking every team by position as we inch closer to Opening Day. This is always something of a funny exercise. You read FanGraphs regularly, after all — a fact for which we are supremely grateful — and are well-versed in the goings on of the offseason. You know that Nolan Arenado now plays for the Cardinals (though the Rockies are still paying him for some reason) and that George Springer is a Blue Jay and that J.T. Realmuto found his way back to Philly. You might not remember that Mitch Moreland signed with Oakland, or that Collin McHugh is a Ray, but then, I sometimes forget those facts, which is surely more embarrassing for me than it is for you. All of which is to say, after an offseason spent reading transaction analysis and peeking at projections, you generally know what’s going on. And yet after a difficult, draining year (one you likely spent busy with many things in addition to baseball), you’re still keen to know more about the game and what it might look like between now and October. The positional power rankings are our answer to that impulse.
This post serves as an explainer for our approach to the rankings. If you’re new to the exercise, I hope it helps to clarify how they are compiled and what you might expect from them. If you’re a FanGraphs stalwart, I hope it is a useful reminder of what we’re up to. If you have a bit of time, here is the introduction to last year’s series. You can use the handy nav widget at the top of that post to get a sense of where things stood before Opening Day 2020, oddity and all.
Unlike a lot of sites’ season previews, we don’t arrange ours by team or division. That is a perfectly good way to organize a season preview, but we see a few advantages to the way we do it. First, ranking teams by position allows us to cover a team’s roster from top to bottom. Stars, everyday staples, and role players alike receive some amount of examination, and those players (and the teams they play for) are placed in their proper league-wide context. By doing it this way, you can easily see how teams stack up against each other, get a sense of the overall strength of a position across baseball, and spot places where a well-deployed platoon may end up having a bigger impact than an everyday regular who is merely good. We think all of that context helps to create a richer understanding of the state of things and a clearer picture of the season ahead.
We will have a post for each position, with starting pitchers and relievers divided into two posts each to allow us all the many words we need to do the league’s rotations and bullpens justice without taxing your patience. Each post will start with a brief summary of the position, then rank each team’s group of players from the best down to the worst based on projected WAR. Those WAR numbers are arrived at using a 50/50 blend of ZiPS and Steamer projections and our manually maintained team depth charts (courtesy of Jason Martinez), which include playing time estimates for every player. Read the rest of this entry »
Jay Jaffe