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Throughout the week, we’re publishing our positional power ranking series. If you’re unfamiliar with the process or concept, Jeff explained the series on Monday. Today, I’ll be addressing second base. What fun!

Every position has its theme. You have the bright young things who play shortstop, the fly-ball revolutionaries occupying first base, the catchers who aren’t Buster Posey.

Second base has, in the past, been defined by the veterans at the top, but these rankings portend change in the form of young upstarts. Jose Altuve wrested the top of the rankings from Robinson Cano last year and has only widened the gap between himself and his keystone compatriots; he’s projected to be more than a win better than second place Brian Dozier. And as mentioned, the middle and bottom bits of the rankings feature names like Ozzie Albies, Ketel Marte, Yoan Moncada, and Luis Urias, all of whom could outperform their projections and shift their teams’ positions.

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We tire of spring training pretty quickly, but I think it’s because we’re watching it wrong. We burden it with too many expectations, chief among them that it will look and feel like real baseball. Of course, it isn’t really baseball yet — John Andreoli is there — but the contrast of its not-baseballness to the baseballness of the regular season is illuminating. It teaches us things.

The eighth inning is a particularly good time for such lessons. It’s such a funky inning! It’s good for people watching, too, because most of the folks we know have hit the showers. The almost-baseball gets weird, and the faces become unfamiliar. With that in mind, I watched the eighth inning of the available broadcasts for Sunday, March 4. Here are some of the people I met, the baseball I saw, and the things I learned.

Rockies vs. Angels
I’m not especially fond of jerseys with no names on them. I get it: there are lots of dudes running around spring training. Prospects and non-roster invitees, big names and big numbers. The “who” of a guy can get lost in all that shuffling between big-league camp and the back fields.

There is an elegance to the nameless jersey, a sort of brutal honesty. It says, “You can probably look away now. Go grab a hotdog.” You know, how a jersey talks? It signals to the crowd that we can try to beat traffic. But it feels so impersonal, and it would cost so little to give every player the dignity of his name. It’d give moms and grandmas so much more to go on at Thanksgiving. “Here’s my boy.” Nameless jerseys are awful in a medium way most of the time, but occasionally they’re a kindness.

Brian Mundell won’t talk about this moment at Thanksgiving. Despite all his hard work and years of practice, he fell down. We might be inspired to say, “Aw, buddy,” and gift him a little sympathetic frown, but we aren’t quite sure who we’re looking at. The anonymity of his jersey protects him. Nolan Arenado probably won’t ask him about it. He won’t become a Twitter joke, the fringe prospect who fell down. When he’s getting gas in Scottsdale, a kid buying gum won’t smirk. He’ll get to move on from this small bit of failure until he doesn’t remember it anymore, in part because it was a minor moment in spring, and in part because he’s 77. And who’s 77? Just some nameless guy. Could be anyone, really.

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Remember how the world never expressly needed a taxonomy of ejections? Well, good. Here is Part I. Now, appreciating your refusal to clamor for a Part II, here’s an entire second post dedicated to a taxonomy of ejections. Enjoy!

I’m Going to Throw Stuff at You Now
Home-plate umpire Quinn Wolcott ejects Ryan Braun.
Date: April 29
Ejection No.: 30

Humans enjoy power, but normal people don’t get to wield it very often. Clerks can make you wait, and TSA agents can subject you to additional screening, and sometimes umpires eject players when they complain about a strike a little too loudly but not actually too loudly. They have power on the field, and sometimes they exercise it arbitrarily because they can’t use it at all other places. Sometimes. Sometimes, though, Ryan Braun throws his elbow guard at them. Pretty rude.

Or they experience I’m Going to Throw Stuff at You Now’s related but distinct variant, Kicking Stuff at You. Also rude.

Throwing Stuff, God Bless America Edition
Home-plate umpire Shane Livensparger ejects Scooter Gennett.
Date: September 10
Ejection No.: 168

Look, whatever, Scooter threw stuff. He tossed around his work tools. You’ve seen that before. You’ve watched baseball, and when you were a kid in the school yard, you saw other kids chuck balls and sticks at their enemies. You just watched Ryan Braun and Yuli Gurriel misbehave. That’s not the point of this. The point is the power of ritual. The umpires and manager are standing there grousing at each other, arguing baseball stuff, and then they are stopped dead in their tracks by “God Bless America.”

You can see Jerry Layne on the far right mouthing “Where’s the flag?” before realizing it’s off to his right and helpfully nudging Bryan Price to face the right way. Price and Layne are adversaries. They’re grumpy with each other. They’re observing ejections’ rituals. But the game presented another, more potent tradition to mind. Perhaps they all saw The Power of Myth at a particularly formative age.

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It’s been an angry sort of offseason, which hasn’t been very enjoyable. I find the most reliable cure when I’m angry at baseball is to watch baseball. Baseball is pretty great. So with spring training upon us, I set out to watch some baseball and get back in the spirit of things. But I couldn’t shake that angry feeling. I found myself somehow watching video of ejections, the moments when our guys are at their angriest.

Including spring training and the postseason, there were 197 ejections in Major League Baseball in 2017. Using the meticulously maintained Umpire Ejection Fantasy League, I watched them all. It’s nice when people embrace the things they like, and I wanted to feel like I was a part of something other than being angry. Others have endeavored to unpack ejection data, but that isn’t our purpose today. I was interested in the aesthetics of ejections, the angry walks and grumpy faces. I sought to construct a taxonomy of baseball ejections. This represents the first batch of categories. Another batch will follow.

I Kept Talking
Home-plate umpire Stu Scheurwater ejects Buck Showalter.
Date: April 30
Ejection No.: 21

Ejections of this variety observe predictable stages of how much talking the player or the manager is actually doing.

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