It’s our turn to Positionally Power Rank the second baseman. If you’re not familiar with this series, read the introduction, and then come back for a walk through the league’s most homogenous spot on the field. By which I mean that the keystone position in MLB is an eclectic mix of young contact hitters, aging contact hitters, contact hitters with some power, and Jonathan Schoop. But hey, let’s sort out which of these contact hitters are better than the others, and we’ll do that right now.

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You know the drill by now. If you don’t know, now you know. We’ll now look at a graph of projected team WAR at first base, reflect briefly, then reflect verbosely.

Graph:

To reflect briefly: It will all be over soon, Phillies fans. You’ve been great.

We’ve got four distinct tiers here. The “no worries here” tier, which features six star first baseman and a seventh star pairing, the “average-or-better” tier, which features eight solid regulars and a possibly questionable projection, the “meh” tier, which features plenty of platoons and sadness, and the “Ryan Howard” tier, which features only sadness.

To reflect verbosely:

#1 Diamondbacks

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Name	PA	AVG	OBP	SLG	wOBA	Bat	BsR	Fld	WAR
Paul Goldschmidt	672	.289	.399	.527	.388	34.3	1.3	7.3	5.5
Yasmany Tomas	28	.262	.298	.422	.311	-0.3	0.0	-0.3	0.0
Total	700	.288	.395	.522	.385	34.0	1.3	7.0	5.5

So you wanna build the perfect first baseman? Well of course, we start with the bat. If first basemen have one job, it’s to slug, and so our perfect first baseman’s gotta slug. Paul Goldschmidt just led all first baseman in slugging, so our first selection will be his power. But we don’t just want power, we want a keen eye and the willingness to take a walk — the kind of skills that perpetuate a high on-base percentage and feel like they’ll age well. We might be inclined to take Joey Votto’s discipline, but Goldschmidt’s actually got the exact same approach, so we’ll make it easy and take his eye, too. But we want a first baseman, not a designated hitter, and we want a first baseman who will last, so we’re gonna need some defense. Last year, Goldschmidt’s tDEF (my simple man’s go-to runs saved metric — just an average of UZR, DRS and FRAA) was +12, four runs better than any of his peers. He actually beat the first-base positional adjustment. So let’s take Goldschmidt’s glove. And because we’re greedy, we want a first baseman who can run, too, and no first baseman even come close to running like Goldschmidt.

What’s the perfect first basemen look like? Paul Goldschmidt’s bat, Paul Goldschmidt’s eye, Paul Goldschmidt’s glove and Paul Goldschmidt’s legs. Diamondbacks are doing alright here.

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I think I’ve written almost this exact thing before, but to kick off this annual series in earnest, let’s begin with the position we arguably know the least about! Here’s a link to Dave’s introduction to the series, if you need a bit of a refresher. Probably, though, it’s all self-explanatory, and now here’s a plot of all the projected team values behind the plate, with what at least I consider an unsurprising arrangement. In fairness, maybe it’s unsurprising because I’ve been looking at these numbers now for several, several hours. OK.

Did you know that the Giants have a good catcher? What I love about this isn’t just that the Giants are in the lead — it’s that they’re in the lead by 1.3 wins. That’s the same as the difference between the Dodgers in second place and the Reds in 15th. The tricky bit is that catchers can sometimes have all that perceived intangible value, and I don’t know what we’re supposed to do with leadership from a statistical perspective, but, you know, no analysis is perfect. Read on for paragraphs about catchers! (The Braves get the last paragraph.)

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We’re now officially two weeks from Opening Day, which means you’re about to be inundated with season previews. Some places will go team by team, others will group by divisions, but basically every outlet that covers baseball will roll out overviews of the 2016 season. In an attempt to provide something a little bit different here at FanGraphs, we do our season previews on a positional basis, and we call them the Positional Power Rankings. This is now our fifth crack at these things — you can see the archived versions of 2012, 2013, 2014, and 2015 by clicking on those links — and we hope that they’re getting better each time we do them.

From my perspective, one of the primary benefits of previewing the season from a positional perspective is that we can spend a bit more time discussing a team’s overall depth. Most team-based previews aren’t going to spend a lot of time on the bench pieces or the minor leaguers who will get first crack at playing time should an injury occur, especially on a contender; no one clicks on a story about the Nationals 2016 season to read about Jose Lobaton, for instance. But depth matters, and often times, the difference between making the postseason or watching October baseball from home is the performance of a team’s role players, and with many teams moving towards a balanced roster approach over betting on a few big-name stars, we think breaking down every team’s projections at each position on the field gives you guys a better understanding of where the various strengths and weaknesses lie.

How does a platoon stack up against having one regular everyday guy? What is the magnitude of the improvement a team will get from swapping out a veteran placeholder with a top prospect in May or June? These are the kinds of things we think the Positional Power Rankings are helpful at identifying, and because our previews are based on strength at a certain spot, non-contenders get a chance to shine if they have a particularly strength as well. So we know it’s different than most places, but hopefully it’s different in a good way, providing you with information you won’t get elsewhere, or at least provides information in a format that makes you see a team’s pros and cons in a different light.

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