Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon, folks, and welcome to my pre-Opening Day chat. I’m just back from a brief ski vacation in Salt Lake City with my daughter; due to delays we didn’t get home until 3 AM so forgive the cobwebs. The second of my two Positionl Power Rankings ran while I was gone, the Right Fielders https://blogs.fangraphs.com/2024-positional-power-rankings-right-field

Jay Jaffe: The first of those was, um, first base, which ran early last week https://blogs.fangraphs.com/2024-positional-power-rankings-first-base

Jay Jaffe: Anyway, on with the show…

Andrew: If it does come to light that Ohtani bet on sports, do you think the Angels are forced to vacate all their playoff wins while he was on the team?

Jay Jaffe: womp womp

TKDC: Over/under .5 game suspension for Ohtani when this all shakes out?

Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon, folks, and welcome to another edition of my FanGraphs chat. I’ve got my head buried in Positional Power Rankings assignments but came up for air to write about Noelvi Marte’s PED suspension yesterday https://blogs.fangraphs.com/noelvi-martes-ped-suspension-simplifies-re…, and last Friday wrote about Brayan Bello’s extension https://blogs.fangraphs.com/red-sox-hope-brayan-bello-deal-is-the-star…

Jay Jaffe: With that, let’s get going.

wheelhouse: I’m trying to rebalance here, but if Cole is out for the season, do you think the Yankees are:
A) a threat for the third wild card
B) 100% dead in the water, stick a fork in them

Jay Jaffe: To borrow from Monty Python for a line that’s often quoted in our household, “A fair question and one that in recent weeks ‘as been much on my mind.”

Jay Jaffe: I think the answer to that depends upon how close to the best versions of themselves other starters such as Cortes, Rodón and Stroman are in 2024. If the two holdovers pitch as they did last year, the Yankees will be toast

Jay Jaffe: if the three of them pitch up to their capabilities and if they get a decent fill-in, all isn’t lost, but it may very well cost them down the road — either via a trade or a necessary payroll cut if they were to add a big salary to this year

Dan Szymborski: Ack, I’m here!

Dan Szymborski: Got lost fuming on Twitter

Placido Polanco fan club president: Just read Ben Clemens’ article about team depth. Don’t the ZiPS projected standings account for depth? Does ZiPS handle depth differently than the way proposed in Ben’s article?

Dan Szymborski: Sort of. ZiPS always has a generalized model that varies the playing time availability of top players so sometimes those Plan Bs or Cs or Ds get a lot more playing time than you expect

Dan Szymborski: For example, in that one run in the AL projections that I alluded to for the O’s, the O’s mostly ended up with David Banuelos and Michael Perez catching

Harry Lime: Can you suggest any articles that talk on late round players for deep drafts? thx

Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon, folks! Welcome to another edition of my Tuesday chats. I have a piece up today illustrating the weakest positions on NL contenders — sort of a preseason Replacement Level Killers list — with a companion AL piece to follow soon. https://blogs.fangraphs.com/the-weakest-positions-on-national-league-c…

Jay Jaffe: On Sunday I covered the Cody Bellinger signing https://blogs.fangraphs.com/options-options-cody-bellinger-returns-to-…

Jay Jaffe: and last Friday i took a look at the Mets’ rotation in light of the Kodai Senga injury https://blogs.fangraphs.com/with-kodai-senga-injury-mets-rotation-alre…

Jay Jaffe: With the caveat that I may have to duck out for a few minutes soon when our painter arrives, let’s get on with it.

Jay Jaffe: (We had our living room, dining room, and kitchen painted yesterday! Facelift for the whole first floor!)

Idiotic Failson: Regarding the Yankees still being potentially interested in Snell – I want owners to spend money as much as the average fan and feel that owners too often hoard their team revenue. That said, let’s say that the Yankees spend $25mm/year on Snell. That brings their commitment this year to him to close to $60mm and their payroll to close to $400mm. Can they really afford to run $400mm payrolls (necessary or not) regularly? Am I wrong in thinking that signing Snell might actually be unreasonable?