It’s time to do this all again. A few days ago, I ran an annual polling project, asking how you felt about the season that was, on a team-by-team basis. It might seem like a silly question, or it might seem like the results would be obvious, but tradition is tradition, and I always get a kick out of the data analysis. This is the data-analysis post. I suppose I’m under no obligation to share the results with the voting public, and I could just keep all the numbers to myself, but then I don’t know what the point of any of this would be. I already struggle enough to understand what the point of any of this is. Don’t need to make the problem worse.

To refresh your memories, that polling project included 30 polls, with one for each club. Here is an example of what the polls looked like:

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This post is part of a series concerning the 2019 Today’s Game Era Committee ballot, covering executives, managers and long-retired players whose candidacies will be voted upon at the Winter Meetings in Las Vegas on December 9. Use the tool above to read the introduction and other installments. For an introduction to JAWS, see here. Several profiles in this series are adapted from work previously published at SI.com and Baseball Prospectus. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

Joe Carter

Hailed as a reliable run producer for his 15 consecutive seasons with double-digit home-run totals and 10 with over 100 RBI, Carter is most famous for hitting just the second World Series-ending home run. His three-run shot off Phillies reliever Mitch Williams in Game Six of the 1993 World Series sent the Blue Jays to their second consecutive championship and produced a call for the ages from Tom Cheek: “Touch ’em all, Joe. You’ll never hit a bigger home run in your life!”

Unlike the first player to hit a Series-ending homer, Bill Mazeroski (Game Seven, 1960), Carter was unable to parlay his fame and his superficially impressive counting stats into a spot in Cooperstown. To the relief of a burgeoning stathead community that had begun spreading the gospel of on-base percentage, he received just 3.8% of the vote in 2004, his lone BBWAA ballot appearance.

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This past season, the Mariners and Rays were separated by exactly one win in the standings. Of the two teams, the Mariners have the larger operating budget, and although the Mariners’ division includes the Astros, the Rays’ division includes the Red Sox and the Yankees. And yet these are two teams that seem to be going in different directions, with the Rays being the club on the rise. The Mariners will have to try desperately to stay afloat while getting next to no reinforcements from an empty farm system. The Rays are young and good and cost-controlled, and their farm is in the upper tier. The differing circumstances have led to a trade — an as-yet unofficial five-player swap, just the latest in a series of agreements between the two teams.

Rays get:

• Mike Zunino
• Guillermo Heredia
• Michael Plassmeyer

Mariners get:

• Mallex Smith
• Jake Fraley

It’s an entertaining trade for all the stat nerds out there, on account of the various extremes. Zunino seldom hits the ball, but when he does, it goes a mile. Heredia and Smith hit the ball far more often, but when they do, it doesn’t go anywhere. Even Plassmeyer and Fraley are coming off eye-opening minor-league seasons. There’s something to dig into, for everybody. Plenty of numbers to be studied.

But the take-home: The Rays are trying to win, and they’ve addressed a position of need. The Mariners are apparently trying to reload, without losing too much, and they’re banking on 2018 results while adding a longer-term player. You can see an argument favoring either side of this, but I find the Rays’ to be more convincing.

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Bryce Harper is a (nearly) unrestricted free agent. He is newly 26 years old. He is projected, by Steamer, to be baseball’s second-best hitter next season. According to reports, he’s already turned down a contract offer worth $300 million. According to MLB Trade Rumors, he might end up with a contract worth more than $400 million. We’ve been anticipating this offseason for a while. Harper has been a household name for longer than I can remember, and as the cherry on top here, he’s represented by Scott Boras. Boras will push for some kind of contract record. I expect he’s going to be successful. Harper’s a core player in the prime of his life, and there’s more money in baseball than ever before.

Earlier this morning, almost by accident, I noticed that Harper was worse than Mitch Haniger in 2018, by 1.1 wins above replacement.

The point is not that Haniger is better than Harper is. Age is on Harper’s side. Talent is on Harper’s side. Track record is on Harper’s side. While I don’t know how much of a believer I am in the concept of measurable ceilings, we sort of know what Harper’s ceiling is, because we saw it in 2015. He was unbelievable. He hasn’t become as consistent as one would like, but Harper hits for power and he draws a boatload of walks. He just played in a career-high 159 games.

The Haniger thing got me looking closer, though. And in Harper’s otherwise good-enough contract season, he raised some questions about his defense. We still don’t focus that much on defense when we’re talking about sluggers. But teams don’t ignore it. Teams interested in Harper will have to figure out what happened.

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This post is part of a series concerning the 2019 Today’s Game Era Committee ballot, covering executives, managers and long-retired players whose candidacies will be voted upon at the Winter Meetings in Las Vegas on December 9. Use the tool above to read the introduction and other installments. For an introduction to JAWS, see here. Several profiles in this series are adapted from work previously published at SI.com and Baseball Prospectus. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

Harold Baines

The weight of expectation that comes with being selected with the No. 1 overall pick of the amateur draft is heavy enough without anybody bringing up Cooperstown, yet after Baines was chosen first by the White Sox in 1977, out of a Maryland high school, Chicago general manager Paul Richards said that the 18-year-old outfielder “was on his way to the Hall of Fame. He just stopped by Comiskey Park for 20 years or so.” Baines had actually been spotted playing Little League in Maryland by once and future Sox owner Bill Veeck Jr. when he was 12. No pressure, kid.

While Baines did spend 22 years in the majors and racked up an impressive hit total and compares favorably to other No. 1 picks, his accomplishments were nonetheless limited by injuries to his right knee that led to eight surgeries. From his age-28 season onward, he served mainly as a designated hitter while rarely playing the field. His 1,643 games at DH are more than any player besides David Ortiz.

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It’s Election Day in the United States! If you haven’t yet voted, and if you still have the chance, I encourage you to go vote for whatever you’re going to vote for. If you’re already done, or if you’re standing in line waiting, or whatever — today’s a day that puts a lot of Americans in a voting mood. And as long as you’re in the mood to be voting, I’ve got more voting for you to do down below. Some voting with, shall we say, far lesser stakes.

We’re at the point where just about everyone is ready to turn the page and focus on the offseason ahead. The playoffs ended last week, and this is the week of the general-manager meetings in California. I wouldn’t be surprised if we see some movement pretty soon. Some transactions of real consequence. I’ve been told to prepare for a crazy market, and it could all get underway at a moment’s notice. So before all that starts up, and while the 2018 season is still fresh in your collective minds, I want to continue what’s become an annual polling project. The convenient thing about this being an annual polling project is that I can just copy and paste the text below from last time!

This is a post with 30 polls, one for each team. Ideally I’d like you to only vote in the poll or polls corresponding to your favorite team(s). Some of you might be fans of baseball more than you’re fans of one team in particular, and in that case, either don’t vote at all, or vote for the team you think you care about the most. It’s up to you. It’s all up to you. For each team, I’ve asked a simple question. How was your experience being a fan of the given team this season? There’s no wrong answer, and your feeling is personal to you. But if you’d like to share it, please do so. This shouldn’t take much in the way of mental gymnastics. Were you happy? Were you disappointed? How disappointed were you? Do you love watching every game, no matter the score and no matter the standings? Just how much did you get out of your investment? To what extent were you invested in the first place?

It’s easy, and I appreciate your participation, in advance. I’ll review the results later this week. In the past, I’ve written summary blurbs for each team, but I realized those blurbs might bias the responses, so now I’ve quit. Also, I’m lazy (Editor’s note: still true in 2018). Anyhow, all the polls are below. Hopefully the anchor text works to send you to your team directly! Thank you again for making these poll posts possible.

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Jeff Albert brings a combination of common sense and analytic know-how to his new job as St. Louis Cardinals hitting coach. He also brings with him a degree of familiarity. Prior to joining the Astros organization in 2013, Albert spent five years tutoring up-and-coming hitters in the Cardinals’ farm system.

Last season was his first at the big-league level. After four years as Houston’s minor-league hitting coordinator, the 38-year-old spent the recently completed campaign as the Astros’ assistant hitting coach. His expertise is multi-faceted. Along with being a new-age hitting guru, Albert is a certified strength-and-conditioning specialist with a master’s degree in exercise science.

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Jeff Albert on hitting: “From a coaching perspective, I think you could make the argument that art and science are the same thing. The art is the way you apply the objective information — the scientific information — within the context of the human element and the environment. So, I don’t look at it as being one or the other. I look at it as having information that will help an individual player perform better.

“Ted Williams gets a lot of credit for his book [The Science of Hitting], and rightly so. Wade Boggs had one I really liked — The Techniques of Modern Hitting — and he’s talking about many of the same things. The two are considered different types of hitters, but both are talking about things like swing path, hitting line drives, and making solid contact to the outfield.

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At some point, I won’t continue to feel obligated to post this. That point isn’t now. The Mariners have the longest active playoff drought in the four major North American sports. Here are their playoff chances over the course of the 2018 regular season:

This is all well-established and relatively ancient history now, but it feels fresh and raw again with the benefit of some distance. Yes, the good Mariners were clearly overachieving. But in the middle of June, they stood at 46-25, 11 games ahead of the eventual wild-card A’s. The Mariners were going to snap the drought, because their lead in the race was virtually regression-proof. Then the Mariners regressed. The A’s, meanwhile, never lost again. The drought lives.

You wonder how things would be different today had the Mariners won a few extra ballgames. Had the A’s lost a few extra ballgames. Odds are, the Mariners still would’ve lost to the Yankees, but even getting that far would’ve meant something. Alas, a promising season turned out bad, and now the Mariners are in the news. They’re in the news because they might try to get worse.

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Howard Norsetter, the Minnesota Twins’ international scouting coordinator, was fired at the end of the 2017 season. The termination came as a shock, both because of Norsetter’s long tenure with the team – he was first hired by Minnesota in 1991 – and also because of his record whilst working for the Twins. Norsetter is most notable for being the scout who discovered and signed stars like Justin Morneau, but the sheer number of legitimate major league players he uncovered during his career is remarkable. Norsetter signed Grant Balfour, Liam Hendriks, Max Kepler, and Byung Ho Park, among more than 25 major leaguers. John Sickels posted an interview with Norsetter from 2010 in which he demonstrated a sharp baseball mind.

And even after Norsetter was let go, the Twins continued signing players he’d found and recommended, including Kai-Wei Teng. In other words, Norsetter, who lives in Australia, is undeniably good at his job. The Twins evidently agreed, saying his termination wasn’t performance related. Norsetter was later hired for a lesser position with the Philadelphia Phillies.

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Will the Hall of Fame find room for an all-time saves leader in 2019 — besides current leader and first-ballot lock Mariano Rivera, that is? (He’ll headline the BBWAA ballot, to be released on November 19.) I refer instead to Lee Smith, the record holder from April 13, 1993 (when he overtook Jeff Reardon) to September 24, 2006 (when 2018 Hall inductee Trevor Hoffman surpassed him). At first glance, he not only appears to be the most likely ex-player to be elected from among the six on the 2019 Today’s Game Era Committee ballot, which also includes three managers and one owner, but the only one with a path to election. Released on Monday, the ballot, which centers on candidates who made their greatest impact upon Major League Baseball from 1988 onward, is as notable for its omissions as well as its inclusions.

The full slate of candidates alongside Smith includes former outfielders Harold Baines, Albert Belle, and Joe Carter; first baseman Will Clark; starter Orel Hershiser; managers Davey Johnson, Charlie Manuel, and Lou Piniella; and owner George Steinbrenner. Carter and Manuel are the ballot’s only newcomers besides Smith, which is curious because there wasn’t exactly a clamor to elect the rest, who served as bystanders when John Schuerholz and Bud Selig were elected two years ago. Six of the returnees received “fewer than five votes,” a shorthand the Hall typically uses so as not to embarrass any candidate. Piniella received seven votes, still far short of the 12 needed for election from among the panel of 16.

To these eyes, which have been studying the Hall of Fame voting since the 2002 election cycle, Smith isn’t necessarily the best candidate, but it’s not hard to see parallels with 2018 inductee Jack Morris, who was elected by the Modern Baseball Era Committee last December. Both candidates spent a full 15 years on the BBWAA ballot, Morris from 2000 to -14 and Smith from 2003 to -17; the latter was the last player to do so after a 2014 rule change that truncated candidates’ windows of BBWAA eligibility to 10 years. Both built up support slowly until they appeared to be trending towards election, with Morris crossing the all-important 50% threshold in his 11th year of eligibility and Smith in his 10th. The claims of both to a plaque in Cooperstown hinge(d) upon compiling big totals in a stat that’s since been devalued within stathead circles — 254 wins for Morris, 478 saves for Smith — but one that plays better in front of a panel where writers and historians generally constitute just a quarter of the electorate, with executives and Hall of Famers (both players and managers) making up the other three-quarters.

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