Here, I thought it virtually inevitable that Alex Cobb would settle for something similar to the Lance Lynn contract. The pitchers have similar ages, strengths, and profiles, and both Cobb and Lynn happen to have turned down qualifying offers. A week and a half ago, Lynn signed with the Twins for a year and $12 million, after spending the offseason aiming much higher. In my head, I figured that would be Cobb’s fate, too. There are worse things. Yet Cobb has emerged with something much stronger, something more lucrative. Seemingly despite the odds, Cobb now has more or less the contract he wanted all along, agreeing to terms with the Orioles for four years and $57 million.

In the bigger picture, it’s not surprising, since Cobb was expected to get something like this back in December. In the smaller picture, it is surprising, given how the market played out. And it’s additionally surprising, given the Orioles’ reluctance to sign pitchers to long-term deals. I don’t think this was ever the likelihood, which helps to explain why it took so long in the first place. But for Cobb, he’s got a home, in a familiar division. And for the Orioles, they’ve patched another rotation together, after appearing shorthanded. While they might be the East’s worst team, we’ve heard that before. They’re going to give this another shot.

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I’d like to beg your indulgence to reflect on community. Specifically, our community. Our community here at FanGraphs, sure, but the community of people who care about the rigorous analysis of baseball, too. Communities are home to all kinds of folks engaged in different bits of sin and kindness, all experiencing different stakes. We’re knit together by our sins and our kindnesses, sometimes quite uncomfortably. One such sin is the everyday kind, the sort of casual meanness and lack of care we all wade through all the time. It’s a smaller kind, but we still find ourselves altered by it. I suppose you’ll have to forgive me for worrying on such things; I know we can be suspicious of feelings around here. But don’t fret. There’s another bit of sin, too, a baseball sin.

Earlier this month, Sheryl Ring published a piece called “Can Major League Baseball Legally Exclude a Woman?” The piece considered whether the exclusion of women from baseball, both as players and umpires, was legally permissible under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Specifically, Sheryl, while acknowledging that it wouldn’t be an easy case to make, argued that being male was not a Bona Fide Occupational Qualification for playing Major League Baseball and that the failure to scout, much less hire, women could potentially violate Title VII.

The response in the comments was resoundingly negative. That isn’t in itself a bad thing. It wasn’t a perfect piece, though what piece is? We here like debate. We don’t always get things right, or express our ideas as well as we ought to. Our job as writers is to convince you or move you or both. The issue isn’t that the comments were critical. Rather, what struck me was how quickly some of the voices escalated, from skepticism to certainty to what read, at least to me, as a barely repressed anger that other commenters seemed less sure and more open, that the question had been posed at all.

Communities fight. Communities committed to finding right answers may fight more — and harder — than most. For years, we fought others, fought against bunts and batting average, but we mostly won. Now the lines are less clear; the field is muddy and murky and full of fog. We’re still a community, but we’re changing. We’re having to make room for new folks in our digital neighborhood. But as strangers, unburdened by the potential chance encounter at the corner store, we have an odd relationship with the idea of care. The literal distance between us has resulted in a high tolerance for gruffness; I never have to see my barbs land, never have to watch your face color with anger or embarrassment. I am free to forget your stakes, and you are free to forget mine.

But I wish we would remember them. The idea of a woman playing in Major League Baseball means something to me. It stirs something. I long for it, in a way that is embarrassing to talk about in my place of work, which this is, but those are my stakes. They aren’t the only stakes I have, but they’re important ones. I suspect seeing someone who looks like me play the game will make me feel that I belong in a way I don’t quite now. I want it to be real, even as I’m not sure it ever will be.

Others may not have liked the piece or found it convincing. Perhaps the post ought to have lingered longer on the institutional barriers girls and women face when playing baseball. Maybe certain readers thought it didn’t express adequate appreciation of the great distance we have to close. But they could have been nicer about it; they could have shown greater care. They could have appreciated that what means very little to them means a great deal to me and mine, and tempered not their criticism but their ire. They could have thought for a moment about what else we might worry that ire is meant to say: that we are not welcome. They could have remembered our stakes, as members of their community.

That was the everyday sin, the sin of disrespect and unfeeling. It is what makes our community less than perfect and less than perfectly welcoming. It is troubling, this lack of care. I’ve worried every day since then who we might have driven away, who might only ever lurk at the edges of the comments, blistered by those who think the only means by which to disagree is to trample. To ignore others’ stakes.

The baseball sin was the certainty.

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Out of all the polling projects I run, this one’s always my favorite. No sense in beating around the bush. Here are our current, schedule-adjusted projected 2018 standings. These are based on the Steamer projection system, the ZiPS projection system, and manually-adjusted team depth charts. Now that the Orioles have signed Alex Cobb, there are hardly more big changes to make between now and opening day. So, what do you actually think of the projections you’re seeing?

For convenience, here are the league landscapes, in case you didn’t feel like clicking the link.

The top looks like the top you’d expect. The bottom looks like the bottom you’d expect. We’ve been writing about the various tiers for months. But, even if you might not realize it, you’re experts. You know a lot about particular baseball teams, information the projection systems might not be aware of. So you might consider certain team projections too optimistic, or you might consider certain team projections too pessimistic. This is your collective opportunity to make yourselves heard. Last year, the community thought the projections were too low on the Rockies, Brewers, and Royals. All three teams won more games than was projected. Meanwhile, the community thought the projections were too high on the A’s, Angels, and Marlins. All three teams won fewer games than was projected. You all can provide valuable input, and so I love when this project gets to the analysis part.

The analysis part is coming, probably early next week. Following, you’ll find 30 polls for 30 teams. They should be simple to understand, especially if you’ve done this before. Vote based on research, or vote based on gut. I don’t care. Just vote. All I ask is that you vote based on the information we know today. Vote based on the rosters and depth teams have, and don’t vote based on the assumption that a team will make midseason additions or subtractions. That stuff is effectively un-projectable. Everything now being said, I leave it to you. Thank you all in advance for your participation.

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Aaron Judge is in hot water. The Yankees’ slugger and junior Tower of Power recently told Baltimore’s Manny Machado that the shortstop would “look good in pinstripes.” Major League Baseball, concerned that Judge’s comments might constitute tampering, proceeded to slap the right fielder on the wrist.

Now, it’s common knowledge that Machado (a) is a free agent after the season and (b) has been connected to the Yankees before. So what, exactly, did Judge do wrong here? And what is “tampering” anyway?

If you’re a fan of that other sport invented by James Naismith using soccer balls and peach baskets, you’ve probably seen “tampering” thrown around relatively often. It’s less common in baseball, but does occur. So let’s look at the Rule. You’ll find it in Major League Baseball’s Official Rules. No, not these rules. These other rules. I bet you didn’t know there were two rulebooks.

Anyway, Rule 3(k) on page 43 of the latest Rulebook governs tampering, and says this:

TAMPERING. To preserve discipline and competition, and to prevent the enticement of players, coaches, managers and umpires, there shall be no negotiations or dealings respecting employment, either present or prospective, between any player, coach or manager and any Major or Minor League Club other than the Club with which the player is under contract, or acceptance of terms, or by which the player is reserved or which has the player on its Negotiation List, or between any umpire and any baseball employer other than the baseball employer with which the umpire is under contract, or acceptance of terms, unless the Club or baseball employer with which the person is connected shall have, in writing, expressly authorized such negotiations or dealings prior to their commencement.

And as if to reiterate that point, Section 3 of the MLBPA Regulations of Player Agents states that only agents can do recruiting.

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Hello! This is a post in the series called “Positional Power Rankings,” which started on Monday with Jeff Sullivan’s introduction and continues today with my thoughts on the league’s shortstops. If you’d prefer to read other people’s thoughts on other positions, you can navigate to those thoughts using the widget above.

We’ve been talking about a golden age of shortstops for a few years now. Scanning through this list, I don’t see any particular reason to stop the chatter. Some players are fading a little, but Manny Machado is a shortstop again this year, after spending much of his big-league career at third; J.P. Crawford and Gleyber Torres are emerging, and the guys at the top of the list are projected to be just as good or better than they were last year. This is a special time to care about the middle of the infield, and the folks ranked in the middle of this list this year could easily have ranked near the top a decade ago. In some cases, like Troy Tulowitzki’s, they literally did. Anyway, here’s the chart you’ve been looking for:

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As this offseason confirms, the way in which clubs spend their money has changed perceptibly over the last decade or so. Where it used to be commonplace for an organization to pay a player for what he had already done, teams have increasingly begun to compensate players for what they’re likely to do in the future. We see the emergence of this trend most clearly in long-term extensions for younger players, a development that has led to missing free-agent classes.

Of course, that doesn’t mean clubs have stopped signing free agents altogether or stopped exposing themselves to risk of any kind. Teams still need to address weaknesses, and one means to do that is by way of the open market. In some cases, the performances they expect fail to materialize. In some of those cases, teams decide they’re better off paying someone else to take care of the problem. This is how teams end up with dead money on their payroll.

Dead money is generally any money a team is paying out to a player who no longer appears on their 40-man roster. There are three types of dead money:

1. Money paid to players who have been released. Those players are free to sign with other teams, but the team releasing the player still owes the money remaining on the contract.
2. Money paid to other teams as compensation for players who have been traded. Generally, we see teams cover a portion of a contract to receive a better return in trade.
3. Money paid to players who are still in the organization, but who have been removed from the 40-man roster. Any team could have claimed these players if they were willing to take on the contract, and the player probably could have elected fee agency, but then he would forfeit his right to the guaranteed money.

Last season, nearly $300 million of MLB payroll was of the deceased variety, a sum that was double the amount of the prior campaign. Over the past year, we’ve seen the contracts of Carl Crawford, Josh Hamilton, Jose Reyes, and Alex Rodriguez all come off the books. The result is a $100 million decrease in the amount of dead money from last year. The graph below shows the teams who are paying the most money this season to pay players not on their roster.

Boston takes the top spot this year thanks entirely to Rusney Castillo and Pablo Sandoval. The Los Angeles Dodgers’ dead money, meanwhile, is spread out over seven players. Because of their original trade with the Padres that removed Matt Kemp from their roster, they are actually paying an amount higher than his current salary after having reacquired him. And the Dodgers would actually place higher on this list if they had released Adrian Gonzalez instead of taking on Matt Kemp’s contract when their former first baseman was dealt to the Braves and then released. The team could also still increase its total if the front office decides Kemp is not a fit for the current roster.

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It’s that time again! The time when I get to write the same post I write every March. Oh, every time, the numbers are always different. But the words? The words seldom change. In one sense, that makes this post very easy. In another sense, it makes it hard to change things up. Hopefully you won’t notice if I plagiarize myself.

Strength of schedule. You know what I mean when I say that, right? It’s pretty much self-explanatory — we’re talking about how strong or weak a team’s overall schedule is. I think this gets talked about most often in football. Especially college football, I assume. You don’t hear this much in conversations about baseball, because baseball is widely perceived to have a great deal of parity. And the schedules are so very long that it’s easy to assume everything just averages out in the end. But that’s not what happens! If anything, the schedules are so very long that minor differences have a chance to pile up. What’s the cost of a win on the free-agent market? $8 million? $7 million? $9 million? Schedule strengths can matter by multiple wins. This can be a real and significant variable.

And FanGraphs makes this very simple to calculate. So, come along. I can show you who’ll have it relatively easy, and who’ll find things relatively challenging. I always love a post I can write in an hour.

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Zach Davies logged 17 wins and a 3.90 ERA in 33 starts for the Milwaukee Brewers last season. He did so — as my colleague Travis Sawchik detailed in September — as a major-league outlier. Compared to the bulk of his contemporaries, the svelte right-hander is both undersized and velocity-challenged.

Neither of those things is about to change, at least not in a stand-up-and-take-notice way. Genetics are what genetics are. Not that he would mind adding a little meat to his six-foot frame and an extra inch or two to his not-so-fastball. The 25-year-old finesse specialist believes that each would be an asset to his already effective game.

Davies discussed that very game, including his velocity and his approach to sequencing and speed differential, earlier this spring.

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Davies on adding weight and (hopefully) velocity: “I went into the offseason trying to get stronger and put on some weight — that’s always a goal for me — and I’m up to 170 now. I was 160 last year. I think the extra weight has multiple benefits for me. Adding a little velo — I hovered right around 90 last year — would definitely be a positive, and the weight should at least help keep me healthy throughout the year.

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­On Sunday, the Washington Post reported that the omnibus spending bill currently being considered by Congress may include statutory language insulating Major League Baseball from liability for not paying minor leaguers minimum wage. This may be the first time on FanGraphs that we are going to be discussing an omnibus spending bill. But it’s relevant in this case.

Readers are likely familiar with the lawsuits filed by Minor League Baseball players alleging that their pay — generally around $1,100 per month for first-year players, with no pay for spring training — is a violation of a law called the Fair Labor Standards Act because it failed to pay minor leaguers even minimum wage. Thus far, the suits have had mixed results: one suit that attacked Major League Baseball’s antitrust exemption was dismissed last summer, but another suit, which has been pending for over three years now, remains extant. Paying minor leaguers minimum wage would cost MLB franchises an extra $5.5 million per year. Minor leaguers are not members of the MLBPA.

Nathaniel Grow already covered the problems these suits face in a pair of excellent articles I recommend highly. My own take, as someone who has personally litigated about two dozen class actions in one form or another, is that one suit, in particular, has a shot. (The reasons why are complex enough to deserve their own article, but if you’re curious, that case is Senne et al. v. Office of the Commissioner of Baseball et al., and I think that Garrett Broshuis, the plaintiffs’ lead attorney, had the right idea in the very clever way he pleaded his complaint.) That said, even if none of the lawsuits had any legal merit whatsoever — which is not, I believe, the case — defending such suits is expensive, and there is always risk inherent to any contested litigation.

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On Monday, Craig Edwards began our positional power rankings series by evaluating the catchers. If you’re unfamiliar with the process or concept, Jeff explained the series yesterday, too. Today, we tackle first base.

First base is at an interesting place. There remains plenty of familiar star power at the top of FanGraphs position rankings here, from Paul Goldschmidt to Anthony Rizzo to Joey Votto, the type of lineup-anchoring sluggers you expect to find at a position that is typically a run-production workhorse. There are also emerging young stars like Cody Bellinger and perhaps Matt Olson.

And first base has become home to a growing number of fly-ball revolutionaries, players attempting to make swing changes to get under the ball and save or extend careers standing by improving their overall offensive efficiency. It makes sense that players like Yonder Alonso, Logan Morrison and Ryan Zimmerman would be among those motivated to launch more pitches into the air since they don’t have much defensive versatility to fall back upon.

First base, from a production standpoint, also appears to be a healthy place. First basemen led all position groups with a 113 wRC+ last season, their second-highest mark of the last decade. First basemen also produced their collective second-highest WAR total (80.7) of the last 10 years.

But the position has become crowded and so loaded with offensive sources that free-agent first basemen were having trouble finding work this winter. Power has become so common, so easy to find, it’s become devalued. For instance, Morrison hit 38 home runs last season and posted a 130 wRC+ but had to settle for a one-year, $2.5-million deal.

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