PHOENIX, Ariz. – You are probably aware of Rich Hill’s story.

You are probably aware of his remarkable comeback and the excellent second act of his career. You probably know he is something of a sabermetric darling, having challenged conventional wisdom with his pitch usage. The A’s and Dodgers were willing to invest in his small sample of success in 2015 and 2016 thanks, in part, to spin rate, which has become newly measurable. Hill also appealed to traditional scouting eyes due to the deception of his delivery and his ability to make his curveball look like two or three pitches by mixing speeds, arm slots, and shapes.

This author certainly finds Hill to be of great interest. So when I visited Dodgers spring-training camp earlier this month, Hill was one of the players I was hoping to interview.

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Spring training is far too long. I think just about everyone agrees on that. But spring training is also wonderful, and it’s wonderful for two reasons. One, there’s baseball to watch. Baseball free of stakes and emotion, sure, but baseball, precious live baseball. And two, new baseball means new baseball statistics. They’re statistics we hardly make anything of, and they’re statistics that can be hard to track down in the first place, but numbers are numbers, and after an offseason spent reflecting on the same data over and over, it’s good to have new figures to consider. New numbers help fill the void in between new games.

You know that, on the individual level, spring-training stats are nearly worthless. The signal is drowned out by the noise, for so very many reasons. And even on the team level, you don’t want to take anything too seriously. Yes, four of the five best spring-training records in the American League belong to the Red Sox, Astros, Indians, and Yankees. But over in the National League, the Marlins have a better record than the Nationals. The Padres have a better record than the Cubs. Why should we care about team-level results? Even the teams barely care about team-level results.

And yet, there are league-level results. League-level results, covering hundreds of games and tens of thousands of plate appearances. Only there, when you put everything together, can you find numbers that might have real meaning. To get to the point more quickly, I’m just updating something I wrote about three weeks ago. Spring training is just about complete, with opening day right around the corner, and the league-level numbers are striking, in two areas in particular.

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There are three types of baseball. One is regular ol’ baseball. The second is extra-inning baseball, which is sometimes referred to as “#freebaseball”. And then finally, there’s Weird Baseball, stylized by the youths as “#weirdbaseball”.

Extra-inning baseball is like regular baseball, except — even more often than usual — batters are trying too hard to hit home runs. This leads occasionally to Weird Baseball. Scientists change their mind about what constitutes Weird Baseball once a month, during breaks when determining who is a millennial and who is not. Weird Baseball, at the moment, is technically denoted as baseball occurring in the 16th inning and onward.

I’m not the first to say it, but I’m the only to say in this blog post, that baseball is unlike other sports in that each team is tasked with playing basically every day. The result is a metronome-like effect, a dependable presence that lends order to life. But just like in life, chaos sometimes emerges from the order that baseball has created. Sometimes the chaos is a joyful sort; other times, it brings grief. In either case, it’s difficult to ignore. The chaos of #weirdbaseball is difficult to ignore.

Major League Baseball is trying to eliminate the chaos.

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I think I say the same thing every year, but, I suppose, tradition is tradition. I run a lot of polling projects, crowdsourcing the FanGraphs audience, but out of all the polling projects, I enjoy this one the most. I don’t enjoy the first post; I enjoy analyzing the results. This is the results-analysis post. So often, our site supplies projections, and that’s that. If you see a projection you don’t like, you might say something in the comments or post something on Twitter, but that’s the end of it. Here, you get to have a collective voice. Not that we’re going to adjust our team projections based on this, mind you, but this is a chance to see community feedback.

Here is where you can see our best projected standings, taking schedule into account. As always, those are based on ZiPS projections, Steamer projections, and manually-maintained team depth charts. Those standings have been available now for a little while, but that doesn’t mean you have to think they’re correct. So last week, I ran a post with 30 polls, asking for your input. Is a given projection too optimistic? Is a given projection too pessimistic? I’ve got everything you said in a spreadsheet. This community is more fond of the Brewers, and it’s not so fond of the Blue Jays. That probably doesn’t surprise you. After all, you, the reader, are a part of the voting community.

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A quick glance at the contract situation for the best players on the San Francisco Giants might make it appear as though the club is set up for the long haul. Of the Giants’ eight best players by projection this season, seven are locked up through at least 2020, with the eighth signed for two more seasons. Every single player expected to make a significant contribution is signed or under team control for at least two seasons, with Andrew McCutchen representing the only notable exception.

What that quick glance at the Giants’ contract situations might miss, however, is the ages of all of those contributors. With a veteran core, the Giants are very much in win-now mode and losing Madison Bumgarner — who likely won’t return until June after breaking his pinky finger — deals the team a big blow in what might be the team’s last best chance at another playoff run.

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Scott Kingery just signed a long-term deal with the Phillies for life-changing money. Congratulations, Scott! Of course, Kingery has yet to play in the big leagues, and that makes this deal unusual. The previous largest extension ever for a player who hadn’t yet debuted in the big leagues was Jon Singleton’s deal. That didn’t work out too well for the Astros, but Kingery is a great prospect. Odds are, Kingery will be fine, and this deal will be fine. That’s hard-hitting analysis for you.

There are two things in baseball that really pique my interest: rules and things that have never happened before. The Kingery extension is an example of the latter. This is something new, and that makes it interesting. What makes it doubly interesting is how my Twitter feed populated immediately after news of this deal had percolated through the interwebs for a time. People seemed to have one of two reactions:

1. Kingery signed a below-market deal just to avoid starting in the minors and having his service time manipulated, and therefore this contract is a joke.
2. The Phillies paid too much money to a guy who hasn’t shown anything (literally) at the big-league level yet, and therefore this contract is a joke.

The People seem to agree that the contract is a joke, but can’t quite agree on why. And both points can’t be true: if the contract is a joke because it’s a gross overpay, then it can’t also be a joke because it pays too little. And this got me thinking about the prisoner’s dilemma.

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Manny Margot upped his launch angle more than any other player in the second half of the 2017 season. Eno Sarris wrote about that fact in January, and as he did so with data alone, a not-insignificant piece of information remained unaddressed: How purposeful was the change, and what (or who) prompted it?

The answer to the latter question is Johnny Washington. San Diego’s assistant hitting coach made the suggestion, and knowing that “hitting the ball in the air gives you more chances in the gaps,” Margot took it to heart.

The 23-year-old outfielder confirmed that “right around the halfway point” is when he began trying to hit more balls in the air. The ways in which he accomplished that goal were twofold. Read the rest of this entry »

The Cardinals don’t have a rotation problem. Which is to say, they don’t have a rotation problem right now. What they do have — as the title of this post suggests — is a potential problem in the first few months of the season if the current members of the rotation underachieve. For most teams with fine rotations — like the Cardinals — the cause for concern is a lack of depth. That is not, however, the Cardinals’ issue at the moment. The Cardinals’ potential issue is that their current sixth and seventh starter might be significantly better than the pitchers in their starting five.

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GOODYEAR, Ariz. — As you might imagine, Joey Votto has excellent eyesight.

And as you might also suspect, Votto knows his exact quality of eyesight, improved after undergoing LASIK surgery as a minor leaguer.

“20-13 and 20-17,” Votto told FanGraphs of his most recent right and left eye test scores. “I had good vision beforehand. It started going wonky [early in my professional career]. I didn’t want to deal with contacts.”

At 33, Votto was the best hitter in the NL last season. After a down 2014 season, in which he was limited to 62 games, he’s shown no signs of aging– if anything, he has improved, “aging” like a bottle of Mouton-Rothschild.

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I remember, when I’ve written some positional power rankings before, I got to write about shortstops. And when I wrote about shortstops, Troy Tulowitzki ranked way above everyone else. It was always laughable at the time how much better he was than his peer group. It’s no longer so laughable because now this paragraph just serves as a reminder that we all get older and time is a monster to even the innocent. Tulowitzki is never healthy these days and we’ve entered a whole new age of young and talented super-shortstops. But anyway, I’m drifting from the point. When I wrote about prime Tulowitzki, I got a kick out of how much better he was than the next-best guy. Now I’ve gotten the chance to write about center fielders. This is the hardest I’ve laughed in days.

When this post went up a year ago, the Angels were first at 8.3 projected WAR, and the Rays were second at 4.7. And now, the gap has only grown. The gap between the Angels and the Rays is, by itself, bigger than almost every single team’s center-field WAR projection. You aren’t here because you needed to be reminded that Mike Trout is good. I’m not here because I need to remind you that Mike Trout is good. But just in case anyone was slipping — just in case you hadn’t thought about it enough recently — Mike Trout is good. Mike Trout is so good that, if you took Mike Trout, and then you removed from him enough talent to make the next-best center fielder, you’d still have enough left over to have an All-Star center fielder. Provided you took only talent, and not arms or legs or eyes. Even Trout’s career couldn’t survive the loss of one of those. (Probably.)

Below, summaries of every team’s center-field situation. Here’s the introduction to this series, in case you’re behind. If you are behind, boy, do you ever have a lot of reading to do. Cancel your plans for the weekend.