This represents the first post by new contributor Sheryl Ring. An attorney in the Chicago area, Ring will cover legal matters for FanGraphs. We’re excited to have her!

Until this week, Juan Carlos Nunez was most famous for having made a website for a fake company selling a fake product, in an attempt to convince the world that Melky Cabrera’s flunked drug test in 2012 wasn’t really Melky’s fault. Since those revelations, Nunez has been barred from baseball permanently and also spent a few months in prison for his involvement with Biogenesis. You would have been forgiven for thinking it would be the last you’d hear of Juan Carlos Nunez.

But if baseball is done with Nunez, it seems as though Nunez isn’t quite done with baseball. This week, Nunez filed a 30-page lawsuit against his former employer, Athletes’ Careers Enhanced and Secured, Inc. (ACES, for short), demanding $3 million in damages. ACES is one of the largest and most well known baseball agencies.  According to MLBTradeRumors’ Agency Database, ACES is the current representation for stars like Charlie Blackmon, Carlos Carrasco, and Dustin Pedroia among more than 50 other notable major leaguers. And in 2012, ACES represented Cabrera, as well. You might also have heard of ACES’ two most high-profile names, Sam and Seth Levinson, who are also named as defendants in Nunez’s lawsuit. Sam is the President of ACES; Seth is its CEO.

Nunez contends in the Complaint that the Levinsons knew about Nunez arranging for players to receive performance enhancing drugs like HGH from Anthony Bosch and Biogenesis and actually instructed Nunez to distribute those PEDs to players. Nunez says that better performance meant better numbers and bigger paychecks for players — and bigger commissions for the Levinsons and ACES. According to the Complaint, the Levinsons wanted Nunez to make Biogenesis a selling point in his pitch to get new players to sign with ACES. Nunez even namechecks a couple of stars in his Complaint, alleging that he personally, with the Levinsons’ knowledge and approval, arranged for Nelson Cruz to receive HGH in the early 2012 to help him recover from an infection. And Nunez also says that the whole fake-website debacle was the Levinsons’ idea. As you can imagine, there is a lot to unpack here.

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Last week, I published KATOH’s 2018 top-100 list. It was the fourth such preseason list to appear at FanGraphs. Unfortunately, it will also be the last.

I am embarking on a new opportunity in the baseball industry that prohibits me from working in the public sphere, which means no more KATOH. As much as I’d love to brag about how awesome this opportunity is, unfortunately that is all I can say about it.

Writing for FanGraphs was something I aspired to do since I stumbled upon the site as a teenager nearly a decade ago. I’ll be forever grateful to Dave Cameron and David Appelman, who hired me based on what was little more than an idea and stuck with me as I continually worked out the kinks. I also owe a debt of gratitude to Paul Swydan, who first brought me into the fold at the Hardball Times despite my undeveloped writing skills.

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Me, I’m kind of sick of hearing about J.D. Martinez. I’m sick of hearing about all the free agents. All I want is for the ones who’ll get jobs to get jobs so that we can move on with all our affairs. Seems like Martinez is destined to end up in Boston. Arizona is reportedly trying to stay involved by playing with what present and future money they have, but you can never really tell what information is just out there because Scott Boras wants it to be. It would remain surprising if Martinez doesn’t spend 2018 in a Red Sox uniform. Someone will simply have to give in.

To Martinez’s credit, a lot of us probably do take him for granted. When you talk about free agency, you talk about the future, but Martinez has put together a remarkable past. At least as far as the recent era goes, Martinez is among the original so-called swing-changers. He’s a daily reminder that even the Astros don’t get everything right. And, since 2014, 289 players have batted in the majors at least 1,000 times, and Martinez has ranked fifth in wRC+, between Bryce Harper and Paul Goldschmidt. Martinez isn’t much of a runner, and he isn’t much of a defender, and he turned 30 years old in August. Guy can hit, though. He was perfect for the home-run era, even before the era began.

That’s an introduction about J.D. Martinez. Now let’s use him to talk about somebody else.

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No matter what you think about the Marlins’ rebuild, there’s no getting around the fact that they’re rebuilding. Or, to put it in Derek Jeter’s words, building. The Marlins had what might’ve been baseball’s best outfield, but it’s been completely dismantled, and then some. Outfielder Giancarlo Stanton was traded. Outfielder Marcell Ozuna was traded. Outfielder Christian Yelich was traded. Infielder Dee Gordon was traded, and moved to the outfield. You could say the Marlins have traded four starting outfielders, then, which doesn’t seem like something that’s normally possible, but here we are, and the regular season is going to be rough.

From the Marlins’ perspective, 2018 hardly matters anymore. That is, in terms of major-league success. It’s going to be a bad season, and all they’ll care about is player development, and making more moves. I don’t think the Marlins much care if they win 50 or 60 or 70 games. This being a season like any other, though, we can still analyze the Marlins, for our own fun. I’m sure the team understands the numbers will be ugly. Just how ugly might they be?

This post is interactive. Following the text will be one single poll.

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Over the last several weeks, Lars Anderson has regaled us with stories from his time in Australia. If you’ve been following along, you know that the 30-year-old former big leaguer began his Down-Under adventure with the club-level Henley and Grange Rams, then took his talents to the Australian Baseball League’s Sydney Blue Sox. Along the way, he experienced a cultural joy ride that was sometimes thoughtful, often absurd, and nearly always entertaining.

In the final installment of this series, Lars says goodbye to Australia and, in all likelihood, to his baseball career.

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Lars Anderson: “Yet another season has come to an end. Another round of heartfelt thanks and goodbyes both given and received. Another locker room left empty, with trash bins full of worn-out spikes and sweat-stained hats. And once more, as faithful as the rotating seasons, a ‘summer’ that started with complete strangers ended in solemn friendship and brotherhood. I watched them recede down that well-worn road into my past. Odds are, we’ll never see each other again.

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Pitchers and catchers report to camps this week, and while overaged futility infielders 14 years removed from shoulder surgery have a few more days before going on the clock, here I am, too. For those unfamiliar, I’m Jay Jaffe, FanGraphs’ newest senior writer. I’ve spent the past 11-ish years writing about baseball full time, first for Baseball Prospectus and then Sports Illustrated, with a pit stop at the lamentably late Pinstriped Bible and, this past summer, a book called The Cooperstown Casebook.

At any given time, there are only a few hundred people who get to write about baseball for a living. In that regard, as in so many others, I’m a very lucky person. Luck is the residue of design, as Branch Rickey famously said long before I came along. (While old enough to be disqualified from prospect lists, I’m not that old). It’s a mantra I’ve repeated for decades.

I didn’t rise through the ranks of traditional baseball coverage; instead, as a biology major-turned-graphic-designer who one moonlit evening in mid-2001 decided that the world simply couldn’t live without my opinions about baseball, I started up The Futility Infielder. Thanks to some exhaustive coverage of the Hall of Fame balloting — a renewable wellspring I somehow had the good fortune to stumble across — I came to the attention of Baseball Prospectus a couple years later. After creating a catchy (and surprisingly enduring) metric for Hall fitness, I began a long run at BP, gradually transitioning out of the design world and into full-time writing. In May 2012, SI hired me to start up their new daily baseball blog, where I was free to apply the kind of analysis that I’d had been doing in parallel to so many other statheads, this time via a mainstream platform.

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Jeff Sullivan wrote last week that the DH just had its worst season. That was the main point of his piece. Along the way, though, Jeff also did some myth-busting with regard to how the DH spot is being utilized these days. There’s an emergent belief that the DH has become a revolving door on many clubs, used more often to keep players fresh and create roster flexibility, and less often to simply give a lone, defensively challenged hitter a full complement of at-bats.

What Jeff found contradicts this belief, however. Last season, the top-15 designated hitters in the AL accounted for 64% of plate appearance. Since 1973, though, the average for primary DHs is just 56%.

From Sullivan’s piece:

So designated hitters are hitting worse than ever not because of a transformation of the role itself but just because they’re hitting worse than ever.

While the collective production of DHs might improve in 2018, it’s still a bleak landscape, with only seven AL teams projected to produce a win or better from the position. The Mariners (3.0 WAR), Yankees (2.6), Indians (2.4), Athletics (1.8), and Rangers (1.2) account for the top-five DH teams. Their respective depth charts at the position are led by Nelson Cruz, Brett Gardner, Khris Davis, Edwin Encarnacion, and Shin-Soo Choo. The average age of those players is 34.2 years. While the DH position often allows for aging bats with diminishing defense to find their way into the lineup, there is hardly a youth movement occurring at the position. It’s possible the position is even weaker than in 2017.

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Among the players who’ll appear on next year’s Hall of Fame ballot, Mariano Rivera is likely to stand out as a no-doubter in his first try. He’s the all-time saves leader. He was dominant in the regular season and even more dominant in the playoffs. He’s regarded as the greatest reliever ever, and he did it all with just a single pitch.

Roy Halladay might not possess the same quantity of superlatives as Rivera, but he is worthy of enshrinement and there is little reason to delay his entry to the Hall past next year. Halladay’s untimely passing will likely bring a more somber tone to his candidacy. At this site, both Jeff Sullivan and Dave Cameron wrote touching tributes to Halladay’s career after his death. That said, Halladay needn’t benefit from sympathy or nostalgia to earn a place in the Hall. His case on the merits is very strong.

Based on the traditional measures alone, the argument for Halladay is decent, if not rock solid. Some notable facts:

• He has 200 pitcher wins and two Cy Young Awards. Every other pitcher to do so is in the Hall of Fame except for Roger Clemens.
• Of the 76 pitchers with at least a single Cy Young Award, only 15 recorded at least 200 wins and an ERA of 3.38 (Halladay’s career ERA) or better. Among that group, only Roger Clemens and Vida Blue (who pitched in a lower run-scoring environment) are absent from the Hall of Fame.
• In addition to Halladay’s two Cy Youngs, he finished second in the voting twice, third once, and fifth place on two more occasions. According to Cy Young Shares at Baseball Reference, Halladay’s total of 3.5 is behind only Roger Clemens, Randy Johnson, Greg Maddux, Clayton Kershaw, Steve Carlton, Pedro Martinez, Jim Palmer, and Tom Seaver.

So this is already a good start, but Halladay’s case goes well beyond these basic facts, too.

Halladay’s career was defined by greatness in an era dominated by hitters. Consider: since 1901, only 203 pitchers have reached 2,500 innings. Of those 203 pitchers, Halladay’s 3.38 career ERA ranks just 91st. But offense was hovering around record levels during much of his time as an active player. Relative to the era in which he pitched, Halladay’s actually prevented runs at a rate 24% better than average, and that mark actually ranks 15th since 1901. All 14 pitchers ahead of him by that measure are in the Hall of Fame except for Roger Clemens.

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The big news broke over the weekend, when the Cubs finally pulled Yu Darvish off the free-agent market. Not only is that good short-term news for the Cubs; it’s also bad short-term news for the Brewers and the Cardinals. It was, of course, expected for a while that the Cubs would eventually do something significant, but Darvish is about as significant as it was going to get. The division rivals already had needs, but the signing might’ve provoked a little greater urgency.

You can imagine the jokes when Monday morning brought news the Cardinals were signing Bud Norris. You might not actually need to imagine them — you might have authored some of them! It comes off as an uninspired response. Now, teams don’t actually need to make responses to other transactions. That’s just offseason narrative. And the Cardinals have already made an impact move in trading for Marcell Ozuna. It’s not like the Cardinals have been completely silent. But they haven’t made that Josh Donaldson-level move. They haven’t made that Manny Machado-level move. There’s impatience among the fan base, and the Darvish/Norris juxtaposition isn’t making anything feel any better.

I understand, in that Yu Darvish is analytically sexy. I understand, in that Bud Norris isn’t. Norris has never been a household name, nor has he been a particularly remarkable major-league pitcher. Let me put things differently, though. How would it feel if the Cardinals were instead signing Greg Holland? I have some tables to show you.

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