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.

“The game power plays beneath his raw because Vogelbach’s approach to hitting is often of the Take What You’re Given variety and he’s spraying contact all over the field.”

– Eric Longenhagen

FanGraphs’ lead prospect analyst wrote those words about Dan Vogelbach for last year’s Mariners list and largely echoed them in this year’s version, as well. The appraisal is accurate: Vogelbach has never put up the kind of power numbers that his hulking physique suggests he should.

He’s looking to change that. Seven years after the Cubs drafted him in the second round out of a Fort Myers, Florida, high school — and 20 months after the Mariners acquired him in the Mike Montgomery deal — Vogelbach has decided that what’s always worked for him isn’t working well enough.

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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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