If Shohei Ohtani isn’t able to play in the major leagues next season, that would quickly make Yu Darvish the clear No. 1 free agent available this winter — and perhaps the only clear top-of-rotation arm. And even if Ohtani is cleared to migrate across the Pacific to play professional baseball, Darvish is likely to walk away as the highest-paid player from this free-agent class.

Yes, Darvish’s awful World Series performance is still fresh in the collective consciousness, but that shouldn’t negate his late-season work with the Dodgers. After some data-informed tweaks (documented here by Eno and also by Andy McCullough of the L.A. Times), Darvish was excellent. With the Dodgers in the second half, the right-hander struck out 61 and walked 13 in 49 innings.

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Zack Cozart is going to be an interesting free agent. I mean, at the major-league level, they’re all interesting free agents, but Cozart’s case is particularly intriguing, given his late-blooming power. Cozart seems like one of those guys who was built to take full advantage of a slightly livelier baseball, and given that he’s also a capable shortstop, he’s a valuable asset as long as his power exists. Cozart might not strike it super rich in the coming months, but he’ll get a healthy guarantee from someone. Teams like shortstops who can hit.

Speaking of which, kind of: Zach Vincej. I admit that this is going out on a limb. Not only was Vincej claimed by the Mariners off waivers from the Reds; the Mariners then outrighted Vincej to Triple-A, meaning he’s not on the 40-man roster. Vincej has been freely available, and I wouldn’t say there’s been a feeding frenzy. You probably haven’t heard of him. I hadn’t heard of him. Vincej is not, and never has been, a top prospect. He’s a 26-year-old with nine major-league at-bats.

But I haven’t been able to stop thinking about this. So I felt compelled to put this in writing. Vincej seems like a run-of-the-mill minor-league infielder. Yet he might be just the sort of player who’d most benefit from a promotion.

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When a baseball player dies, as Roy Halladay did yesterday, it can be difficult to know what to say. I never met Roy Halladay. I don’t have any personal anecdotes to share or any insight into who he was as a person. I don’t know his family. I only knew him through the television, when I watched him work. And you can’t really know a person that way.

The people that really did know Roy Halladay seemed enamored of him. In awe of him, not just as a player, but as a person. In the last 24 hours, the universal reaction within the baseball community has been that the game lost not just a guy who was great at pitching, but an ambassador for the sport. The stories that have emerged are both heartbreaking and inspiring. Stories like Jayson Werth’s:

“For a guy that was very serious, quiet and reserved, I can remember it like it was yesterday, the look on his face to see us waiting for him to celebrate together,” Werth said. “He loved the game but played for his teammates, for us to love him back like that you could tell it meant a lot. I’d never seen him so genuinely happy. I’ll never forget the expression on his face.”

I never got to see that Roy Halladay. Most of us probably don’t have that kind of connection with him, but yet, there is still the natural desire to mourn. For most of us, Roy Halladay wasn’t really part of our lives anymore, but it still feels like we lost something. So, today, while acknowledging that our loss cannot compare to the sort endured by those who knew him in a more personal way, I’d like to honor the Roy Halladay I did know.

This guy.

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Roy Halladay died in a plane crash on Tuesday, in the Gulf of Mexico, near to the Florida coast. He was the only victim, and he was 40 years old. Halladay loved to fly — following his retirement from baseball in 2013, it became one of his major pursuits.

We know Halladay for his career, and it was an incredible one. He ran a four-digit ERA in 2000, and three years later, he won the AL Cy Young. Seven years later, he won the NL Cy Young, and along the way he threw a perfect game and a playoff no-hitter while making an All-Star roster eight times. Out of a career nearly sidetracked before it really began, Halladay fashioned a Hall-of-Fame-worthy record. Few pitchers have ever worked with such efficient tenacity. As an opponent, Halladay seemed something other than human. He seemed something better. Humans aren’t programmed with such laser-like focus.

Halladay was the model of a professional athlete, and, from the sounds of things, he was the model of a person. He made no enemies, even out of his rivals. Those who knew him have always spoken highly. Some baseball players are said to be the most driven. Halladay actually was. Some baseball players are said to be the hardest workers. Halladay actually was. Some baseball players are said to be worth the price of admission. Halladay actually was. Halladay was everything you could possibly want, and that wasn’t a feeling shared just among fans.

I wanted to be Roy Halladay. I’m heartbroken, rest easy Doc.

— dan haren (@ithrow88) November 7, 2017

Roy Halladay was your favorite player’s favorite player. He left the game better than it was, and the same could be said of his community. Halladay was one of the special ones. You mourn the special ones. You mourn everybody, every mother and father and daughter and son, but, you mourn the special ones.

The Dodgers didn’t lose Game 7 specifically or the World Series generally due to a failure of their bullpen. That doesn’t mean the way Dave Roberts deployed his relievers won’t cost both the club and those pitchers down the line, though. There are indications that fatigue might be an issue. It’s not a product of how many total pitches the Dodgers pen threw. It’s about how those pitches were spaced out.

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Every year, around this time, I look forward to this post. I look forward to it because it checks the two boxes most important to me as a writer: the post is always popular, and I don’t have to try to come up with a new idea. It’s always the same idea, and it’s always the same basic research. What changes are the names and the dates and the numbers. It’s not that the research and prep are easy, but finding an idea is usually the challenge. That’s not a concern when you have a recurring series.

That being said, I get nervous. I always want to write about the worst called ball of the season, but, around the All-Star break, I tend to write about the worst called ball of the first half. Here’s this year’s. If that stands up as the worst called ball overall, then I’d have to decide if I want to write a second time about the same event. It’s preferable, to me, that the second half contain a ball that’s objectively even worse. The odds of that aren’t great; the second half is shorter than the first. They’re not actually halves at all.

Excitement and nervousness. My fingers are always crossed. This year, I got lucky again. The worst called ball of the first half was thrown on June 18. The worst called ball of the whole season was thrown on August 20. It was worse by a fraction of a fraction of one inch. The pitch-tracking technology isn’t truly that precise, to begin with. And this all depends on the upper and lower strike-zone boundaries, which are subjective, since they change for every hitter. I don’t have 100% confidence that the ball on August 20 was worse. But my confidence level is at least, I don’t know, 51%. That’s good enough to proceed.

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From my own perspective, at least, it’s always weird to turn the page. At some point, the content stops being about the season that was, and it starts focusing on the season ahead. There’s a transition period, but it’s not well defined, and shortly after the climax of the World Series, it’s just…done. It’s gone, and everyone starts to look forward. You never want to dwell on a season that’s completed, but you also don’t want to just skip that easily past the answers to the questions we were asking for months.

I don’t have much longer to write about 2017. You don’t have much longer to think about 2017. Unless you’re an Astros fan, in which case, yeah, keep on replaying everything in your mind. You’ve earned that. But now is the time for me to repeat the same polling project I’ve published twice before. While the 2017 season is still somewhat fresh in your minds, I’d like to analyze your collective brains. With your permission, of course.

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. 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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As we head into the off-season, there are a lot of different plans being made. Some teams are preparing to spend big on free agents, looking to upgrade their roster for 2018 without surrendering any talent. Others are looking to make win-now trades, eyeing upgrades currently on other teams. And a few teams are planning on being sellers, turning some big leaguers into players who might be more helpful when the team is ready to win.

But regardless of where a team is on the success cycle, every team is going to have answer the same question this winter. This question hangs over the evaluation of nearly every player in the big leagues, and will impact both what kinds of players a team will acquire, how they value them, or whether they feel their internal options are as good as what they can bring in from the outside. And this question has little to do with each player’s own abilities, yet might have a big impact on their expected performance.

In all 30 front offices, the off-season plan will be significantly impacted by one big variable: what kind of baseball should they expect to play with in 2018 and beyond?

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Heading into the 2017 campaign, a lot was expected of Jackie Bradley Jr. In 2016, he’d shown that his late-season breakout the previous year was no fluke. He recorded five wins, bashed a career-best 26 homers, and earned a place on the All-Star team for the first time. He was excellent on the defensive side of the ball, as well. There was sufficient reason to think he’d reach a new level.

Unfortunately, though, this season didn’t quite go as planned. If his career seemed to be trending up, the 2017 campaign changed that impression. It was an unexpected chapter in what has become a pretty strange career up to this point.

Let’s start with Bradley’s power output. In 2015, when then-interim manager Torey Lovullo finally gave Bradley a shot at regular playing time, he started pounding the ball with authority. For the 2015 season as a whole, he posted a .249 ISO. From his July 29 call-up to the end of the season, his ISO was .272. No one expected him to carry that over for a full season in 2016 — only 24 players have ever posted a .270 ISO for a whole season while manning center field, and the list of players who have done it more than one season is perilously short, including only Carlos Beltran, Joe DiMaggio, Jim Edmonds, Ken Griffey Jr., Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays, Duke Snider, Gorman Thomas, Mike Trout, and Hack Wilson. Ten guys.

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While the path to the decision took something of a circuitous route over the last couple of seasons, one of the least surprising developments of the weekend was the Pirates’ announcement that they would exercise Andrew McCutchen’s $14.5 million club option for 2018.

After an inexplicable 0.6 WAR campaign in 2016 and an ice-cold start to 2017, McCutchen finally figured things out and rebounded to finish the season with a .279/.363/.486 slash line and 3.7 WAR. If the status of McCutchen’s option was ever in doubt in May, he rendered it a non-issue with a massive June and July, resembling a legitimate superstar during that and other stretches.

According to Matt Swartz’s research, the cost of a win was $9 million from 2014 to -16. Steamer projects McCutchen to post a 3.1 WAR season. The outfielder could reasonably contribute close to $30 million in production, in other words. That’s considerable surplus value at the end of what has been one of the most club-friendly deals of the 21st century.

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