Before we begin in earnest, here is a table showing the hardest thrown pitches of this young baseball season through Sunday’s games.

Right now, St. Louis right-hander Jordan Hicks is throwing harder than Aroldis Chapman. When he did it the first time, it drew some attention, but he repeated that performance on Sunday.

His hold on the title might not last, of course: Chapman could begin throwing harder, and Hicks might not be able to maintain this level of velocity all season. For example, the 21-year-old righty averaged only 98 mph on his fastball in his performance yesterday, getting four outs in what was the first appearance of his professional career without a day of rest.

Hicks was a starter throughout the minors, during which he recorded only 165.1 innings and never worked above High-A. There were indications during spring training that he might have the talent to deal with major-league hitters, but the team sent him to the minors after some issues with tardiness. Despite that, he made his way back to major-league camp and was added to the Opening Day roster even though it required the Cardinals to place Josh Lucas on waivers. Jeff Zimmerman discussed Hicks’ talent and scouting reports after Hicks made the team. We are beginning to see why the Cardinals believed he could impact the club at the highest level in potentially important spots.

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Don’t expect to see Yasmany Tomas at Chase Field anytime soon. The 27-year-old Cuban slugger was placed on outright waivers on Saturday, removing him from the Diamondbacks’ 40-man roster even as starting right fielder Steven Souza Jr. is sidelined for at least the first month of the season. The waiver move only further underscores the mistake the Diamondbacks made in signing Tomas to a six-year, $68.5 million contract in December 2014, a deal that has cost the team far more than money. He’s become the opposite of the gift that keeps on giving.

Tomas played in just 47 games for the Diamondbacks last year, hitting .241/.294/.464 with eight homers, an 89 wRC+, and 0.1 WAR before being sidelined by a groin injury that eventually required two surgeries, first in August and again in December. The additions of Souza via trade and Jarrod Dyson via free agency made clear at the outset of spring training that Tomas wasn’t guaranteed a starting job. Even with Souza’s pectoral strain, the Diamondbacks optioned Tomas to Triple-A Reno on March 25, and Sunday’s move now allows them to put that 40-man spot to better use. Given that he’s owed around $46 million through 2020, Tomas is unlikely to be claimed on waivers. Refusing an outright assignment and opting for free agency would void the remainder of his deal.

With the move, Tomas has become the game’s most expensive minor leaguer, making $10 million in salary plus another $3.5 million in the final installment of his signing bonus. You don’t see that every day, and for evidence how far out of sight and out of mind such a player can become, one need look only to the man he supplanted for that dubious title, countryman Rusney Castillo. The Red Sox signed Castillo to a seven-year, $72.5 million contract in August 2014. He recorded just an 83 wRC+ in 337 plate appearances spread over 2014-16 before the Sox outrighted him off their 40-man roster in June 2016. Now he’s buried in Triple-A — in part because adding him back would push them even further over the luxury-tax threshold. The Diamondbacks don’t have to worry about going over the $197 million threshold, but their $131.5 million Opening Day payroll nonetheless set a franchise record.

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Now that real baseball has finally started, we are very likely going to spend a lot more time here at FanGraphs discussing the game on the field. That’s a very good thing for all of us who love the sport. Before wading too deeply into the new season, however, let’s take one more look at how this offseason affected payrolls.

This past winter was an unusual one, with a number of free agents receiving significantly less than expected, and players and teams holding out for contracts all the way until the season’s start. Most of our pieces contained a general caveat that we would need to wait until all players had signed to really determine the effects of this offseason. I even spent some time wondering if we would have to wait until after next offseason to determine the longer-term effects of this past winter.

As we have now reached Opening Day, we have the opportunity to look at current payrolls and compare them to the same point last year. Here’s where we sit on Opening Day, per Cot’s Contracts.

The Boston Red Sox are well out in front of all teams, followed by the San Francisco Giants, Los Angeles Dodgers, Chicago Cubs, and Washington Nationals. Notable by their omission, the New York Yankees don’t appear among the top five. This is notable for several reasons.

• The Yankees haven’t placed outside the top three in MLB payroll since 1992, the year Marlins owner Derek Jeter was drafted. Melido Perez and Danny Tartabull were the team’s top-two players.
• The Yankees haven’t been outside the top two in MLB payroll since 1994, the last time a baseball season ended without a World Series.
• The last time the franchise had an Opening Day payroll lower than $167 million before this season was 2003, before Alex Rodriguez had ever played a game for the club.

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Each week, we publish in the neighborhood of 75 articles across our various blogs. With this post, we hope to highlight 10 to 15 of them. You can read more on it here. The links below are color coded — green for FanGraphs, brown for RotoGraphs, dark red for The Hardball Times and blue for Community Research.
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Whatever their other uses, records are valuable for the drama they’re capable of facilitating. Wondering if Player X or Team Y will surpass a standard established by their predecessors is part of how many enjoy baseball. While each era is distinct in some ways — Dazzy Vance’s 21.5% strikeout rate meant something very different in 1924 than it would have in 2017 — the raw numbers still possess their own considerable weight.

Some records seem nearly insurmountable, others less so. At the moment, the Mariners’ single-season record of 264 home runs, set in 1997, is seeming particularly vulnerable. And it wouldn’t be surprise if the Yankees were the ones to topple it.

Provided they remain healthy, Aaron Judge, Gary Sanchez, and Giancarlo Stanton are going to do plenty of damage. There are lots of yet-to-be-launched home runs littered elsewhere on the roster, as well. The game is trending toward the optimization of launch angles, the ball might be juiced, and the Yankees have unreal power.

I suspect we are all curious to observe the individual damage Stanton, the reigning NL MVP, will do in his new home. He’s going from Marlins Park and its 80 home-run park factor for right-handed hitters — 100 is average — to Yankee Stadium’s 124 right-handed HR factor. He’ll be able to splinter his bat and hit homers to right and right-center at New Yankee. Read the rest of this entry »

A week ago today, the author of the current post published his own contribution to FanGraphs’ positional power rankings — an examination, specifically, of designated hitters. In the context of the positional rankings, DH occupies a slightly uneasy place. For one, the position (or non-position, as it were) doesn’t actually exist in the National League, which means the pool of players is necessarily smaller. Also, attempting to understand the contributions of a DH in the context of wins presents some difficulties. On the one hand, owing to the absence of any defensive responsibilities, designated hitters are subject to a robust negative adjustment in the calculation of WAR. On the other hand, though, hitters who are deployed in the DH role tend to hit worse than when playing the field — what analysts typically characterize as a “DH penalty.”

While one, duly motivated, could dedicate some time and energy to improving upon the extant methodology for evaluating the position, it’s also true that good hitters, when utilized in a DH capacity, tend to be well acquitted by WAR, poor hitters less so — a point illustrated by the image below.

Here one finds the chart that accompanied the aforementioned power-rankings post. Teams further to the left are projected to produce more wins out of the DH spot in 2018; teams on the left, fewer of them. The Yankees and Red Sox, who employ Giancarlo Stanton and J.D. Martinez, respectively, are expected to fare well this season. The Mariners and Indians (Nelson Cruz, Edwin Encarnacion), too.

It’s the rightmost bar of this chart that probably deserves some attention, because it largely concerns Your 2018 WAR Leader.

The White Sox were forecast, just a week ago, to receive the fewest wins from the DH position of any American League club — and not just the fewest wins, but actually negative wins. Certain current events might serve to cast that projection in a curious light.

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A celebrity chef and restauranteur, a philanthropist, an icon in two cities, an All-Star in three, and the only player to collect at least 500 hits with four different franchises — Rusty Staub was all that and more. “Le Grand Orange,” who played in the major leagues from 1963 through 1985 and collected 2,716 hits including 292 homers, passed away on Thursday, hours before the start of the 2018 season and three days shy of his 74th birthday. If he wasn’t quite a Hall of Famer as a player, he most certainly was as a humanitarian, raising more than $100 million to combat hunger and to benefit the widows and families of police, firemen, and first responders killed in the line of duty.

“He was a George Plimpton character who didn’t have to be invented,” wrote Faith and Fear in Flushing’s Greg Prince.

A native of New Orleans, Daniel Joseph Staub — the son of a minor-league catcher — gained his first nickname from a nurse at the hospital he was born, for the red fuzz covering his head. Playing alongside older brother Chuck, he helped Jesuit High School to the 1960 American Legion national championship and the 1961 Louisiana State AAA championship. Major-league scouts from 16 teams beat a path to his door, and Staub wound up signing for a bonus of either $90,000 or $100,000 (sources differ) with the expansion Houston Colt .45s in 1961. He put in a big season for the Class-B Durham Bulls in 1962, leading the league with 149 hits and the next year, just eight days past his 19th birthday, was the Colts’ Opening Day right fielder. He went 1-for-3 that day, collecting an RBI single off the Giants’ Jack Sanford for his first hit, but batted a dismal .224/.309/.308 with six homers in 150 games for the 96-loss team, which was in its second year of existence.

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Two people walked into a bar. They settled every debate in the universe. Then they discussed baseball.

“Who is Mr. October?”

“Reggie Jackson. What my elders taught me anyhow. Read it was sarcastic at first, then Reggie grew into the role.”

“Mr. November?”

“Ain’t Jeets that’s for sure? Can’t take a crown because you were first in line when a calendar flips.”

A swig.

“Randy Johnson won Games Six and Seven of the World flippin’ Series. That boy never needed to grow, of course. Just found the right circumstance. We should all be so lucky and talented.”

“Sounds good to me.”

Peace in our time.

“What about Mr. March?”

Oh no.

“All the databases have ‘Mar/Apr’ in their splits. There have been 70 regular-season games played in March. What are we saying here? Beginnings don’t matter? Without a beginning there is no end. An ouroboros. With no March there is no October. There is no November. There’s no Christmas. I like Christmas.”

“Chanukkah is also…”

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After examining the most player-friendly free-agent contracts of the 2017-18 offseason, here I turn to the winter’s most team-friendly deals. As I explained previously, given the perfect storm of factors that suppressed free-agent spending relative to past winters, it feels unseemly simply to celebrate “winners” and pick on “losers.” I’m not here to punch down at a player such as Mike Moustakas, whose one-year, $6.5 million deal was less than one-tenth the value of estimates projected by Dave Cameron, the FanGraphs crowd, the MLB Trade Rumors crew, FanRag Sports’ Jon Heyman, and MLB.com’s Jim Duquette back in November.

Instead, I think it’s more appropriate to view the free-agent contracts in terms of team- and player-friendliness. While acknowledging that shorter deals are inherently more team-friendly, I’ve stuck with apples-to-apples comparisons for this column and the previous one by considering the one-year, two-year, and three-year deals in their own separate categories — and grouping those of four years or more together due to the small sample size. Here, price and expected WAR aren’t the only considerations: player age, fit with a team’s roster, and competitive situation are among the additional factors to weigh.

As a refresher, here’s a graphic breaking down major-league free-agent deals by contract length over each of the past six winters, using data from the MLB Trade Rumors Free Agent Tracker. I’ve omitted minor-league deals as well as those signed by international players, including Shohei Ohtani.

Four Years or More

Lorenzo Cain, Brewers: five years, $80 million

Of the winter’s five deals that offer four years or more, only those signed by Cain and Alex Cobb (four years, $57 million from the Orioles) feature a total value under $100 million. Between those two players, Cain (who turns 32 on April 13) has the longer track record for productivity than Cobb, having averaged more than four wins per season over the past four years. He recorded 4.1 WAR in 2017, his last in Kansas City. Cobb was worth 2.4 WAR last year and hasn’t been above 3.0 in any of his four seasons with at least 100 innings pitched, plus he lost most of 2015-16 to Tommy John surgery and (checks roster) remains a pitcher.

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After several posts and roughly 100,000 words, we’ve come to the end of the 2018 Positional Power Rankings. It’s our own FanGraphs version of a season preview, and in case you’ve missed anything — or in case you’ve missed everything! — you can navigate through the series using that little handy widget up above. We’ve got write-ups about every single team at every single position, informed by our own depth-charts projections. The projections don’t consider, say, character, or morale, but they do consider what players have done on the field. What players have done on the field is a great indicator of what players are likely to do on the field.

If you read all the way through the series, you might not need this post. You would already have an inkling of which teams have value, and where. All this is is a summary of what we’ve already published. Here, you can look at everything in one place, to maybe get the fullest understanding of how all the teams are presently built. If you’re game, let’s all examine some big giant tables.

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