Maybe it was the fact that she spent her formative years in Germany, while I spent most of mine in Jamaica and America’s South, but my mother and I have always disagreed about a fundamental thing when it comes to the weather. For her, she wants the sun. It doesn’t matter if it’s bitter cold and dry; if the sun’s out, she’s fine. I’d rather it was warm. Don’t care if there’s a drizzle or humidity or whatever.

It turns out, when we were disagreeing about these things, we were really talking about pitching. Mostly because life is pitching and pitching is life.

But also because the temperature, and the temperature alone, does not tell the story of pitching in the cold. It’ll make sense, just stick with it.

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It is abundantly clear which team won the R.A. Dickey trade. Acquiring Noah Syndergaard, Travis d’Arnaud, John Buck, and Wulimer Becerra from the Blue Jays for Dickey, Josh Thole, and Mike Nickeas in December 2012 has paid off for the New York Mets in a big way. This isn’t a particularly controversial opinion in need of detailed supporting evidence, but Spencer Bingol covered the particulars of the Mets’ heist several months ago, even before Noah Syndergaard turned into a starter who pitches like a lights-out closer.

Barring something unexpected, the Mets will have gotten more wins at a lower price from their part in the trade than the Blue Jays will have from their part in the trade by the time Dickey’s contract expires at the end of this season. Then the Mets will continue to reap the benefits for several more seasons while d’Arnaud, Syndergaard, and Becerra remain under team control. There’s no way, in an absolute sense, to spin this as anything but a win for Mets and a loss for the Blue Jays.

This kind of retrospective analysis is valuable, but it is a bit simplistic. The interesting question isn’t which set of players performed better; that’s obvious.  The interesting question is if the Blue Jays would have been better off not making the trade.

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Any half-decent statistical analysis will tell you that Clayton Kershaw is the best pitcher in baseball. This is just about inarguable. Kershaw has pitched at an unbelievable level, and he’s been able to do it for an unbelievable amount of time. He has the peak and the track record, so while there have been other great pitchers, there aren’t any Kershaws, by the numbers. This is why Kershaw gets the best projections. Projections are our statistical measures of true talent, and Kershaw’s talent is alone by itself.

I know, I know, Jake Arrieta. And, yeah, I know, Chris Sale, and Jacob deGrom, and so on. I mean no disrespect to anyone else. Kershaw has just had the strongest argument, so I’m using him here as the point of comparison. Because, you see, we have a new potential contender. We’ve all noticed Noah Syndergaard, and people are starting to ask questions. I see it on Twitter. I saw it in Dave’s most recent FanGraphs chat. I heard it on the Effectively Wild podcast. The big question, which seems absurd but improbably isn’t: is Syndergaard now better than Kershaw? Is Syndergaard suddenly the best?

Let me be straight with you: I haven’t decided. Part of me thinks it’s stupid to even consider. The rest of me thinks we could be on to something. At least, Syndergaard does have a real argument. I’m going to lay it out below as I try to talk myself through the issue.

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Building a rotation is a difficult task for any organization. Drafting and developing prospects takes time and patience and often yields little in the way of results. Free agency is incredibly expensive not merely for proven pitchers, but unproven and mediocre ones, as well. Trades mean giving up talent and making sacrifices for the future. There is not a best way to build a rotation, but some teams have more limitations than others financially and the most efficient way to build a rotation includes young, cost-controlled starters. Ideally, a team would want the best rotation at the least possible expense. It’s a difficult task, but the New York Mets (to name one team) appear to have accomplished it.

A few weeks ago, FanGraphs previewed the 2016 by using the Depth Chart Projections found here to rank the teams by position. While the exercise itself is most useful for creating context around the projections — and to highlight individual players and teams — the foundation for the whole endeavor is the projections themselves. While often a very small difference exists between certain teams in terms of wins, it’s also true that two equally productive starting rotations, for example, can have very different costs (in dollars). That has an effect on how the corresponding teams can distribute salary throughout the rest of their respective rosters.

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On Sunday, with two outs in the bottom of the seventh, Boston reliever Noe Ramirez fielded a comebacker off the bat of Toronto center fielder Kevin Pillar. He flipped it to Hanley Ramirez for the putout. It wasn’t a particularly momentous occasion, but it got me thinking — was this the first ever Ramirez to Ramirez putout in major-league history? I probably would have let it go right there (I’m pretty lazy, after all) but Jim Reedy pointed out that there have only been 29 Ramirezes in major-league history, and that didn’t seem like to daunting of a number. So I dove in.

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Aroldis Chapman was supposed to be a starter. Maybe supposed is a strong word, but when he debuted in professional baseball as a 22-year-old out of Cuba in Triple-A, he did so as a starting pitcher, and if not for injuries to then-Reds closer Ryan Madson and a handful of other Cincinnati relief pitchers, the club seemed prepared to have Chapman open the 2012 season in the starting rotation.

But those injuries happened, and Chapman instead returned to the bullpen, where he’d pitched for the previous season and a half. He returned to the bullpen, he was handed the keys to the ninth inning, and he hasn’t given them back since. Watching Chapman on the baseball field in the ninth inning has been a treat all these years, but it’s always felt like something of a missed opportunity. Sure, we see the 104 mph fastball and the strikeout rates over 50%, but it’s almost felt like cheating, in a sense. It’s all still remarkable, yeah, but this is a guy who could start, throwing just one inning at a time.

Don’t we all want to see what he could do if he came out in the first and pitched as deep as he could every game? Aren’t we curious how much of the stuff would carry over during the transition? Wouldn’t it be fun if Chapman didn’t lose anything, and routinely threw six or seven innings with the same caliber stuff he throws in the ninth? At some point over the last couple years, we’ve all accepted the fact that we’d probably never get to see it in action, Aroldis Chapman the starter.

And then Noah Syndergaard made his first start of the 2016 season.

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With the start of the regular season just four days away, we find ourselves in the thick of preview season. No matter where you look, it all boils down to the question: what’s 2016 going to look like? At FanGraphs, we’ve just wrapped up our yearly Positional Power Rankings that assess the season through the lens of each position.

As you might have noticed, each team is made up of the sum of these positional projections and they will all start playing together as 30 units in nine-inning contests next week. If you’re into that sort of thing, we offer Playoff Odds that estimates each club’s shot at postseason baseball (explained here).

It’s important to remember, for all the reasons cited in the previous link, that these projected standings are incapable of total precision. In reality, even with a perfect model for individual player projections, you still wouldn’t hit on every team. And we don’t have anything close to a perfect model for individual players. Yet these projections do offer an objective reading of where the teams stand relative to one another based on what we know. They might wind up being wrong, but they’ll be wrong because they’re flawed not because they’re trying to write an interesting narrative.

Despite clear signs of parity, especially in the American League, our projections think only one division is going to be particularly close: the National League East.

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A week ago, the St. Louis Cardinals learned they were going to be without Jhonny Peralta for the first couple of months of the season, after he required surgery to repair a torn ligament in his thumb. Because the Cardinals have been participating in a multi-year experiment to see if you can win games without a viable backup shortstop on the roster, speculation immediately turned to outside acquisitions, since no one thinks running Jedd Gyorko out there on an everyday basis is a good idea. While Erick Aybar was floated as a natural fit, given that he’s in a walk year on a rebuilding team, the Braves quickly hung a high price tag on him, making a deal between the teams unlikely.

Instead, the Cardinals seem likely to make a more minor move, not wanting to create a mid-season playing time problem when Peralta does return. And on the minor acquisition spectrum, there was always one name who made a decent amount of sense: Ruben Tejada.

The signing of Asdrubal Cabrera made Tejada superfluous for the Mets, pushing him into a third-string shortstop role that probably wouldn’t have resulted in a lot of playing time. Even with Cabrera having his own health problems, the Mets still seemed perfectly content to let someone else have Tejada if they wanted him, and his availability was no secret around the league. And then today, the Mets made the speculation official, putting Tejada on waivers, and giving any team the chance to take him if they so desire. While Tejada doesn’t yet have a new uniform, his days as a Met are over, and now we simply wait for the seemingly inevitable announcement that he’ll be signing with the Cardinals.

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Once Major League Baseball announced last month that New York Mets relief pitcher Jenrry Mejia had been permanently suspended from the sport after testing positive for performance enhancing drugs for the third time, it was probably only a matter of time until Mejia threatened to pursue legal action against the league. Even though Mejia can petition commissioner Rob Manfred for reinstatement next year, the earliest that he would be allowed to return to the playing field would be 2018. Considering that Mejia only appeared in seven games last season for the Mets — between serving his initial, 80-game suspension and subsequent, 162-game suspension for PED use — by the time Mejia is potentially eligible to return to action he would have effectively missed the better part of a minimum of three seasons, a difficult absence for anyone to overcome.

So given that, it’s not particularly surprising that Mejia announced last week that he intends to challenge his lifetime suspension. In particular, Mejia claims that officials from MLB threatened him in 2015 following his second positive PED test — results that he insists were inaccurate — allegedly telling him that the league would “find a way to find a third positive” if Mejia appealed his 162-game suspension. Even though Mejia did not appeal that second suspension, he is nevertheless now accusing MLB of conspiring to drive him from the game.

Moreover, Mejia’s attorney, Vincent White, went one step further on Friday, announcing that he’d spoken to a witness who claims that MLB has previously hired third party contractors to hack into players’ social-media accounts in order to look for evidence linking the players to PEDs. (MLB has, not surprisingly, officially denied all of these accusations.)

Unfortunately for Mejia, despite the attention-grabbing nature of these allegations, his odds of successfully overturning his permanent suspension appear to be pretty slim.

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In absolute terms, we know that strikeouts are at an all-time high. We see it in box scores, talking heads consistently discuss and lament the phenomenon on broadcasts, and in truth, it’s been going on for years. We’re left to wonder and analyze where the ceiling is for this trend, and exactly where the line between passable and unacceptable strikeout totals for batters begins and ends. For pitchers — whose velocity is a main factor in the increased strikeout numbers — going to work must be that much more enjoyable. And, in 2015, it was most enjoyable in terms of strikeouts for the rotations of the Chicago Cubs and Cleveland Indians.

If we look at strikeout rates for individual team seasons over the course of baseball history, no one struck out batters at a higher clip than the rotations of the 2015 Indians (24.2%) and 2015 Cubs (23.9%). That isn’t really surprising given the strikeout trend of recent years, but in mid-June of last season, the Indians’ rotation was actually on pace for the third-highest league-adjusted strikeout rate since 1950. At that point in time, they were striking out a historic rate of batters in a historic strikeout period, which is the sort of thing that tends to lend itself to positive team results. It didn’t, but most of that wasn’t the rotation’s fault (hello, team defense!), and the ridiculous strikeout pace didn’t quite continue into the second half of the season.

In the end, they finished as the 41st-best league-adjusted strikeout rotation, which really isn’t too bad: they ended up striking out almost 27% more batters than the league average starting rotation in 2015. Here’s the 2015 Indians compared to the best 15 league-adjusted strikeout rotations since 1950 by K%+ (percentage points above average compared to a given year’s league average strikeout rate):

In case you’re wondering, the 2015 Cubs finished 105th-best, with a K%+ rate of 120. Also not bad, but it’s illustrative of just how many strikeouts a team has to amass to make a run at breaking the record. And so I wondered: what strikeout rate would it take in 2016 to break the league-adjusted rate? And do the Cubs or Indians (or another rotation) have any realistic shot at breaking it?

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