Is it still cool to talk about contact hitting, or are we past that? I don’t think we should be past that. Not yet, not as long as the Royals remain the defending champions. So, you remember all this stuff. It was a big part of the Royals conversation during last year’s playoffs. Yeah, the Royals had a really strong bullpen, and an incredible team defense, but they wound up mostly defined by their insistence on putting the ball in play. For better or worse, that’s the association. The Royals were the contact team. As a matter of fact, they were arguably the best contact-hitting team since at least 1950. I personally don’t care too much about what happened before 1950, not when I’m talking about statistics.

The Royals are a loyal organization, so they brought back a lot of their players. There’s been a little mixing up, but for the most part they’re still the familiar Royals, so it shouldn’t surprise you they’re again running a low strikeout rate. It’s a pretty sticky metric, strikeouts. As much as the Royals have put the ball in play, though, they’ve so far been surpassed in that regard. Filter out pitchers, and the Royals have baseball’s seventh-lowest rate of strikeouts. They’re a little higher than the A’s. They’re a little higher than the Marlins. And so on, and then there are the two standouts. To this point, at least as far as not striking out goes, the Angels and Giants have been on another level.

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If you look at the positional adjustments for Wins Above Replacement on our website, it looks like left and right field are equally valuable, and the second-easiest positions to play on the field. Generally, that seems about right — first base is where you put your slugger, and the corner-outfield spots is where you put your other sluggers.

And yet, if you look for bats that qualified for the batting title (and didn’t play catcher, the most platooned position on the field), you’ll find that there are fewer left fielders than any other position, and significantly so. Only 15 left fielders qualified last year. Even shortstop had 20 guys who reached that threshold. If you look at the Fans Scouting Report, left fielders were better defensively last year (overall and in almost every component) than they had been before in the life of the Report.

It seems that there’s a bit of a difference between left and right field, and in the types of players who are playing those positions. So I thought it made sense to ask the players what the difference actually was. It’s not as easy as putting the better arm in right field because he has a longer throw to third base.

Tim Leiper, Blue Jays first base coach: “The nuances for me… when the ball is hit directly at you, it’s learning how to open up toward the line. If you’re in right field and it’s a right-handed hitter, and he hits it directly at you, he probably stayed inside the ball and it’s going to slice to the line a little bit. Same thing with a left-handed hitter to left field. But I find that left-handed hitters actually have more slice to the ball than right-handed hitters. That’s probably because they’re right-hand dominant. The spin is different. I think the right-handed hitter’s balls have a lot more chance to stay true. I also think some outfielders maybe open up in one direction better than the other.”

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The Angels lost to the Cubs 9-0 on Monday. Garrett Richards didn’t allow all of those runs, but he did allow more than zero runs, so he took the loss. He needed 97 pitches to go five innings, and he allowed six hits and three walks, so it’s not like Richards just had the game of his life. If I were most people, I’d probably take this opportunity to write some happy words about Jake Arrieta. But I’m not most people, and I’m particularly enthusiastic about Richards’ changeup. Yesterday kicked off the slate of games that matter, and Richards threw nine changeups. Why is that important? Last season, Richards threw one changeup. The season before, he threw all of 15. This is a legitimate thing, now. Richards is going to try to throw changeups. Now we’re going to watch all of Monday’s.

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There’s not a lot of footage out there of Garrett Richards throwing a changeup. This is because he would pretty much never throw a changeup, and this is because doing so never made him feel all that comfortable. So, in the past, Richards wouldn’t throw many changeups, but, below, you can see Richards throw a changeup from just a few weeks ago. As a bonus, I’ll also include an additional changeup, thrown on Tuesday.

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Last week, I ran a little crowdsourcing project in which I asked you all to assign some made-up risk points – between one and five of them — to each and every roster in the major leagues. It was inspired by a passing comment from my weekly Tuesday chat, and it got me thinking about overall team volatility.

And, perhaps volatility is the word I should’ve used, rather than risk. I asked people to consider factors like average age of the team, proven vs. unproven players, injury risks in key contributors, and organizational depth. But risk implies you’ve got something to lose, and so even though I included a disclaimer that read, “This isn’t about how good or bad a team is. The Braves shouldn’t automatically be more risky than the Cubs just because they’re a worse baseball team. Try and think of each team’s amount of risk in a vacuum, relative to its own general skill level,” I should’ve known that, since the Braves aren’t really risking anything this year, they’d show up with a low risk rating no matter what.

So I probably screwed up my own project with a poor word choice and skewed the results a little bit, but we can still talk about some pretty interesting nuggets of information that came out of the results, and if you’re interested in reading that, well, you’ve come to the right place.

Getting back to that projected performance vs. projected team risk topic, here’s a graph plotting the two against one another:

The average risk rating was exactly 3.0. Definitely, worse teams were given lower risk ratings, and better teams were given higher risk ratings. Only three teams projected for a record better than .500 had significantly below-average risk ratings. The six worst projected teams in baseball had risk ratings barely above 2.0.

You see that dot way out on the right, though, and that’s the dot that was at the heart of this whole project. The point was to find the team you all found most risky, and no matter what the results were, there was always going to be a team. That team was the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, with a weighted risk rating of 4.3.

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Early next week, our Positional Power Rankings are going to turn to the pitching staffs. I’m slated to write about the top 15 starting rotations, and if I were to begin writing that piece now, I’d end up discussing how the Dodgers have the best starting rotation in the game. This is a controversial statement, because the Dodgers are built upon fragility, and they’ve already had something like 27 pitchers injured. How could the Dodgers possibly have a better rotation than, say, the Mets? The Mets roll four or five deep. They have three could-be aces. It’s easy to love the Mets; it’s correct to love the Mets. The argument for the Dodgers is that they have plenty of depth, and it’s also — importantly — that they have Clayton Kershaw. Kershaw’s not hurt, and Kershaw is basically two aces in one. No rotation has a better starting point.

I’ll write about that next week. I’ll write about it using many of the same words. When ranking the best groups, I think people have a bias toward even spreads over something more top-heavy. All of this here also functions as a spoiler. The PPR series runs down the rankings at every individual position, but a question a lot of people like to debate is, which team has baseball’s best outfield? We’ve had this conversation before, a year ago or something, when fans would compare and contrast the Marlins and the Pirates. Those remain two very good outfields. Yet based on what we have on FanGraphs, baseball’s best projected outfield for 2016 will play half its games in Anaheim.

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There is an inherent optimism when contracts are signed. The Cleveland Indians believed they were putting themselves over the top three years ago when they signed Nick Swisher and Michael Bourn to four-year deals. The team did not get the production they were hoping for, and after making the Wild Card their first year with the team in 2013, the team has won fewer games the last two seasons, and the Indians agreed to pay money to the Atlanta Braves to get rid of Bourn and Swisher while taking on the contract of Chris Johnson, who they have also jettisoned. As a result, the Indians have a larger percentage of their payroll going to players not playing for them in 2016 than any other Major League Baseball team.

The Indians might have the largest percentage of their payroll devoted to dead money, but they do not have the largest amount in total. The two franchises from Los Angeles both best the Indians. Thirteen of the 30 MLB teams have money going to players not currently on their 40-man roster. The graph below shows those 13 teams, with data collected from Cot’s Contracts.

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At this point it’s safe to call it a spring tradition: Eyebrows get raised in response to Jered Weaver’s underwhelming velocity, and Weaver tells the media he doesn’t care. There’s nothing wrong with Weaver’s reaction, because he is more of a command pitcher, and he knows he’ll be fine if he locates. I’m sure he’s beyond tired of this repeating conversation. But from the outside, it’s significant that Weaver’s fastball continues to surprise, because it just keeps getting slower, more quickly than it probably ought to. The public is velocity-obsessed, yeah. That doesn’t mean this doesn’t warrant attention:

The league-average fastball has gotten harder over time. You know that. But while we expect velocity to decline for pitchers as they age, Weaver’s curve has gotten weird. He lost more than a mile between 2011 and 2012. He lost more than a mile again between 2012 and 2013. And then last year, he lost three miles. He lost even more after returning from a DL stint. This isn’t the kind of thing people just shrug off. This is kind of a big deal, whether Weaver wants to admit it or not.

Now there’s another season coming. Weaver is a healthy member of the Angels rotation. The league will probably continue to throw harder, and based on recent historical trends, we might expect its average at about 91.9 mph. As for Weaver? Weaver isn’t going to average that.

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Early this morning, the full 2016 ZiPS projections went live on the site. This is probably news to many of you. Surprise! Happy ZiPS day. You can now export the full ZiPS spreadsheet from that link, find individual projections on the player pages, and view our live-updating playoff odds, which are powered by a 50/50 blend of ZiPS and Steamer. This is good news for everyone, including us, the authors, because now we have more information with which to work.

And so here’s a post that I did last year, and one which I was waiting for the full ZiPS rollout to do again: previewing the year’s team defenses. It’s been a few years running now that we’ve marveled over speedy outfielders in blue jerseys zooming about the spacious Kauffman Stadium outfield, and now those speedy outfielders in blue jerseys are all World Series champions. People are thinking and talking about defense more than ever, and you don’t think and talk about defense without thinking and talking about the Kansas City Royals. Defense: it’s so hot right now. Defense.

The methodology here is simple. ZiPS considers past defensive performance and mixes in some scouting report information to give an overall “defensive runs above or below average” projection. Steamer does the same, except rather than searching for keywords from real scouting reports, it regresses towards the data from the Fans Scouting Report project compiled by Tangotiger every year. The final number is an average of these two figures, and can be found in the “Fld” section of the depth charts and player pages. It isn’t exactly Ultimate Zone Rating or Defensive Runs Saved, but it’s the same idea, and the same scale.

Let’s look ahead toward the year in defense.

* * *

The Best

1. Kansas City Royals

This is one of my new favorite fun facts: the Royals outfield defense, just the outfield, is projected for 31 runs saved, which is higher than any other entire team in baseball. And with Alex Rios out of the mix in right field and Jarrod Dyson and Paulo Orlando stepping in full-time, Kansas City’s outfield defense should somehow be even better than it’s been in the past.

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Previous editions: Baltimore / Boston / Chicago AL / Chicago NL / Cincinnati  / Cleveland / Colorado / Detroit / Houston / Kansas City.

Earlier this week, lead prospect analyst Dan Farnsworth published his excellently in-depth prospect list for the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim. In this companion piece, I look at that same LA farm system through the lens of my recently refined KATOH projection system. The Angels have the second worst farm system according to KATOH, edging out only the Marlins.

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