There are different ways to turn a team around. That’s probably an obvious thing to say, but it’s true. Another thing that’s obvious and true: teams are made of humans. Because of that, no turnaround is entirely uniform in nature.

Even so, a team might emphasize certain traits when attempting to rebuild or improve. On-base skills, power, etc. Some of those turnarounds are easy to follow; others, less so.

Given the relatively short history of defensive metrics, the turnaround of team defense hasn’t been thoroughly chronicled, and yet teams have certainly made it a priority. Just last year, the Astros and Indians exhibited improvements in the field in a way rarely matched. Looking further back, it’s possible to find other teams that have accomplished the same feat. The question, though: how did they it? Maybe it’s possible to use past successes as a road map for current teams! So, let’s find the next Indians and Astros.

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Chris Carter finally signed! With the Yankees, for $3 million plus incentives. Chris Coghlan also finally signed! With the Phillies, on a minor-league deal for $3 million plus incentives. On the one hand, these players couldn’t be any more different. But there are similarities, too, if we look at them through the lens of the market and its needs.

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We tend to form memories poorly. In middle school, my band teacher was fond of telling us that if you only played two parts of the song correctly, to make it the beginning and the end, because most people wouldn’t remember anything else.

So it may be with Andruw Jones. If you pressed most people on what they remember most about Jones, there’s a decent chance that they’d recall him as the 19-year-old who homered twice in the 1996 World Series and also as a really fat guy who was terrible in his 30s. In between those two endpoints, though, he had a Hall of Fame career.

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The Indians just signed Brandon Guyer to a very modest contract extension. If you know Guyer, it’s for one of two reasons. A small number of you might know Guyer personally. A greater number of you know Guyer for his skill at being hit by things. Guyer is a specialist when it comes to finding an alternate path to first base. Here he is, doing his thing:

Call it cheap if you want, but what works works. Despite being a part-time player, Guyer just led the league in hit-by-pitches. For his career, he’s been hit by a pitch 66 times, while he’s been walked on four balls 61 times. Just last season, Guyer was hit by a pitch in 9% of his plate appearances, a rate which was 10 times higher than the league average. Ten times higher than the league average! Guyer is a statistical weirdo, but you have to love him for it. Unless, you know, you’re pitching.

Guyer is a bit of a competitive annoyance because of his specialty. And yet, as the freaks go, he’s out-classed. Guyer specializes at one arguably cheap way to reach base. Jacoby Ellsbury specializes at another. We’ve gone over this before, but we’re doing it again. Last year, Guyer’s rate of reaching by HBP was 10 times the league average. Last year, Ellsbury’s rate of reaching on catcher’s interference was 94 times the league average. Ellsbury managed one of the most extraordinary statistical accomplishments in the history of the game.

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The New York Yankees are supposedly rebuilding — and, in a sense, it’s true. They didn’t make the playoffs last season, and they haven’t seen the American League Division Series since 2012. They started the winter by trading the guy who had been their starting catcher for the past three seasons. Those are all some traits that might be representative of a team in transition.

On the other hand, they haven’t dropped below .500 in forever. You have to go back to 1992 to find the last time the Yankees failed to break even. They’ve never been the bad team that one now commonly associates with a tear-down effort. Also, they’ve spent some money in free agency this offseason, on Aroldis Chapman and Matt Holliday. These aren’t the types of players/deals — closers, short-term deals for aging superstar — that teams who are far from contention typically sign/make.

So who are the Yankees? If you had to pick between pretender and contender, you’d have to land on the latter. Let’s take a look at the potential starting lineup. As always, the venerable Mike Axisa has done much of the legwork for us. In his recent piece on how the Yankees may split Brett Gardner and Jacoby Ellsbury in the lineup, here was his best guess as to how the Yankees’ lineup will shake out this season.

1. LF Brett Gardner
2. 2B Starlin Castro
3. C Gary Sanchez
4. DH Matt Holliday
5. SS Didi Gregorius
6. CF Jacoby Ellsbury
7. 1B Gregory Bird
8. RF Aaron Judge
9. 3B Chase Headley

Not bad, right? Let’s take a look at the projected wOBAs for all of the AL teams, according to our current depth charts.

The Yankees are in the middle of the pack, but there are a few caveats here. First, the projections may be conservative on Bird and Sanchez, which is understandable in both cases. Certainly, we shouldn’t expect Sanchez to repeat his blistering .425 wOBA from last season, but the .348 wOBA for which he’s pegged for seems like it could be a little conservative. The early returns from our FANS projections seem to agree, pegging him for a .355 wOBA.

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On Tuesday, we looked at the best pitches in baseball last year when judged by whiffs and grounders. One thing we learned in that exercise: they were all thrown by relievers. Makes sense. They get a lot of advantages when it comes to short stints and leveraged situations. Let’s not hold it against them because the rest of the reliever’s life is very difficult. On the other hand, let’s also celebrate the starting pitchers separately, because many of them have pitches that are excellent despite the fact that they have to throw more often, to batters of both hands.

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Mike Mussina never won the Cy Young Award. He made the All-Star team only five times over his 18 years in the big leagues. He won 20 games just once, in the final season of his career. His career ERA mark is closer to 4 than it is to 3. In other words, it’s not difficult to see why Mussina hasn’t been inducted into the Hall of Fame yet, given the traditionalism of the electorate. There have been many worthy candidates who’ve accompanied Mussina on the ballot since he first appeared there, of course. Nine players have been elected since Mussina first became eligible, all of them slam-dunk candidates.

Whatever the arguments against him, though, Mike Mussina is almost surely a Hall of Famer. Hall of Fame voting has already technically concluded, so this column serves less as an appeal to voters and more of a general appraisal of the situation, if nothing else. Also, have you seen baseball news lately? I haven’t either, so here we go.

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After having typically appeared in the very famous pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have been released at FanGraphs the past few years. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the New York Yankees. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Other Projections: Arizona / Atlanta / Boston / Chicago NL / Cleveland / Detroit / Houston / Kansas City / Los Angeles AL / San Diego / San Francisco / Seattle / Tampa Bay / Toronto / Washington.

Batters
This Yankees club — on the field-playing side, at least — offers an almost perfect case study in the Completely Average. Five of the club’s nine likely starters — Starlin Castro (624 PA, 2.1 zWAR), Jacoby Ellsbury (561, 2.1), Brett Gardner (587, 2.0), Chase Headley (531, 2.2), and Aaron Judge (522, 2.2) — are projected by Dan Szymborski’s computer to produce between 2.0 and 2.2 wins in 2017. A sixth, Didi Gregorius (586, 2.5), is only a tenth of a win from rounding down to two.

Even the more extremes cases preserve the equilibrium. On the strength both of his youth and a fantastic debut, catcher Gary Sanchez (499, 4.0) earns the club’s top projection. The team’s array of first basemen and DHs, meanwhile, offset whatever surplus wins Sanchez provides. The result, once again, is vehemently average.

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Two days ago, I examined what exactly is going on in the San Diego rotation. The notion of a Padres pitcher is almost a philosophical one. Technically there are starting pitchers on the roster, yes, but any resemblance to any quality pitchers, alive or dead, is entirely coincidental.

This is somewhat the case with the group of outfielders currently employed by the Cleveland Indians. I would hesitate to insinuate that these outfielders, who play for a team that reached Game Seven of the World Series, are of a similar quality to the starting pitchers of the Padres. Tyler Naquin, after all, just finished third in the American League Rookie of the Year voting. Brandon Guyer could be sitting on his couch at home and stand a good chance of being hit by an errant pitch and being awarded first place. Lonnie Chisenhall is a solid if unspectacular player. And we must remember that for all his injury tribulations this past year and change, Michael Brantley is still one of the more talented players in all of baseball.

Yet when taken altogether, this does not look like the outfield of a team that just won a pennant, nor one that’s expected to contend for a division title. Cleveland’s strength will always be its pitching. The team is built around Francisco Lindor, yes, but it’s also built around Corey Kluber, Carlos Carrasco, and Danny Salazar. These are the men who decide if the team soars or crashes. If the pitching is good, the team will have a chance. They still need good position players, though, and the outfield gives them three opportunities to do that.

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So much of what we do is try to tell the future. So much of what we do is get the future wrong! But still we keep on plugging away, with any noteworthy trade, or any noteworthy signing. One noteworthy signing last week reunited the Yankees and Aroldis Chapman, with the closer getting a five-year guarantee. The history of relievers getting long-term deals isn’t great, but one thing we can’t ignore is that Chapman is kind of extraordinary. By some measures he’s even unique. Baseball doesn’t have an extended track record of Aroldis Chapmans (Chapmen?). Projecting his future is tricky, as it always is.

We know that, if Chapman stays the same, he’ll remain nearly unbelievable. That much, he’s proven. We know that he could snap something after any given pitch. That much, countless other pitchers have proven. But what else might we able to say?

One issue that’s come up is imagining Chapman throwing at lower velocities. Every pitcher eventually loses his zip. Some start at 25, and some start at 35, but it’s a guarantee. There’s no getting around it. For Chapman in particular, there’s one positive sign. Last year, his average fastball was 100.4 miles per hour. That’s the highest mark of his career, and he was around 98 in his first full season. So Chapman hasn’t lost anything yet. Maybe he’ll continue to hang around triple digits for a while to come.

Inevitably, though, there will be decline. And what then? To attempt to answer that, I want to try something. How might Chapman perform at lower velocities? Well, we can look at how he’s already performed at lower velocities.

Tables, ahoy! I looked at Chapman’s game log from 2012 to 2016. For every single game, I grabbed Chapman’s average fastball velocity, and then it was a matter of putting numbers together. In this first table, Chapman’s numbers are split into six groups.

That’s fairly informative already, but let’s increase the sample sizes. We’ll do that by condensing from six groups to three.

Surprise! When Chapman has thrown his hardest, he’s been his best. He hasn’t allowed many hits, and he’s allowed only two home runs. The home-run category here might be the most dramatic, but it’s also the noisiest, since Chapman hasn’t allowed many homers overall. Even when Chapman has worked around 96-97, he’s still been a strikeout machine. For reference, he’s a top-10 table since 2012, looking at strikeout rate minus walk rate. Chapman leads all pitchers, overall, but I took him out and replaced him with the three versions of himself.

The hardest-throwing Chapman is in first, easily. The medium-throwing Chapman is in fourth. The slowest-throwing Chapman is in ninth, out of 776 pitchers. Ken Giles just missed this table. So did Sean Doolittle. And maybe that’s older Chapman: some kind of healthier Sean Doolittle equivalent. Doolittle has sometimes given up his home runs, and he hasn’t been considered one of the highest-tier relievers, but he has been excellent when he’s pitched. So Yankees fans can be somewhat encouraged.

Aroldis Chapman, at some point, will lose some velocity. Aroldis Chapman, at some point, will get worse. But, of course, he has a lot of velocity to give. And when he’s worked at lower speeds before, he’s been only somewhat less incredible. Chapman comes with a lot of what you might consider wiggle room.