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.

As of yesterday afternoon, both Aroldis Chapman and Kenley Jansen had been courted by the Yankees. Both had received offers. And both those offers were believed to exceed the four-year and $62 million deal that had just rendered Mark Melancon the most well-compensated relief pitcher in history.

Brian Cashman said his preference was for Chapman because, among other reasons, Chapman wouldn’t cost a draft pick, and the closer had pitched well in New York. Cashman told MLB.com’s Bryan Hoch that he “[didn’t] believe that Jansen would have any issues pitching in New York either, but it’s nice to have that box checked, too.” You have to figure Champan’s 100 mph fastball certainly helped matters.

Cashman got his wish. Chapman is a Yankee once again, to the tune of five years and $86 million. There are reasons the deal makes sense from a baseball point of view. It’s also possible that the spectacle of Chapman’s velocity will have some marketing value. Hal Steinbrenner himself has reportedly stated that he liked the buzz Chapman created at the stadium. By those criteria, it’s possible that they choose wisely, and I’ll address those points in a moment.

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Over the last few years, the New York Yankees have placed a focus on getting younger. The attempts to make that happen have been mostly successful. The data back it up. Consider: since 2014, the average age of the club’s batters (weighted by plate appearance) has decreased from 32.5 to 31.2 to 30.0.

At first glance, the Yankees’ decision on Sunday to sign Matt Holliday to a one-year, $13 million contract might seem to run contrary to these efforts. Adding a 37-year-old to play designated hitter doesn’t immediately seem like the sort of move that would continue to facilitate the Yankees’ youth movement. That said, this is the same club that allocated a majority of the team’s plate appearances at DH last season to 40-year-old Alex Rodriguez and 39-year-old Carlos Beltran. In a crowded market for designated-hitter types, the Yankees acted relatively early and might have gotten one of the better deals for the upcoming season.

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While everyone else basks in the glow of continued labor peace and begins to explore the minutia of the latest pact between the league and its players, the Yankees remain committed to a PR campaign against the collective bargaining agreement and its (negative) influence on the team’s ability to compete. The latest critique comes courtesy New York Yankees general manager Brian Cashman in a piece from George King III of the New York Post.

We’ll get to that in a moment. Before we do, though, we should acknowledge that, yes, the Yankees pay a substantial amount both in revenue sharing and luxury tax. Yankees president Randy Levine indicated that the former obligation was $90 million in 2015 — from a combination both of the standard 34% revenue sharing and also a performance factor, explained in greater depth here by Wendy Thurm. As a result of these obligations, the Yankees are giving more money back to small-market teams than any other club in baseball. Add in more than $300 million in luxury-tax/competitive-balance penalties over the last decade, and it’s pretty easy to see the Yankees’ grounds for dissent.

That’s not the real cause of the Yankees’ failure to dominate in recent seasons, however. Rather, poor spending and failed player development have been the team’s main issues.

But back to Cashman, for a moment. In his recent comments, he was unambiguous about the effect that the last few CBAs have had on his club.

“The CBA is going to affect us in the long term,” general manager Brian Cashman said Tuesday at Yankees scout Cesar Presbott’s Thanksgiving turkey giveaway in The Bronx. “It’s already crippled us in the short term. Exhibit A is our free agency last year and a lot of the international markets I’ve been taken out of.

“The previous CBAs have really hindered us, so I think the next one is something we’re clearly going to be interested in on how it will impact us over the entire course of the term of the contract. The previous ones have impacted us in a bad way.”

As noted above, the Yankees have been compelled to contribute quite a bit in revenue sharing, etc. — ultimately paying out probably more than a billion dollars directly to their competitors over the last decade. It’s not that simple, though.

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The most dominant pitcher in the minors pitched in the majors. But he didn’t pitch much, as a September call-up, and he wasn’t very good, and you probably don’t know him. He gave up a home run. Walked four and whiffed five. About a hit an inning. He wasn’t handling high-leverage assignments. For all intents and purposes, his big-league work was almost invisible.

And yet, the most dominant pitcher in the minors was extraordinarily dominant, in the minors. He is but 23 years old, and he isn’t going away. He’s not about to change anyone’s offseason plans. He’s not about to get dealt in a blockbuster. He’s a prospect. He’s a prospect who’ll get an extended chance to build on what he’s already done.

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The Yankees acquired two high-octane arms from Houston in exchange for veteran catcher Brian McCann today in right-handed pitchers Albert Abreu and Jorge Guzman.

Abreu is the main piece for New York, a somewhat undersized (on paper, anyway) righty with absolutely electric arm speed that he produces with little effort. Abreu’s fastball will sit in the low- to mid-90s, usually 91-96, and touch as high as 98. He has well below-average command of his fastball (and the rest of his repertoire) right now but the ease of Abreu’s delivery allows for considerable projection in this area, though of course it’s not a foregone conclusion that he’ll develop starter-level command.

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Without looking at either team too hard, you might think the Astros needed major league pitching and the Yankees needed major league pitching. So of course the Yankees traded catcher Brian McCann (and $5.5m a year) to the Astros for prospect right-handers Albert Abreu and Jorge Guzman. We’ll learn more about the prospects (other than their high velocity fastballs) later, but the major league teams probably both needed this trade, and it might have actually been about pitching for the Astros anyway.

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In the interest of full disclosure, I’ll start by telling you that I was raised as a fan of the most Evil of Empires. Yes, I confess to the assembled jury of my readers and the court of the comments, that the Yankees earned my allegiance from an early age, and that I can still be found every now and then in the stands at The House that George Built. I am everything you perceive to be wrong with baseball from an emotional level, and I hold my head up high as I ride my AT-AT walker towards Echo Base to destroy your shield generator.

Here’s the thing. Michael Fulmer was really good in his first run at the league. Like, really good. Rookie of the Year good, as we found out last night. He came up as a 23-year-old and worked a 3.06 ERA in the American League over the course of 159 innings, and his underlying metrics are decently fond of him. Here’s to you, Mr. Fulmer. You shoved. You earned it. But damn if Gary Sanchez wasn’t really good too.

If you read this site, you’re almost certainly familiar with what Sanchez did in his two-month-long methodical demolition of baseball. In case you aren’t, here’s the CliffsNotes version. Sanchez had 229 plate appearances in 2016. Four of them came in May, in a game for which he was called up for the sole purpose of DH’ing against Chris Sale. It didn’t go well. Back to the minors he went, until he re-emerged in August. That’s where the fun started. When all was said and done, Sanchez had hit .299/.376/.657 (!) and tied Wally Berger for the distinction of fastest ever to 20 home runs. Oh, and he played good defense behind the plate. And showed off a howitzer of an arm while throwing out over 40% of would-be stealers.

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These days, some people are hard at work trying to understand one another. As votes rolled in and results were released, segments of the population were taken aback. In certain corners, the mood has been celebratory, triumphant. Elsewhere there has been fear, disappointment, and, more than anything else, confusion. “How could anyone make that choice?” many have wailed. “How could so many people overlook all the evidence?” I won’t pretend to be more than I am. I know that I am but a single man in a rising, roiling ocean of souls. But I can try to defend at least my own decision. For 2016 American League Rookie of the Year, I voted for Michael Fulmer ahead of Gary Sanchez.

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