If you had the unfortunate honor of following me on Twitter during the 2016 season, you were subjected to several dozen versions of this tweet:

Request: If your team’s catcher throws behind a runner at 1B this year, tweet me date/team/inning/batter. Please RT for science!

— Neil Weinberg (@NeilWeinberg44) April 3, 2016

I undertook a yearlong effort to catalog and analyze every instance in which a catcher threw behind a runner at first base and the product of that endeavor was an essay in the 2017 Hardball Times Annual. That essay contains answers to questions including, but certainly not limited to:

• Which catcher threw to first most often? (Salvador Perez.)
• The average success rate on back-pick attempts? (About 10%.)
• Which catcher was most accurate when throwing to first? (Yadier Molina.)
• Do base-stealers draw more throws? (They seem to.)

If said essay failed to quench your thirst for back-pick factoids, you will likely have interest in getting your hands on the raw data which you can download here. If you use the data for any sort of published work, all I ask is that you cite me and send me a link on Twitter (@NeilWeinberg44).

With the new year, you’ve probably noticed a few new things around here. For one, you can now help support the site with an ad-free membership, which is a pretty neat thing for both you and us. If you’re a heavy user of the site, it’s a great way to keep us in business but also make your FanGraphs experience more enjoyable.

And supporting us allows us to do things like hire Travis Sawchik, who made his debut as a staff writer last week, and has already made himself an integral part of the staff with pieces like the one he wrote this morning on home-field advantage. We’re really excited to have Travis here, and think he’s going to help make 2017 a great year for FanGraphs.

And we want you guys to get to know him better as well, so starting today, Travis is going to be taking over the Monday chat, and will be answering your questions starting at 12pm ET.

But don’t worry, fans of the Dan Szymborski chat; he’s not going away, he’s just moving. Dan will now be chatting on Wednesdays at 2pm ET, which should also lead to more Dan Szymborski chats, since there are fewer Wednesday holidays, so if you enjoy the Szymborski chat, you’ll probably have more of them in 2017.

So, that leaves us with the following chat schedule for 2017. All times listed are in eastern time.

Monday, 12 pm: Travis Sawchik
Tuesday, 12 pm: Eric Longenhagen
Tuesday, 9 pm: Paul Swydan and Jeff Zimmerman
Wednesday: 12 pm: Dave Cameron
Wednesday, 2 pm: Dan Szymborski
Thursday, 12 pm: Eno Sarris
Friday, 12 pm: Jeff Sullivan
Friday, 3 pm: Paul Sporer (RotoGraphs chat)

We hope you enjoy the chats, and we look forward to talking with you all this coming year.

The Mariners, after trading Taijuan Walker away in the Jean Segura deal, have been looking for a back-end starting pitcher. How desperate were they? Well, desperate enough to take a pitcher that the Baltimore Orioles — who have one of the worst rotations in baseball — didn’t want to keep around.

The deal, as announced by both teams, is a straight-up swap of Seth Smith for Yovani Gallardo, with the Orioles including some cash in the deal, though Dan Connolly reports the Orioles save about $4 million in the deal, so the cash doesn’t offset the price differences. In Smith, the Orioles are getting a guy who can play right field against right-handed pitching; he doesn’t field well or hit lefties enough to justify an everyday job, but as the strong side of a platoon, he’s a decent role player. Given that the Orioles current right fielder was Joey Rickard, Smith is an upgrade over a replacement level hole, and picking him up at a reasonable price makes plenty of sense for Baltimore.

For the Mariners, this is a bit weirder. Yeah, they needed another arm for the rotation, since the back-end was pretty thin, but it’s not entirely clear that Gallardo is actually much better than what they already had. After a nice run with Milwaukee at the beginning of his career, Gallardo transitioned more into an innings-eater in 2013, and things have been steadily downhill since then.

As the strikeouts disappeared, Gallardo survived by avoiding walks, but even that went away last year, when he posted the second highest walk rate of his career. His stuff has diminished to the point that he’s now a nibbler, but he doesn’t get swings and misses out of the zone anymore.

His in-zone contact rates are fairly steady (though worse than in his prime), but the lack of whiffs out of the zone means that Gallardo doesn’t really have any way to put batters away anymore, and so now he’s just a pitch-to-contact guy who doesn’t throw enough strikes.

If you want to be optimistic, you can look at his prior track record of success and his age, and hope that maybe Gallardo can get some of his prior stuff back, but the trends here are all negative. As a guy who throws 90 and doesn’t have an out pitch or plus command, he’s really nothing more than a #5 starter at this point, and even that might be generous. And toss in the elbow problems that turned his initial three year deal with Baltimore into a two year deal following his physical, then landed him on the disabled list last year, he’s not even necessarily an innings sponge you can count on to stay healthy.

Perhaps when your internal options are Ariel Miranda or Nathan Karns, even Gallardo looks useful, but for a team looking to win in the short-term, they should probably do better than hand the ball to Gallardo every five days. Smith isn’t a huge loss, especially with the team having younger outfielders worth taking a look at, but this feels like moving a useful-but-flawed outfield for a less-useful-and-flawed pitcher. Sure, the Mariners needed a pitcher more, but unless they know how to get Gallardo’s velocity back, I’m not sure this is the arm they needed.

Left-hander Marlon Arias hasn’t participated in affiliated ball since 2009, when he was a member of the Dodgers system. As for what he’s done in the meantime, it’s probably fair to say that his whereabouts haven’t been documented meticulously. His player page at FanGraphs suggests he’s passed at least a few of the subsequent years (2012 and 2014-15) in the Mexican League. Neither Baseball Reference nor Baseball Cube reveal much else of substance on the matter. Generally speaking, where the subject of Marlon Arias is concerned, mum has been the word.

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Position: Arizona Diamondbacks Senior Baseball Systems Developer

Location: Phoenix
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Position: TrackMan Analytics/Operations Intern

Location: Stamford, Conn.
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The Phillies have acquired long-time Red Sox starter Clay Buchholz in exchange for minor-league second baseman Josh Tobias. Here’s how Tobias grades out by my KATOH system. (KATOH denotes WAR forecast for the first six years of a player’s major-league career. KATOH+ uses a similar methodology with consideration also for Baseball America’s rankings.)

The Phillies snagged Tobias in the 10th round in 2015, and he’s performed admirably in the minor leagues. He increased his prospect stock by hitting .321/.362/.475 in short-season A-ball to close out his draft year. He had similar success in Low-A last year, but saw his performance crater following a late-season promotion to High-A. He hit a weak .254/.324/.357 at the latter level with a concerning 21% strikeout rate.

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Hello! I’ve spent a little while in one of my spreadsheets, because I’m working up another thing. But that doesn’t mean I can’t provide a smaller thing in the meantime. As I’ve mentioned on a few occasions in the past, I have projected team records going back to 2005. Of course, the methods aren’t all consistent, because certain projections haven’t existed for that long, but all projections follow the same general rules — use a best-guess depth chart and then project player performance based on what those players have done in the recent past. I’m not saying the 2005 projections were as good as the 2016 projections, but they weren’t crazy. So let’s look at a little data! You don’t have anything better to do.

First, and most simply, here are projected wins and actual wins, for all 360 team-seasons.

There’s enough signal there to know the projections are onto something, and there’s enough noise there to keep baseball entertainingly unpredictable. The greatest over-achiever since 2005: those 2012 Baltimore Orioles, who won 93 games after having been projected to win a measly 70. The greatest under-achiever since 2005: the 2012 Boston Red Sox, who won 69 games after having been projected to win an impressive 91. In other words, the Orioles won like the Red Sox were supposed to, and the Red Sox lost like the Orioles were supposed to. I guess you could say the numbers were right, but they were misplaced.

How have the individual team breakdowns looked? I’m not including this because I think it’s in any way predictive. It’s just here to sate some curiosity. I calculated error in two ways. Here’s one, where I took the absolute value of each miss, and then added them up over the 12 years.

The projections have had the greatest error with the Indians, missing by an average of almost 10 wins per season. At the other end, welp, check out the Yankees. The average error there is about three wins per season. The Braves aren’t even particularly close to that. For whatever reason, the Yankees have been reasonably predictable over the past decade and change.

Here’s the other way of calculating error, just subtracting projected wins from actual wins over the time window. Absolute values have no place here.

How to read this: The Rangers have ranked 15th in projected wins, but they’ve been seventh in actual wins. Hence their error of +48. The Mariners are tied for 20th in projected wins, but they’ve been 26th in actual wins, hence their error of -45. The Rangers are out in front here by nine wins; the Mariners trail the next-worst team by 10 wins. I don’t think this means anything about the teams moving forward, but this provides some partial background, when you consider how various fans respond to the 2017 projections over the offseason. Projections have looked wrong before, and they’ll look wrong again. If they didn’t, we’d hate them.

Going into next season, the Nationals are prepared to start a 32-year-old at first base, a 32-year-old who last season recorded a WAR of literally -1.3. That’s very bad! If Ryan Zimmerman had any dwindling chance of building a Hall-of-Fame career record, he effectively kissed it goodbye. It was an extraordinarily frustrating summer.

But is Zimmerman toast now, or what? Spoiler alert: I don’t think so. Story arc: to follow.

It’s worth glancing over this thing I just put up about Tyler Naquin. This small post follows directly from the analysis performed for that bigger post. As the season wore on, there were several articles written about how Zimmerman seemed like he was getting unlucky. I have further evidence to support that. In the linked post, I plotted air slugging against air exit velocity, and I highlighted the Naquin dot. Here’s that again, but with a red highlight for the Zimmerman dot.

According to this, Zimmerman under-performed by 262 points. Only Billy Butler came real close to that, and Butler runs like he doesn’t want to wake up a baby. In the earlier Naquin post, I showed that these differences didn’t appear particularly sustainable between 2015 and 2016. And, say, about that! Zimmerman is highlighted here again.

In 2015, Zimmerman ranked 31st in average air exit velocity, at 94.5 miles per hour. On those batted balls, he slugged 1.016. In 2016, he ranked 32nd in average air exit velocity, at 94.3 miles per hour. On those batted balls, he slugged .760. He followed almost exactly standard performance with extreme under-performance, and if you just bump Zimmerman’s 2016 numbers up to the best-fit line, his overall slugging percentage would move from .370 to .460. Instead of slugging like Jordy Mercer, he would’ve slugged like George Springer. You can accept a first baseman who slugs like George Springer.

Just for the sake of making sure it’s clear, this isn’t conclusive, because we don’t have a lot of Statcast information yet. We don’t know how all of these things work. Maybe Zimmerman is just weird now. It’s also important to recognize he’s had some injury problems, and he’s coming off a career-low walk rate and a career-high strikeout rate. Ryan Zimmerman is by no means in his career prime. One should rightly assume he’s declining, but from the looks of things, one also shouldn’t exaggerate. Zimmerman is better than the results he just posted. He remains an offensive threat, and a player who further deepens the Nationals’ quality lineup.

The first few leaderboard sorts don’t produce many revelations about Junichi Tazawa, but if you finagle the filters and the cutoffs, you start to see why he might be attractive to a club. It’s more about consistency and volume than anything, and that’s a rare quality for a reliever — sufficiently rare, it seems, to earn him a two-year deal worth $12 million, the terms he reached late yesterday afternoon with the Miami Marlins.

Since 2012, Tazawa is 96th among 256 qualified relievers in ERA. He’s 38th in FIP. He’s given up a few homers, though, so let’s check strikeouts minus walks — weird, he’s 38th. So he’s okay.

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