The Cardinals don’t have a rotation problem. Which is to say, they don’t have a rotation problem right now. What they do have — as the title of this post suggests — is a potential problem in the first few months of the season if the current members of the rotation underachieve. For most teams with fine rotations — like the Cardinals — the cause for concern is a lack of depth. That is not, however, the Cardinals’ issue at the moment. The Cardinals’ potential issue is that their current sixth and seventh starter might be significantly better than the pitchers in their starting five.

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The current post is the last of this week’s installments in the positional power rankings. (Pitchers will appear next week.) If you’re the sort of person who’s unfamiliar with what a “positional power ranking” is, you have every right to read the introductory post by Dr. Jeff Sullivan, a real medical doctor who is certified to comment on all manner of physical maladies and whom you should contact with real, pressing, possibly urgent health concerns.

If, on the other hand, you’re acquainted with these particular rankings of power, consider turning your attention immediately to the chart below, which depicts WAR projections for all the American League’s designated-hitter depth charts.

Historically, the offensive burden on designated hitters is high. It probably should be high: the position carries little in the way of other obligations. If a designated hitter isn’t hitting, he doesn’t have much other value to his club. Maybe he’s a proficient interlocutor, one capable of identifying the common ground between himself and those around him. That’s an important skill. How it translates to run-scoring, though, isn’t immediately obvious.

By the numbers, the Yankees probably have the best designated hitters. The White Sox probably have the worst, according to the same numbers. All the other clubs appear between those two. All other commentary on the topic appears below.

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GOODYEAR, Ariz. — As you might imagine, Joey Votto has excellent eyesight.

And as you might also suspect, Votto knows his exact quality of eyesight, improved after undergoing LASIK surgery as a minor leaguer.

“20-13 and 20-17,” Votto told FanGraphs of his most recent right and left eye test scores. “I had good vision beforehand. It started going wonky [early in my professional career]. I didn’t want to deal with contacts.”

At 33, Votto was the best hitter in the NL last season. After a down 2014 season, in which he was limited to 62 games, he’s shown no signs of aging– if anything, he has improved, “aging” like a bottle of Mouton-Rothschild.

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I remember, when I’ve written some positional power rankings before, I got to write about shortstops. And when I wrote about shortstops, Troy Tulowitzki ranked way above everyone else. It was always laughable at the time how much better he was than his peer group. It’s no longer so laughable because now this paragraph just serves as a reminder that we all get older and time is a monster to even the innocent. Tulowitzki is never healthy these days and we’ve entered a whole new age of young and talented super-shortstops. But anyway, I’m drifting from the point. When I wrote about prime Tulowitzki, I got a kick out of how much better he was than the next-best guy. Now I’ve gotten the chance to write about center fielders. This is the hardest I’ve laughed in days.

When this post went up a year ago, the Angels were first at 8.3 projected WAR, and the Rays were second at 4.7. And now, the gap has only grown. The gap between the Angels and the Rays is, by itself, bigger than almost every single team’s center-field WAR projection. You aren’t here because you needed to be reminded that Mike Trout is good. I’m not here because I need to remind you that Mike Trout is good. But just in case anyone was slipping — just in case you hadn’t thought about it enough recently — Mike Trout is good. Mike Trout is so good that, if you took Mike Trout, and then you removed from him enough talent to make the next-best center fielder, you’d still have enough left over to have an All-Star center fielder. Provided you took only talent, and not arms or legs or eyes. Even Trout’s career couldn’t survive the loss of one of those. (Probably.)

Below, summaries of every team’s center-field situation. Here’s the introduction to this series, in case you’re behind. If you are behind, boy, do you ever have a lot of reading to do. Cancel your plans for the weekend.

Much digital ink has been spilt regarding the plight of minor-league baseball players. Dating back to the filing of the first minor-league wage lawsuit in back 2014, countless pieces have been written denouncing Major League Baseball for paying minor-league players a sub-minimum wage. Indeed, the optics of an organization that generates $10 billion dollars per year in revenues electively deciding to pay thousands of its full-time employees at below a subsistence level is — needless to say — not great.

So it was not surprising that the news that Congress appears posed to officially exclude minor leaguers from (at least some of) the protections afforded under federal wage and hour laws resulted in an immediate wave of outcry by numerous commentators. Specifically, as Sheryl Ring discussed earlier in the week, news reports emerged on Sunday night that, after years of persistent lobbying efforts, MLB was posed to succeed in persuading Congress to include a provision in its omnibus spending bill that would exempt minor-league players from Fair Labor Standards Act, the federal law establishing the minimum wage and overtime rules that millions of Americans take for granted.

On Wednesday night, the actual language of the provision that Congress would be voting on was released:

In some respects, the specific legislative language is better than critics had anticipated. Rather than entirely excluding minor leaguers from the right to the minimum wage — as had originally been feared — the provision’s focus was actually a bit narrower. Instead, it simply provides that minor league players are not entitled to overtime benefits when working more than 40 hours in a week, so long as they are otherwise paid a weekly salary compliant with the federal minimum wage (at least during baseball’s regular season). In other words, the exemption doesn’t deprive players of the right to the minimum wage, just to overtime compensation.

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Thank you, dear reader, for tuning into our continuing positional power rankings series. This episode concerns right field, and I’m your host, Sheryl Ring. Should it be that you reached right field in error and you wish to view other episodes with other (better) hosts, you may do so simply by selecting the appropriate position on the widget atop this article. If, on the other hand, you actually intended to choose this episode, I thank you heartily and promise you an adventure which should provide you with no ability whatsoever to stave off your eventual death, but which will at least give you something of nominal interest to do whilst awaiting its inevitable arrival.

With those words of introduction having been satisfied, to the graph:

You could say that, in recent years, we’ve seen a downturn in the quality of player being utilized in right field by your average major-league ballclub. Last year, in this very space, Neil Weinberg had four teams projected to eclipse three wins and five more projected to at least approximate three wins. As you can see, that isn’t the case this year. Last year, 14 teams were projected to surpass two wins in right field; this year, only 12 are. And then there are the Braves, whose ranking remains unchanged from last year. You can probably figure out why that is.

Despite what could possibly be interpreted as a low point for the major-league right fielder, there are signs of promise. For one, the top-three teams (the Nationals, Red Sox, Yankees) will all be starting players, who, for one reason or another, are standouts and stars worthy of that moniker. For another, unlike last year, there are reasons for optimism for many of the teams towards the middle and bottom of this list: either they are starting young players with yet-untapped upside (the Brewers, Mariners, Rangers, Tigers) or they have top prospects waiting in the wings with that sort of upside (the Mets, Orioles, Rays, Reds, Rockies, and White Sox).

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“The game power plays beneath his raw because Vogelbach’s approach to hitting is often of the Take What You’re Given variety and he’s spraying contact all over the field.”

– Eric Longenhagen

FanGraphs’ lead prospect analyst wrote those words about Dan Vogelbach for last year’s Mariners list and largely echoed them in this year’s version, as well. The appraisal is accurate: Vogelbach has never put up the kind of power numbers that his hulking physique suggests he should.

He’s looking to change that. Seven years after the Cubs drafted him in the second round out of a Fort Myers, Florida, high school — and 20 months after the Mariners acquired him in the Mike Montgomery deal — Vogelbach has decided that what’s always worked for him isn’t working well enough.

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The phrase “out of left field” is typically used to describe the emergence of something strange and unexpected into our lives. Apparently, the expression came from Chicago. There was a mental hospital near left field of the West Side Grounds where the Cubbies used to play up until the early 20th century. Sometimes Cubs fans at the ballpark could hear the patients of the hospital scream. That’s some wild, wild stuff.

It’s also probably baloney.

What follows is the opposite of baloney. What follows is the post containing the left-field portion of our positional power rankings. Which is fortunate, because we’re out of baloney. Have a scrumptious graph instead:

It’s finally here. The promise: fulfilled. You asked for it and you got it.

The Marlins Takeover.

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Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about Alex Cobb’s surprising windfall with the Orioles and the ever-present overlap between baseball and social issues, follow up on non-throwing outfielders, and answer listener emails about challengers to Mike Trout’s email-episode throne (and Trout’s spring training strikeout-less streak), whether tanking is actually bad for baseball or becoming more common, what might make Clayton Kershaw opt not to opt out, players whom cutting-edge stats overrate, how hitters can discourage teams from shifting against them, whether Alex Rodriguez stood out for beating up on bad pitchers, and the possibility of a pitcher getting a loss and a save in the same game, plus a Stat Blast on the best-projected teams and rapid roster improvements.

Audio intro: Weezer, "Beverly Hills"
Audio outro: Jet, "Bring it on Back"

Link to video of Tomoaki Kanemoto throwing
Link to Ben’s article about tanking, hope and faith
Link to Jeff’s post about projected strength of schedule

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