Welcome to the last installment of our positional power rankings series, tackling the top half of the bullpen rankings. Just in the last decade, we’ve witnessed the game achieve record offensive levels by certain measures. One positional group, shortstops, is enjoying a golden era. Some positions are weaker, some are stronger. The game and its positions experience peaks and troughs of production. But relief pitchers give us a constant: they keep marching forward, to greater workloads and relevance.

Last season, bullpens accounted for a major-league record 38.1% of total innings thrown, up three percentage points (35.1%) from 10 years earlier. In 2017, relief pitchers beat their previous record for workload — set the previous season — by 578 innings. Thirty years earlier, bullpens accounted for 31.8% of innings; 50 years earlier, for 26.0%. This trend has been a constant.

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There are three types of baseball. One is regular ol’ baseball. The second is extra-inning baseball, which is sometimes referred to as “#freebaseball”. And then finally, there’s Weird Baseball, stylized by the youths as “#weirdbaseball”.

Extra-inning baseball is like regular baseball, except — even more often than usual — batters are trying too hard to hit home runs. This leads occasionally to Weird Baseball. Scientists change their mind about what constitutes Weird Baseball once a month, during breaks when determining who is a millennial and who is not. Weird Baseball, at the moment, is technically denoted as baseball occurring in the 16th inning and onward.

I’m not the first to say it, but I’m the only to say in this blog post, that baseball is unlike other sports in that each team is tasked with playing basically every day. The result is a metronome-like effect, a dependable presence that lends order to life. But just like in life, chaos sometimes emerges from the order that baseball has created. Sometimes the chaos is a joyful sort; other times, it brings grief. In either case, it’s difficult to ignore. The chaos of #weirdbaseball is difficult to ignore.

Major League Baseball is trying to eliminate the chaos.

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Last week, Congress passed — and President Trump’s signed into law — the Save America’s Pastime Act as part of the omnibus spending bill funding the operation of the federal government for the foreseeable future. As Sheryl Ring and I each noted last week, the act created a new exemption to the federal minimum-wage and maximum-hour laws applying to minor-league baseball players.

Specifically, under the new provision that went into effect on Friday, so long as Major League Baseball pays its minor leaguers the federal minimum wage for 40 hours per week during the regular season, the players will not be entitled to any additional pay for overtime or offseason work under federal law.

Although most commentators initially focused on the effect the provision is likely to have on those playing for one of MLB’s affiliated minor-league teams, Baseball America’s J.J. Cooper noted last week that the new exemption could have dire implications for teams belonging to non-MLB-affiliated, so-called independent minor leagues (such as the American Association, Atlantic League, Frontier League, and Pacific Association). Yahoo’s Jeff Passan expressed a similar concern on Monday, while SB Nation’s Marc Normandin argued that these independent teams deserve to go out of business if they cannot afford to pay their most important employees the minimum wage.

Undoubtedly, the obligation to pay players the minimum wage would likely impose a financial hardship on many independent-league teams. But it’s not at all clear that that will actually be the end result of the Save America’s Pastime Act.

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Unless you’ve stumbled upon this post by accident or have a particular passion for bullpens — particularly for teams with not particularly great bullpens — you are familiar with the positional power rankings here at FanGraphs. The position players were all covered last week, so don’t forget to read up on any you might have missed. Jeff Sullivan wrote a useful introduction that is also available among the links above.

I haven’t actually looked into this, but I would have to guess that these relief rankings are subject to the most volatility when it comes to how relievers actually play out by the end of the season. Jeff Sullivan recently noted the lack of consistency of bullpens from one year to the next. One could also look to last year’s rankings to make that point. The Arizona Diamondbacks were projected to finish last in these rankings a year ago, however, they finished 11th in 2017 reliever WAR. In addition to the Diamondbacks, the Angels, Blue Jays, Brewers, Phillies, Rays, and Royals were all featured in the bottom half of last year’s rankings and ended the season in the top half by WAR.

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In their final team-preview podcast of 2018, Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about a new podcast-inspired song, the Scott Kingery, Ketel Marte, and Christian Vazquez extensions, Ben’s partially listener-inspired research about catcher offense, a Devil Rays close call, and whether the ball is juiced in MLB The Show, then preview the 2018 Mets (28:47) with MLB.com’s Anthony DiComo, and the 2018 Rays (1:08:35) with CBS Sports’ R.J. Anderson.

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I think I say the same thing every year, but, I suppose, tradition is tradition. I run a lot of polling projects, crowdsourcing the FanGraphs audience, but out of all the polling projects, I enjoy this one the most. I don’t enjoy the first post; I enjoy analyzing the results. This is the results-analysis post. So often, our site supplies projections, and that’s that. If you see a projection you don’t like, you might say something in the comments or post something on Twitter, but that’s the end of it. Here, you get to have a collective voice. Not that we’re going to adjust our team projections based on this, mind you, but this is a chance to see community feedback.

Here is where you can see our best projected standings, taking schedule into account. As always, those are based on ZiPS projections, Steamer projections, and manually-maintained team depth charts. Those standings have been available now for a little while, but that doesn’t mean you have to think they’re correct. So last week, I ran a post with 30 polls, asking for your input. Is a given projection too optimistic? Is a given projection too pessimistic? I’ve got everything you said in a spreadsheet. This community is more fond of the Brewers, and it’s not so fond of the Blue Jays. That probably doesn’t surprise you. After all, you, the reader, are a part of the voting community.

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A quick glance at the contract situation for the best players on the San Francisco Giants might make it appear as though the club is set up for the long haul. Of the Giants’ eight best players by projection this season, seven are locked up through at least 2020, with the eighth signed for two more seasons. Every single player expected to make a significant contribution is signed or under team control for at least two seasons, with Andrew McCutchen representing the only notable exception.

What that quick glance at the Giants’ contract situations might miss, however, is the ages of all of those contributors. With a veteran core, the Giants are very much in win-now mode and losing Madison Bumgarner — who likely won’t return until June after breaking his pinky finger — deals the team a big blow in what might be the team’s last best chance at another playoff run.

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Starting pitching might be the most interesting aspect of this positional power rankings series, given how much impact it has on a team’s season. Jay got you warmed up with 16th- through 30th-ranked rotations this morning. Now here is a graphical look at the top 15:

The mainstays atop the list aren’t going to shock you. It’s the cream of the crop, including both of last season’s World Series entrants, within the top three. Two American League teams open up the list then the National League has four of the top six; of the American League’s top five, three come from the East division. Perhaps most shocking of all is the Rockies landing in the top 15, as they’ve developed a nice group of arms. The two Pennsylvania-based teams could have enough pitching to make some noise this year, and a fourth AL East team sneaks in right near the end.

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