This is Alexis Brudnicki’s fourth piece as part of her March residency at FanGraphs. Alexis is the Director of Baseball Information for the Great Lake Canadians, an elite amateur baseball program in London, Ontario, Canada. She has written for various publications including Baseball America, Canadian Baseball Network, Sportsnet, The Hardball Times, and Prep Baseball report. She won a 2016 SABR Analytics Conference Research Award for Contemporary Baseball Commentary. She can also be found on Twitter (@baseballexis). She’ll be contributing here this month.

This is also the second installment of a three-part series exploring whether the Australian Baseball League is in the midst of their own juiced-ball and bat controversy. In this installment, the pitchers respond. You can find Part 1 here.

The Pitchers

For some, the conversation started early.

In the opening weekend of the 2017/18 Australian Baseball League season, 111 runs were scored and 30 home runs were hit. In just 11 games. More than half of those home runs were hit at Melbourne Ballpark, home to the Aces, who hosted the Perth Heat for four contests.

“I noticed a difference in the league in Round 1,” said Josh Tols, a current Phillies farmhand and southpaw for the Aces with five seasons in the ABL under his belt. “There was an abnormal number of home runs hit at Altona in our opening series against Perth. Typically, with the wind at our field, the ball doesn’t get out all that much. Just looking at the home-run numbers after Round 1, you kind of had a feeling it was going to be a long year for the pitchers.”

Other hurlers didn’t begin to notice a difference until a little later.

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The new baseball season is upon us. But even before the Cubs and Marlins began play today, indications from this spring have suggested that a dangerous trend, apparent last year, has continued into the present one — namely, an increased incidence of concussions.

Before I address that, though, first a brief primer on what concussions can do to a baseball player. In 2010, first baseman Justin Morneau was running a 183 wRC+ and had established himself as one of the best hitters in baseball. After suffering a concussion that knocked him out for the remainder of the season, he was never the same, failing to play a full season until 2012 or to cross the 120 wRC+ threshold against until 2014. Third baseman Corey Koskie was a borderline star before suffering a concussion with Milwaukee; he never played again. The way he describes the effects are frightening: “I remember walking up to the plate, thinking OK which way do I run again?”

Joe Mauer‘s career was derailed by a concussion that gave him blurry vision for two years; he was hitting .324 with a 143 wRC+ when he suffered the injury in 2013 and didn’t eclipse a .300 batting average, a .350 OBP, or a 110 wRC+ again until 2017. Last year, Brandon Belt’s season was put on hold by a concussion, as well; he experienced feelings of depression and lethargy.

In perhaps the most tragic case, Cincinnati utilityman extraordinaire Ryan Freel committed suicide in December 2012. Freel had suffered 10 concussions during his career and was posthumously diagnosed with Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy. CTE is a disease caused by repeated concussions or traumatic brain injuries and which was most famously diagnosed in the late Patriots football player Aaron Hernandez. Suicide and aggression are two symptoms of CTE. There’s even research to suggest Lou Gehrig didn’t suffer from ALS, but instead had CTE.

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For fans of all 30 28 26 teams, Thursday, at last, is opening day. As I write this, regular-season baseball is already underway. Literally the first real pitch of the entire season was hit for a home run. It was also a 96 mile-per-hour fastball from a pitcher few people across the country have heard of. I don’t know if you could come up with a more pithy representation of baseball in the modern era. Everything is about power, strikeouts, walks, and apparently batters getting hit by a pitch. This is how it’s been, and this is how it will be.

There’s nothing that quite compares to the feeling of opening day. I know I’m not alone when I say that, every single year, on this particular morning, I wake up with a start. Most mornings begin with a snooze or three or four, but on the morning of opening day, I arise with this internal electricity. It’s not that the games on opening day are that important. It’s that just having games is important. We’ve all spent five or six months feeling like our preferred routine was disrupted, and now we can all get back to normal. We can watch and think happily about baseball.

The start of the year is welcome for just about everyone. That much should be self-evident — as fans, we just want to watch our teams compete, and especially early on, optimism can dig its hooks in without letting go. So the question in the headline might come off as ridiculous. Who among us isn’t excited for baseball, now that it’s finally back? But this is a polling project I’ve run before, two years ago. I wish I would’ve done it in 2017. The average fan of every team is happier now than they were a few months ago. But, who’s most excited? Who’s least excited, relatively speaking? As you should all understand by now, I love collecting data covering the whole MLB landscape, and this is just another opportunity.

There’s no reason for you to think too hard. The polls ought to be very easy to answer, because the answer is already there in your gut. Let’s say you’re a fan of the Yankees. How excited are you about 2018? Let’s say, instead, you’re a fan of the Marlins. How excited are you about 2018? Are White Sox fans more or less excited than Phillies fans? Than Padres fans? Than Rangers fans? Provided you all vote honestly, in sufficient numbers, we can get answers. We can get them very easily! And your responses should be revealing.

The best polling projects, I think, are the ones with no right or wrong answer. In the poll for your favorite team below, select whichever response you feel most strongly about. And then early next week, we can have fun with the numbers, comparing contenders to contenders, and basements to basements. And contenders to basements, and so on and so forth. Baseball is back, and it’s going to be here every day. Every day at the major-league level, and every day at the minor-league level. Look, there’s something stirring within each one of us. Please respond below, if you have a moment, and thank you all in advance for your participation. I’ll never stop publishing polling projects. (I’ll never stop publishing polling projects.)

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While employed as a beat reporter, one thing I learned from photographers is the virtue of patience. One has to keep paying attention, keep triggering the digital camera’s capture button, or risk missing a memorable moment, the best moment of a career. Photographers are fishing, really. There is no DVR playback in live-image capturing.

Only shaky video from a handheld smartphone captured the moment on Tuesday evening.

If it weren’t for Ashley’s wherewithal to employ her phone’s video option, the world might have missed Cristian Pache’s second professional home run. All those who were not present at SunTrust Park had already missed his first. Each occurred on Tuesday night in Atlanta.

Nowadays it seems everything that happens in major-league baseball is captured by high-definition camera. But the Braves’ final exhibition game against a contingent of their minor leaguers at SunTrust Park on Tuesday night was not televised. It was an exhibition, a final warm-up the club dubbed as the Braves vs. Future Stars. We will have only the oral histories to document what happened. And something remarkable did happen.

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Two people walked into a bar. They settled every debate in the universe. Then they discussed baseball.

“Who is Mr. October?”

“Reggie Jackson. What my elders taught me anyhow. Read it was sarcastic at first, then Reggie grew into the role.”

“Mr. November?”

“Ain’t Jeets that’s for sure? Can’t take a crown because you were first in line when a calendar flips.”

A swig.

“Randy Johnson won Games Six and Seven of the World flippin’ Series. That boy never needed to grow, of course. Just found the right circumstance. We should all be so lucky and talented.”

“Sounds good to me.”

Peace in our time.

“What about Mr. March?”

Oh no.

“All the databases have ‘Mar/Apr’ in their splits. There have been 70 regular-season games played in March. What are we saying here? Beginnings don’t matter? Without a beginning there is no end. An ouroboros. With no March there is no October. There is no November. There’s no Christmas. I like Christmas.”

“Chanukkah is also…”

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And just like that, the winter of our discontent is almost over. Tomorrow, all 30 teams celebrate Opening Day, and their fans with them. But before play begins, we at FanGraphs will observe our annual tradition of attempting to predict what will happen this year, before we commence our other annual tradition of getting some things wrong. Last year was a mixed bag. Astros? Nailed it. Cubs and Dodgers? Aren’t our moms proud! Aaron Judge and Cody Bellinger, Rookie of the Year winners? Can’t say we saw that coming.

We gathered predictions from writers across our family of blogs; what follows are the results.

The American League

The American League predictions are marked by their overwhelming sameness. Of the 40 ballots cast, a full 29 have the Astros, Indians, and Yankees sitting atop their divisions come the season’s end. Eight others feature the Astros and Indians but swap in the Red Sox for the Yankees. That isn’t so surprising: we currently project Houston to win 100 games, while New York, Cleveland, and Boston check in at 95, 94, and 93 wins, respectively.

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