This should not be a riddle. There are too many riddles in this universe, this country, this state, this zip code. We accept there will always be some unanswerable questions; it’s part of the bargain for living in a boundless, knotty orb. But this is baseball. The day of the apex of human knowledge – or the robot uprising – is one day closer, and a fair number of us spend a large amount of our time thinking about the game. So what’s the right way to catch a fly ball?

Two hands? That’s what I was told. I’m sure you were also told this. You could probably still hear an elder screaming “two hands” so loudly it traversed time and space and occasionally still echoes in your head. Using both of your hands was the “proper” way to handle anything. Only a neanderthal would pass the carrots at the dinner table with one hand, et al.

Juan Lagares uses two hands when he makes a routine catch.

https://gfycat.com/YoungFavorableDoe

But not when he’s chasing down a fly ball trying to run away from him.

https://gfycat.com/CarelessDamagedChuckwalla

Nobody uses two hands when they have to chase a ball in the gap or when they have to dive. There’s no time, even for a guy like Lagares. Yet it’s just as important to secure a baseball and lock it in a vise no matter how little time you have to react. So I ask again, and this is important since ground balls are quickly growing extinct: how am I catching this fly ball?

“I was always taught to use two hands.” That’s what Mets right fielder Ryan Church said in May 2009. “I mean, if you have to reach for it well that’s one thing, but if you’re there waiting for it, then yeah, sure, two hands.”

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Jake Arrieta is now officially a member of the Phillies. For a few weeks, this arrangement was feeling increasingly inevitable, as Scott Boras wasn’t finding longer-term offers, and as the Phillies have had tens of millions of dollars of payroll space. The Phillies are getting closer to relevance, and, among the would-be Arrieta suitors, they have to worry about efficient spending the least. So, here we are, with Arrieta having had his formal press-conference introduction. The Phillies still aren’t anyone’s wild-card favorites, but Arrieta unquestionably makes them stronger. The rotation is now deeper than just Aaron Nola.

The player in question is interesting enough on his own. Entire books could be written about Arrieta’s career, and he still has another few chapters to go. Arrieta has experienced dizzying highs and unthinkable lows, which makes him out to be something inspiring. But let me warn you right now, this is not a post about Arrieta’s professional achievements. It’s not a post about whether I think Arrieta is going to age gracefully. This is a post about the contract. The inanimate paper contract. Specifically, this is a post about a clause in the contract. You should leave now if you don’t care about this. But with the Jake Arrieta deal, the Phillies and Scott Boras have agreed to something new.

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By most measures, the 2017 season was a very good one for the Brewers. On the heels of back-to-back sub-.500 seasons, the first of which saw them shift into rebuilding mode, they spent over two months atop the NL Central, from mid-May to late July, and remained in the Wild Card hunt until the season’s final weekend. Their 86 wins and second-place finish in the NL Central represented the franchise’s best showing since 2011. They made a big splash in late January, signing free-agent center fielder Lorenzo Cain and trading for left fielder Christian Yelich. They made some lower-cost moves as well, most notably adding a solid starter, Jhoulys Chacin, to a rotation that finished in the NL’s top five in ERA and WAR.

It’s not unreasonable to think that those improvements would put a team that missed a playoff spot by a single game in the thick of this year’s race. Yet, as of publication, the Brewers are projected to finish just 78-84. What in the name of Bernie Brewer is going on?

It bears repeating that projections are not destiny and that, at the team level, the error bars on a given year of preseason projections tend to average six to eight wins in either direction. The 2017 Brewers were one of those teams that push such averages higher, because as of Opening Day last year, they were forecast to win just 70 games. In terms of overachievement, they matched the Diamondbacks (77 projected wins, 93 actual wins) for the majors’ largest discrepancy; the Giants, projected for 88 wins but finishing with 64, had the largest discrepancy in the other direction.

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We tire of spring training pretty quickly, but I think it’s because we’re watching it wrong. We burden it with too many expectations, chief among them that it will look and feel like real baseball. Of course, it isn’t really baseball yet — John Andreoli is there — but the contrast of its not-baseballness to the baseballness of the regular season is illuminating. It teaches us things.

The eighth inning is a particularly good time for such lessons. It’s such a funky inning! It’s good for people watching, too, because most of the folks we know have hit the showers. The almost-baseball gets weird, and the faces become unfamiliar. With that in mind, I watched the eighth inning of the available broadcasts for Sunday, March 4. Here are some of the people I met, the baseball I saw, and the things I learned.

Rockies vs. Angels
I’m not especially fond of jerseys with no names on them. I get it: there are lots of dudes running around spring training. Prospects and non-roster invitees, big names and big numbers. The “who” of a guy can get lost in all that shuffling between big-league camp and the back fields.

There is an elegance to the nameless jersey, a sort of brutal honesty. It says, “You can probably look away now. Go grab a hotdog.” You know, how a jersey talks? It signals to the crowd that we can try to beat traffic. But it feels so impersonal, and it would cost so little to give every player the dignity of his name. It’d give moms and grandmas so much more to go on at Thanksgiving. “Here’s my boy.” Nameless jerseys are awful in a medium way most of the time, but occasionally they’re a kindness.

Brian Mundell won’t talk about this moment at Thanksgiving. Despite all his hard work and years of practice, he fell down. We might be inspired to say, “Aw, buddy,” and gift him a little sympathetic frown, but we aren’t quite sure who we’re looking at. The anonymity of his jersey protects him. Nolan Arenado probably won’t ask him about it. He won’t become a Twitter joke, the fringe prospect who fell down. When he’s getting gas in Scottsdale, a kid buying gum won’t smirk. He’ll get to move on from this small bit of failure until he doesn’t remember it anymore, in part because it was a minor moment in spring, and in part because he’s 77. And who’s 77? Just some nameless guy. Could be anyone, really.

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A few weeks ago, I wrote a piece for this site wherein I noted that the Chicago White Sox rotation was (a) projected to be very bad in 2018 and (b) composed to a great extent of starting pitchers of whom the following could be said: “That guy? Who knows what he’ll do this year.” My editor Carson Cistulli titled the piece “The White Sox’ Rotation Could Be Anything,” and he was right. The White Sox’ rotation could be anything, because it’s full of players whose track records cause most projection systems to raise their digital shoulders, put on their best Robert De Niro face, and shrug magnificently right in your face.

In the comments to that piece, some of you expressed an interest in reading more about variance in player projections. So, here are some words and tables on that subject.

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Last week, colleague and attorney extraordinaire Nathaniel Grow sent me an article — specifically, an Accounting Today piece by Michael Cohn — regarding potential changes to major-league baseball trades as a result of the recent tax reform law. I decided, using that piece as a start, to determine what impact the legislation would have on MLB teams generally, if any at all.

As it turns out, the new law does impact them. A lot.

Let’s begin with some background. What we colloquially refer to as the “tax reform law” is actually more properly called by its title, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. The law made sweeping changes both to individual and corporate tax rates and regulations. Most of it is outside the scope of our concern here. It’s essential to remember, however, that baseball teams are all businesses. There are, of course, different types of business ownership structures — some are corporations, some are partnerships, some are limited liability companies — but the underlying point is that they are all business entities of some sort or other. And so the changes in the tax code impact how every team operates.

Now, a fair warning: this involves a discussion of tax law, which isn’t famous for producing scintillating content. Also note that what follows represents a gross oversimplification for purposes of brevity. In other words, don’t go doing your taxes based on the information provided here.

Ready? Let’s go.

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At least 236 major-league players will earn more than Neil Walker in 2018.

Among second basemen alone, 18 are expected to receive something better than the $4 million the New York Yankees guaranteed to pay Walker, who remained available into the middle of March.

Walker has produced seven straight seasons of at least two wins. He ranks 61st amongst position players in WAR (11.7) since the start of the 2014 season. He was ranked by former FanGraphs manager editor Dave Cameron as 11th-best free agent available this winter.

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The A’s are signing Jonathan Lucroy for one year and $6.5 million. Why are they doing that? Because Lucroy has been good before, and, other than Lucroy, the A’s catchers are Bruce Maxwell, Josh Phegley, and Dustin Garneau. It’s not so much that Lucroy is sure to be a massive improvement. But, he ought to help, and the A’s had some money to move, and this season, the A’s also happen to look like a half-decent wild-card contender. Everything makes sense. This move was almost painfully obvious.

Of course, in order for this move to go down, Lucroy had to accept. You know how free agency works. And the A’s have had some problems here, in terms of getting players to take their money. Sure, the A’s have run low payrolls in large part because they’ve intended for payroll to be low, but they’ve also often been turned down, even when they’ve had the high offer. This offseason, for example, the A’s offered the biggest contract to Brian Duensing, who re-signed with the Cubs. Maybe Lucroy is fond of the A’s. Maybe he’s excited to go there. But, it’s the middle of spring training. The market decided Lucroy wasn’t worth being enthusiastic about. The A’s came calling with a job.

As I write this, Lucroy is 31 years old. Not even very long ago, he was considered one of baseball’s best catchers. How did his free agency end up in this place? Lucroy, like Carlos Gonzalez, is coming off a bad season. And it’s not at all clear what anyone should make of him at this point. What skills he still has are fair to question.

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