Every year, around this time, I look forward to this post. I look forward to it because it checks the two boxes most important to me as a writer: the post is always popular, and I don’t have to try to come up with a new idea. It’s always the same idea, and it’s always the same basic research. What changes are the names and the dates and the numbers. It’s not that the research and prep are easy, but finding an idea is usually the challenge. That’s not a concern when you have a recurring series.

That being said, I get nervous. I always want to write about the worst called ball of the season, but, around the All-Star break, I tend to write about the worst called ball of the first half. Here’s this year’s. If that stands up as the worst called ball overall, then I’d have to decide if I want to write a second time about the same event. It’s preferable, to me, that the second half contain a ball that’s objectively even worse. The odds of that aren’t great; the second half is shorter than the first. They’re not actually halves at all.

Excitement and nervousness. My fingers are always crossed. This year, I got lucky again. The worst called ball of the first half was thrown on June 18. The worst called ball of the whole season was thrown on August 20. It was worse by a fraction of a fraction of one inch. The pitch-tracking technology isn’t truly that precise, to begin with. And this all depends on the upper and lower strike-zone boundaries, which are subjective, since they change for every hitter. I don’t have 100% confidence that the ball on August 20 was worse. But my confidence level is at least, I don’t know, 51%. That’s good enough to proceed.

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From my own perspective, at least, it’s always weird to turn the page. At some point, the content stops being about the season that was, and it starts focusing on the season ahead. There’s a transition period, but it’s not well defined, and shortly after the climax of the World Series, it’s just…done. It’s gone, and everyone starts to look forward. You never want to dwell on a season that’s completed, but you also don’t want to just skip that easily past the answers to the questions we were asking for months.

I don’t have much longer to write about 2017. You don’t have much longer to think about 2017. Unless you’re an Astros fan, in which case, yeah, keep on replaying everything in your mind. You’ve earned that. But now is the time for me to repeat the same polling project I’ve published twice before. While the 2017 season is still somewhat fresh in your minds, I’d like to analyze your collective brains. With your permission, of course.

This is a post with 30 polls, one for each team. Ideally I’d like you to only vote in the poll or polls corresponding to your favorite team(s). Some of you might be fans of baseball more than you’re fans of one team in particular, and in that case, either don’t vote at all, or vote for the team you think you care about the most. It’s up to you. It’s all up to you. For each team, I’ve asked a simple question. How was your experience being a fan of the given team this season? There’s no wrong answer, and your feeling is personal to you. But if you’d like to share it, please do so. This shouldn’t take much in the way of mental gymnastics. Were you happy? Were you disappointed? How disappointed were you? Do you love watching every game, no matter the score and no matter the standings? Just how much did you get out of your investment? To what extent were you invested in the first place?

It’s easy, and I appreciate your participation, in advance. I’ll review the results later this week. In the past, I’ve written summary blurbs for each team, but I realized those blurbs might bias the responses, so now I’ve quit. Also, I’m lazy. Anyhow, all the polls are below. Hopefully the anchor text works to send you to your team directly! Thank you again for making these poll posts possible.

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As we head into the off-season, there are a lot of different plans being made. Some teams are preparing to spend big on free agents, looking to upgrade their roster for 2018 without surrendering any talent. Others are looking to make win-now trades, eyeing upgrades currently on other teams. And a few teams are planning on being sellers, turning some big leaguers into players who might be more helpful when the team is ready to win.

But regardless of where a team is on the success cycle, every team is going to have answer the same question this winter. This question hangs over the evaluation of nearly every player in the big leagues, and will impact both what kinds of players a team will acquire, how they value them, or whether they feel their internal options are as good as what they can bring in from the outside. And this question has little to do with each player’s own abilities, yet might have a big impact on their expected performance.

In all 30 front offices, the off-season plan will be significantly impacted by one big variable: what kind of baseball should they expect to play with in 2018 and beyond?

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Heading into the 2017 campaign, a lot was expected of Jackie Bradley Jr. In 2016, he’d shown that his late-season breakout the previous year was no fluke. He recorded five wins, bashed a career-best 26 homers, and earned a place on the All-Star team for the first time. He was excellent on the defensive side of the ball, as well. There was sufficient reason to think he’d reach a new level.

Unfortunately, though, this season didn’t quite go as planned. If his career seemed to be trending up, the 2017 campaign changed that impression. It was an unexpected chapter in what has become a pretty strange career up to this point.

Let’s start with Bradley’s power output. In 2015, when then-interim manager Torey Lovullo finally gave Bradley a shot at regular playing time, he started pounding the ball with authority. For the 2015 season as a whole, he posted a .249 ISO. From his July 29 call-up to the end of the season, his ISO was .272. No one expected him to carry that over for a full season in 2016 — only 24 players have ever posted a .270 ISO for a whole season while manning center field, and the list of players who have done it more than one season is perilously short, including only Carlos Beltran, Joe DiMaggio, Jim Edmonds, Ken Griffey Jr., Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays, Duke Snider, Gorman Thomas, Mike Trout, and Hack Wilson. Ten guys.

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While the path to the decision took something of a circuitous route over the last couple of seasons, one of the least surprising developments of the weekend was the Pirates’ announcement that they would exercise Andrew McCutchen’s $14.5 million club option for 2018.

After an inexplicable 0.6 WAR campaign in 2016 and an ice-cold start to 2017, McCutchen finally figured things out and rebounded to finish the season with a .279/.363/.486 slash line and 3.7 WAR. If the status of McCutchen’s option was ever in doubt in May, he rendered it a non-issue with a massive June and July, resembling a legitimate superstar during that and other stretches.

According to Matt Swartz’s research, the cost of a win was $9 million from 2014 to -16. Steamer projects McCutchen to post a 3.1 WAR season. The outfielder could reasonably contribute close to $30 million in production, in other words. That’s considerable surplus value at the end of what has been one of the most club-friendly deals of the 21st century.

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I’ve become atypically interested in Clayton Kershaw’s second arm slot. You know, the one where he drops from being so over the top. It is, apparently, Kershaw’s natural arm angle, but it’s not the one he took to the majors. It’s not something he ever used as a Dodger until he felt sufficiently inspired by teammate Rich Hill. Hill also drops down from time to time, and although Kershaw doesn’t drop down by so much, it’s interesting to see him messing around in the first place. Clayton Kershaw is, after all, the best starting pitcher in the world.

Players are always attempting some kind of tweak. They’re forever in search of some kind of leg up. Chris Taylor made the tweak he needed to make in order to become a quality major-league hitter. What interests me about someone like Kershaw is — a player like Taylor is strongly incentivized to improve. His career literally depended on it. Kershaw hasn’t needed to improve. Kershaw has only ever struggled relative to himself. Kershaw didn’t need to start changing up his arm angle. He wanted to try it anyway. Kershaw experimented for the sake of taking his opponent by surprise.

I love that drive that he has. It’s probably suggestive of how Kershaw got so good at all. He doesn’t want anyone to get too comfortable. To bring this all home: Kershaw has unveiled a couple surprises. Late last year, he suddenly started dropping down. And this year, one month ago, Kershaw threw a curveball. It was a special curveball.

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Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about Shohei Otani, the Players Association, and a trio of opt-ins, then discuss whether tanking is bad for baseball and which conclusions can and can’t be drawn from the rebuilds, roster constructions, and in-game tactics of this season’s successful playoff teams.

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In a sense, we’ve all been able to see this coming. For the Royals, it’s long been a race against time, trying to win as much as possible before the simultaneous free agencies of Eric Hosmer, Lorenzo Cain, and Mike Moustakas. This past season was pretty clearly going to be a last ride, and now the organization will have some tough decisions to make. They’ve already denied the Braves permission to interview Dayton Moore for a job in baseball ops. It might even stay that way. Moore might remain in Kansas City to try and see this through.

But let me share with you a fun fact. Maybe it’s more a collection of three related fun facts. You already knew that next year’s Royals were going to feel pretty different. You already knew they were likely to take a step back. It’s a good thing the core managed to win a World Series. Obviously, it’s always good to win a World Series. But the recent championship might take some of the edge off. What the Royals have left, as of today — theirs isn’t the best roster picture.

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Because most of the posts I publish at FanGraphs are based on my KATOH projection system, you might think my interests lie in stark contrast to the typical scout’s. My work is often presented against the backdrop of traditional prospect lists in an effort to identify players who may by underrated by the scouting consensus. However, I do attempt to see prospects in person from time to time in order to put faces and bodies to the stat lines I spend so much time analyzing.

As noted previously in these pages, my in-person looks are defined by one constraint — namely, my general reluctance to leave the five boroughs of New York. As such, I confine my interest in pro prospects to those players in the New York-Penn League (NYPL), seeing as many games over the summer as my schedule will permit.

What follows is specific sort of document, then, based on a combination of in-person looks, statistical performance, and geography. It is, in short, the pref list of someone who refused to stray far from New York City while compiling it. The mediocre scouting video is my own. KATOH numbers represent projected WAR over first six major-league seasons.

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