Welcome to Day Three of the 2017 Positional Power Rankings from FanGraphs. For some background on how these posts work, read the introductory post by Dave Cameron. Click on the links above to examine other positions.

The rankings below come from the FanGraphs Depth Chart projections. While the projections spit out specific numbers, these projections are estimates and teams that are within a few tenths of a win of each other have similar forecasts for the season. While I didn’t create the projections, the commentary is my own.

Last season was marked by a surge of offense throughout baseball, and this was very much the case for second basemen, who posted one of the greatest seasons of all time for the position. While it might be tempting to point to some sort of emerging group of players set to change the way we think about the position, the evidence doesn’t support that hypothesis. Of the top-eight players, only Jose Altuve will play this season under the age of 30, with many of the best already in their mid-30s. Jose Altuve is the exception, not the rule, as the young star has a sizable lead over his competitors at second.

This is the first time in half a decade that the team with Robinson Cano isn’t atop this list. Cano didn’t stumble far and other aging vets fall in line behind him. As far as the order in which clubs appear here, there could be a shakeup before the year is out. A couple teams near the top might be shopping their second basemen if they fall out of contention. If you’re looking for a team to rise, look to the south side of Chicago, where the best prospect in baseball could get his first real shot at a starting job later this season.

Episode 726
Managing editor Dave Cameron is the guest on this edition of the pod, during which he discusses Toronto’s Steve Pearce, matters relating to Steve Pearce, and also matters that possess no relevance to Steve Pearce at all.

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Audio after the jump. (Approximately 38 min play time.)

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Previous editions: AL East / AL Central / NL East.

The World Baseball Classic is in its final stages, meaning that both the end of spring training and the start of the regular season are in sight. We’d better get through the remaining installments in this series quickly.

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As a faithful reader, you’re probably aware that a number of authors have written about the fly-ball revolution at FanGraphs this winter, examining the potential for a sea change in batted-ball profiles. If you’ve missed some or all of our posts you can read them, or revisit them here, here, here and here.

As I toured the central region and Gulf coast of Florida for FanGraphs this spring, a couple comments were particularly memorable. One was from this piece on Tampa Bay’s sharing of changeup knowledge, a success that Jim Hickey attributed less to organizational philosophy and more to pitchers with excellent changeups, like James Shields and Alex Cobb, sharing their craft and skills.

“It’s not so much a philosophy as it is a lineage,” Hickey said.

That struck me as quite interesting: the power of peers and word of mouth to have such a profound influence on the fortunes of a club. I also thought it was interesting when J.D. Martinez noted that more players have approached him this spring, curious about his loft-generating swing plane. Martinez is one of the notable early adopters of the uppercut, joining the likes of Justin Turner, Daniel Murphy and Josh Donaldson. They are not only excelling but espousing the philosophy.

So just as the Rays have handed down quality changeup grips from one generation to the next, and have led baseball in the value produced by changeups since 2006 — when Shields debuted with modest overall stuff but an excellent changeup — shouldn’t teams benefit by having early adopters of fly-ball philosophy? While most coaches in the game still seem to be subscribing to conventional hitting techniques, even if more coaches in the game spoke like private instructors like Doug Latta outside of the game, it stands to reason that players’ peers — trusted teammates, that is — might hold more influence when electing to made a radical adjustment.

The Rays have a changeup lineage. Are some teams creating the foundation of an uppercut lineage?

Maybe.

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Brady Anderson was a fascinating – and curious – player, most notably for his outlying 1996 season when he hit 50 home runs, a number he never before or again approached in his career. While the performance came under a cloud of suspicion, there was no evidence tying him PED usage.

He now has a fascinating and curious presence in the Baltimore clubhouse, as documented in an excellent profile by Ken Rosenthal .

Anderson is a controversial figure this spring. He holds an unusual sort of hybrid role with the Orioles. Technically employed as a high-ranking member of the front office, Anderson also has a locker in the clubhouse, wears a jersey, and plays roles in coaching, dealing with agents, and in strength and conditioning

The story is well worth a read, but I took away two main points — namely, that (a) we might see more hybrid-type roles in the future, further blurring lines and testing clubhouse sovereignty, and (b) Anderson is yet another voice challenging conventional coaching practices.

It’s true Anderson’s situation is an unusual one due to his cozy relationship with ownership. He operates with little oversight or constraint. But what has become less unusual is the practice of a front office infiltrating integrating itself in the clubhouse. As front offices have trended in a more analytical direction, they’ve hired more like-minded managers. They’ve hired forward-thinking strength and conditioning staffs. And in Pittsburgh, a quantitative analyst — Mike Fitzgerald — was believed to be the first such employee to be freed of the shackles of an office cubicle in order to travel with a club, complete with his own locker in road clubhouses (although he didn’t wear a jersey). The Pirates viewed Fitzgerald’s role as significant enough that they have hired a former Amherst College shortstop and pitcher, Bob Cook, to fill the role after Fitzgerald departed for Arizona, as MLB.com’s Adam Berry reported.

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Who’s going to have the better season: Bryce Harper or Manny Machado? That’s the question posed to you at the end of this post. Which means this is a poll post. Poll post!

Years ago, the debate used to be about Bryce Harper, Manny Machado, and Mike Trout. It’s safe to say Trout is now excluded from the conversation, on account of having become too good. That leaves Harper and Machado to battle, and while they’re not actually in direct competition with one another, what’s the downside here of matching them up? Below, I’ll present the respective cases, before getting to the question. This does not mean I think these are the only great players. Kris Bryant is great. Mookie Betts is great. Corey Seager and several others are great. But Harper vs. Machado is a fun one, and I think we’ll be able to learn from whatever these poll results might be.

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A couple of years ago, the Blue Jays were blown away by the spring training performances of a couple of 20-year-old flamethrowers, and because they were the team’s two best pitchers in the Grapefruit League, the team decided to carry both Roberto Osuna and Miguel Castro on the Opening Day roster. Castro even took over as the team’s closer for the third game of the season; the Blue Jays bet big on talent over experience, and while Castro is a reminder that spring training success doesn’t always carry over to the regular season, the team struck gold with Osuna, who has been one of the game’s best relievers the last two years.

There aren’t any 20-year-olds threatening to crack the end of a contender’s bullpen this year, but over in Washington, the Nationals do look like they’re giving strong consideration to handing the ninth inning job to rookie Koda Glover, who turns 24 a week after the season starts. Like Castro and Osuna, Glover is opening eyes with elite velocity and a fine spring training performance, and since Dusty Baker seems to prefer Shawn Kelley and Blake Treinen in setup roles, Glover is the guy who most looks like a traditional closer, even if he doesn’t have the type of experience that is usually required before earning the job.

Unlike the Toronto pair, Glover already did his A-ball to the Majors climb last year, pitching well at every stop on the minor league ladder before scuffling a bit in the big leagues. But while he ran an ERA over 5.00 in the Majors, and failed to record as many strikeouts as you’d expect with his stuff, it’s also not like he got lit up last year; opposing batters hit just .200/.277/.387 against him, good for just a .284 wOBA. Glover’s minor league performances also suggest the team has some reason to think that this plan might work, as both ZIPS and Steamer think he’s effectively as good as anyone in that bullpen besides Kelley.

And spring training dominance, while often overstated in value, isn’t worth ignoring entirely. As Dan Rosenheck showed a couple of years ago, you can improve pre-season projections by incorporating spring training data, and the effects are largest for young players on whom we have the least amount of big league data, meaning the projections have more room for error. And Glover’s spring numbers thus far are exactly the types of numbers Rosenheck identified as potentially worthwhile predictors of a performance that could be better than the current projections state.

His grapefruit league line, to this point.

8 IP, 4 H, 1 R, 1 BB, 11 K.

The hit and run categories don’t matter much, but that 39% strikeout rate? That’s something to pay attention to. Rosenheck’s study showed that big spikes in spring training strikeout rate did tend to suggest better pitching performances in-season, and all Glover really needs to do to become a high-end reliever is miss more bats. The fact that he’s destroying opposing hitters in spring training should be a very encouraging sign.

But there’s a caveat here, because Dusty Baker has decided to get Glover ready to pitch the ninth inning by having him actually pitch the ninth inning, rather than getting his work in earlier in the game. This means that by the time Glover has pitched, he’s generally been facing minor league hitters, since big leaguers aren’t playing all nine innings in the Grapefruit League. Because MLB.com helpfully has game logs for spring training, we can actually go through and look at the 28 batters he’s faced so far this spring. So let’s do just that.

3/20, NYY: Clint Frazier, Pete Kozma, Billy Mckinney, Kyle Higashioka
3/18, HOU: Max Stassi, Colin Moran, Alejandro Garcia, A.J. Reed
3/16, NYM: Ricardo Cespedes, Jacob Zanon, Andres Gimenez
3/13, DET: Steven Moya, Mike Gerber, Juan Perez, John Hicks
3/10, STL: Breyvic Valera, Wilfredo Tovar, Chad Huffman
3/7, BOS: Mitch Moreland, Chris Young, Jackie Bradley Jr
3/3, MIA: Ryan Jackson, Matt Juengel, Austin Nola, Destin Hood
2/28, HOU: Juan Centeno, Jake Marisnick, Andrew Apin

Among those 28 opponents, exactly four are likely to break camp with a big league team this year, and one of those four is Jake Marisnick, who hits like a minor leaguer. The good news is that, when asked to face the bottom of Boston’s line-up, he struck out all three of the Red Sox big leaguers. The bad news is that I don’t know how much the Nationals have really learned about Glover in the other 24 at-bats, given that we already knew he was capable of blowing minor leaguers away.

So, while it’s better that Glover is carving up the likes of Juan Perez and Matt Juengel than if he was struggling against them, we probably can’t apply Rosenheck’s study directly to Glover’s performance, since most of the players in that study faced mostly big leaguers by playing in the early innings of spring training games. And while Glover didn’t need a big spring training adjustment in order to be a decent enough option to close, the quality of competition should temper the excitement about what he’s done this month.

With a mid-90s fastball and a slider that looks like an out-pitch, the big question facing Glover is probably how well he’ll handle left-handed hitters, which could be the difference between him succeeding as a closer and being more suited to a match-up role. If the Nationals wanted to gather the most pertinent information to help them evaluate his readiness for the closer’s role, they probably should have had Glover face as many big league lefties as possible this spring.

With a few weeks of spring training left, there’s still time for Baker to shift his usage plan, and test Glover against the kinds of guys he’ll actually have to get out if he wants to pitch the ninth inning in D.C. this year. But until that adjustment happens, we probably shouldn’t put too much stock in Glover’s dominant spring training numbers. We already knew he could get low-quality hitters out. If he’s going to be the closer for a contending team, the Nationals need to figure out if he can get big leaguers out too.

The conversation began a bit clunky, then it turned a little nerdy. Not in a numbers-crunching way, but rather in a bat-path way. Danny Espinosa, it turns out, wasn’t too loopy after all.

I’d never formally met the Angels infielder prior to approaching him in Tempe earlier this spring. We had interacted, albeit briefly. That was last September, when he was in Pittsburgh as a member of the Washington Nationals, and I was interviewing Trea Turner. Sidling up from the adjoining locker, Espinosa raised an imaginary microphone and asked his then teammate: “Are you the best player in the National League?” He then walked away, bemused, as I claimed that was going to be my next question. (It wasn’t.)

Fast forward to our recent, and more expansive, exchange. The first thing I asked Espinosa, who was acquired by Anaheim over the offseason, was why he was so inconsistent with the bat as a Nat. After a quizzical look that led me to rephrase my question, he suggested he’s happy to be in the American League.

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We’re mixing up the schedule for the PPRs a bit this year, doing corner infielders today so that we can run middle infielders together tomorrow, so the third base rankings follow on Eno’s first base post from this morning. If you’re not sure what all this is, read the series introduction. On to the corners who can field.

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