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This positional power ranking won’t be like the others. Take a look at the graph. In particular, note the right side of the graph.

You’ll notice that a number of the clubs with the poorest first-base situations simultaneously possess strong clubs overall. Seattle, Texas, Toronto, Washington: they’re all supposed to be competitive this year. They’ve punted the position, it seems. Maybe with the ubiquity of high-powered low-defense sluggers on the market, teams have decided just to take the cheapest one. What the reason, it makes for a weird fun-house version of the first-base depth charts we used to know and love.

I say all that and then the first spot up features a vintage first baseman. Anthony Rizzo can hit for power (15th-best isolated slugging percentage in the league) while striking out like it was the 90s (third-best strikeout rate in the top 15 for ISO). He even stole some bases one year. What more is there to say except that the book on Rizzo has been out for years — throw the plate-crowder inside, where he had the 12th-most pitches in baseball last year — and yet Rizzo keeps ticking like a metronome when it comes to power, patience, and contact.

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Just today we kicked off our annual Positional Power Rankings series, which means that, before too long, we’ll get a couple of posts about individual bullpens, looking at every single group. I’ll even be responsible for writing one of those posts, meaning maybe it works to our disadvantage to put this post up now, focusing on one bullpen in particular. But I’ve had a note here for a while, and I’m not one to let a topic go uncovered. The Rockies bullpen is of particular interest, especially at a time when the larger narrative around the team has responded negatively to recent news.

Let’s rewind. Yes, the last week or two have not been kind to the Rockies organization. The outlook for the season ahead has certainly gotten worse. Yet going back to last season, you know which team’s bullpen had — easily — the league’s worst WPA? That would be the Rockies, who made even the Reds feel proud of themselves. Although the Rockies finished at 75-87, their BaseRuns record was a more decent 80-82. With a stronger bullpen, last year’s Rockies would’ve been an average team. Their bullpen this year has the potential to be unusually dominant.

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Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about anticipatory player celebrations, then preview the Rangers’ 2017 season with Levi Weaver of WFAA and the Marlins’ 2017 season with Tim Healey of the Sun Sentinel.

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Welcome back to our annual positional power rankings, which Dave Cameron kicked off this morning with his introductory post. You’re probably familiar with these rankings and series of posts, but if you’re a first-timer, we endeavor to take you through the projected strength of each position in the majors by team — ranking each club from No. 1 to 30 — based upon FanGraphs WAR forecasts. We also provide commentary that hopefully provides some invaluable insights and light-hearted moments. We begin with the catching position.

As you can see in the chart above, the Giants, perhaps unsurprisingly, again pace the field in WAR thanks to Buster Posey. And that advantage is not insignificant in what is again projected to be the weakest position in the major leagues. Major-league catchers combined to slash .242/.310/.391 last season with a wRC+ of 87. So if your team has a Posey, if Gary Sanchez’s second half is indicative of who he might be for 2017, then those players stake their respective teams to significant relative advantages. Only five teams — the Giants, Rangers, Yankees, Dodgers and Astros — project to earn three wins or better from the position, though it is important to remember pitch framing isn’t factored into FanGraphs’ WAR formula.

There isn’t expected to be much change in relative power: the Giants, Nationals, Rangers, and Yankees comprised four of the top-six teams last year. Still, there are players like Travis d’Arnaud, Austin Hedges, and Mike Zunino who contain upside and could perhaps reach new levels of performance. As for an addition of new, young, star power, only two catchers — and Jorge Alfaro at No. 32 and Francisco Mejia at No. 37 — ranked in top 50 of Eric Longenhagen’s top 100 prospects. Mejia is not expected to contribute at the major-league level. So, let’s rank some catching depth charts, shall we?

There are some whispers that Buster Posey’s best days are behind him. Yes, his isolated slugging diminished for a second consecutive season. Yes, he posted his lowest wRC+ (116) in a full season. Yes, he’s logged a lot of innings behind the plate. Yes, he’s going to turn 30 years of age on March 27. But Posey’s average exit velocity was actually up last season (91.2 mph) from 2015 (89.6), his walk rate increased, and his elite bat-to-ball skills remained in place. He ranked as the game’s best framer, according to Baseball Prospectus, and he matched a career best by throwing out 37% of base-stealers. So, Posey should be just fine in 2017. Even if we’ve already witnessed peak Posey, he stands a good chance to again be the game’s most valuable catcher.

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Below is an analysis of the prospects in the Baltimore Orioles farm system. Scouting reports are compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as from my own observations. The KATOH statistical projections, probable-outcome graphs, and (further down) Mahalanobis comps have been provided by Chris Mitchell. For more information on the 20-80 scouting scale by which all of my prospect content is governed you can click here. For further explanation of the merits and drawbacks of Future Value, read this. -Eric Longenhagen

The KATOH projection system uses minor-league data and Baseball America prospect rankings to forecast future performance in the major leagues. For each player, KATOH produces a WAR forecast for his first six years in the major leagues. There are drawbacks to scouting the stat line, so take these projections with a grain of salt. Due to their purely objective nature, the projections here can be useful in identifying prospects who might be overlooked or overrated. Due to sample-size concerns, only players with at least 200 minor-league plate appearances or batters faced last season have received projections. -Chris Mitchell

Other Lists
NL West (ARI, COL, LAD, SD, SF)
AL Central (CHW, CLE, DET, KC, MIN)
NL Central (CHC, CIN, PIT, MIL, StL)
NL East (ATL, MIA, NYM, PHI, WAS)
AL East (BAL, BOS, NYY, TB, TOR)

50 FV Prospects

Relevant/Interesting Metrics
Slashed .320/.406/.422 at Double-A in 2016.

Scouting Report
While this series has often extolled the virtues of loud tools, the best aspects of Sisco’s game are ensconced in quiet. This is most important defensively, where Sisco has improved to the point of viability. Balls in the dirt are sputtering off of Sisco’s catching gear with less force, and his receiving has become more still and refined. Scouts now consider Sisco, who didn’t start catching until his senior year of high school in 2013, a viable defensive backstop. Nobody is particularly excited about him back there, but he’s okay right now and should improve into his mid-20s as he continuously makes good use of his above-average athleticism and refines his skills. In fact, scouts consider Sisco athletic enough that, were something to occur that requires him to move out from behind the plate, he might be able to play somewhere other than first base/DH, which is often the value-crushing alternative for unsound defensive catchers.

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With two weeks left until Opening Day, it’s time for the annual FanGraphs season preview series, which we do a little differently around here. While plenty of other talented writers and publications put out previews by team or by division, we prefer to go position by position, which lets us cover pretty much every roster spot on every team in baseball. While traditional team previews focus mostly on the top end of a roster, the difference in making the postseason is often how well the end of the roster performs, and how much value teams get from their non-stars. By breaking down every position from 1 to 30, we can emphasize where every team looks strong — or a little less so — heading into the season.

The rankings themselves are based on the forecasted depth charts we host here on FanGraphs, which combine projections for rate stats from ZIPS and Steamer with manually curated playing-time forecasts. While forecasting systems have been shown to do better than most humans at forecasting production, humans win out when it comes to allocating playing time, so our depth charts try and leverage the best of both worlds. Of course, no projection system is perfect, and humans are prone to errors, so we don’t think these forecasts should be taken as gospel, but they do give you a good overview of what our site thinks about each team’s expected production at this point in the season.

Certainly, things will change between now and October. Players get hurt, prospects come up and make an unexpected splash, guys change their swings and become entirely different hitters overnight; the final season rankings by position won’t look exactly like these forecasts. That’s one of the things that is great about baseball.

But in general, there’s an upper limit to how many things can break right for a team in a given season. If your favorite team consistently ranks at or near the bottom of all these positional breakdowns, it’s probably fair to assume that they’re not going to win a lot of games this year.

One of the other benefits of doing our previews by position is that we can compare job-shares against full-time players, noting where a platoon might be more effective than a traditional everyday player even though both players in the platoon have obvious flaws. For corner outfield, first base, and designated hitter — where platoons are most common — the ability to look at the expected production from everyone who is allocated playing time at that spot helps give a better view of a team’s strength than simply looking at a team’s starters and bench separately.

That said, doing the posts by position also means that you might see some things that appear a little weird on the surface. For instance, the Cubs willingness to shift players around means that we’re projecting guys like Kris Bryant, Ben Zobrist, and Javier Baez to split their time between multiple positions, and thus, their overall value won’t show up entirely in any one of these posts. If you see a guy who plays several positions, and you think his forecast at one of those spots seems low, check the post for the other positions he plays; it’s probably being accounted for over there.

Additionally, because we only keep one overall value for projected fielding performance, players who play multiple positions will be displayed with the same FLD forecast at every position, even though a guy who splits time between shortstop and second base will probably run better defensive numbers at second base. The FLD projection includes the split in playing time, so the player’s overall forecasted value is correct, but just a heads up that you might see some odd FLD numbers for guys who bounce around.

Finally, let’s get the annual disclaimer out of the way: we don’t game these numbers at all to get any kind of desired result. The authors who are writing the content for each team’s summary don’t get to move teams around based on their own personal preference, and we’re not rigging the forecasts in the background to make sure that certain teams look better than the others. The results are simply the output of the ZIPS/Steamer forecasts and our playing time projections. If your team’s shortstops are ranked 14th and you think they should be ranked 8th, it’s not because we hate your team. This is just what the forecasts think in mid-March.

And really, for many of these positions, ordinal ranking is the wrong number to look at anyway. Often times, the differences between a dozen teams in the middle is a fraction of a forecasted WAR, and everyone within that tier should be considered on mostly even ground, even if one ranks 8th and the other 19th. We’ll include a graphical display of the overall team values at the top of each post, and it’s probably more helpful to look at which tier a team ranks in rather than the specific spot on the list. There are going to be lists where No. 2 and No. 3 aren’t anywhere near each other, while Nos. 3 and 12 are mostly interchangeable.

So, don’t freak out overall a particular ranking, especially if you could just change the number after decimal and a team would go up or down 10 spots. And really, it’s probably better to not freak out in general; your team is going to do whatever they’re going to do, regardless of our preseason projections, and all we’re attempting to provide is a realistic preseason baseline. But there’s enough variance in baseball that most teams, even the ones that don’t look great in March, could be playing meaningful baseball in September.

If you want to review last year’s forecasts while you’re waiting for the series to start — the catcher post will kick off the series in a few hours — then you can peruse each post from the helpful widget that Sean Dolinar created to link the posts together. That widget will make it easier for you to bounce from post to post as they go up. And if you’re just looking for something fun to look at, go check out the graph on last year’s center-fielder post, and then prepare yourself for an even more ridiculous center-field graph this year.

We’ll run through the position players this week and tackle pitchers next week, and wrap up the series with an overview of where everyone stands a few days before the 2017 season officially kicks off. We hope you enjoy these posts, since they are a mountain of work for our writers, and they help you get a better feel for where every team stands heading into the year.