If you’re a fan of the movie Remember The Titans, you probably remember the emotional turning point of T.C. Williams’ High training camp. It feels especially prescient when it comes to left efield this season:

The left side, or left field, is definitely a long ways away from being the strong side it used to be. And now that you’re properly fired up, let’s take a look at this year’s graph.

If you read Corinne Landrey’s piece in The Hardball Times Baseball Annual 2017, this might not surprise you. In it, Corinne notes that, as a position, left fielders recorded their lowest collective OPS+ since the designated hitter was introduced in 1973. Here’s one of the telling graphs from her piece.

Not pretty. And, as you can see, Barry Bonds propped up left field all by himself for quite some time. Left-field production has been trending downward for a while, and as you can see from our first graph, the projections don’t think this year will be any different. On the high end, it’s the only defensive position that doesn’t include a four-win team. (DH also doesn’t have one, but that’s pretty normal for DH). On the low end, no position has more teams pegged for fewer than 1.0 WAR — and no position has more teams pegged for negative WAR, either. Let’s turn to Cosmo Kramer to succinctly wrap up the 2017 left field outlook:

1. Mets

Name	PA	AVG	OBP	SLG	wOBA	Bat	BsR	Fld	WAR
Yoenis Cespedes	525	.265	.320	.490	.340	9.6	0.4	5.1	2.7
Michael Conforto	105	.255	.327	.458	.335	1.5	0.0	0.5	0.4
Brandon Nimmo	35	.254	.328	.383	.311	-0.2	-0.1	-0.1	0.0
Juan Lagares	35	.254	.296	.367	.286	-0.9	0.0	0.5	0.0
Total	700	.262	.320	.474	.335	9.9	0.4	6.0	3.2

Last year at this time, Conforto was the one atop the Mets’ left-field depth chart. The young outfielder had a challenging season, though. Now, as far as left field is concerned, he’s in a reserve role, and will be one of the best backup outfielders in the game (if he doesn’t eventually claim the starting right-field job, that is). This isn’t the end of the world from a team perspective, as it puts Cespedes back in the place where he belongs. Cespedes simply doesn’t have the range for center field, and his arm doesn’t play up there like it does in left. The Mets might not have a true center fielder, but they do have a true left fielder. Cespedes is a weapon there.

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Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan share responses submitted to a smattering of recent topics and banter about whether old scouting reports have value to teams, then answer listener emails about MVP-vote streaks, Brady Anderson and ex-player executives, predicting pitches perfectly, middle-infield offense, Aroldis Chapman copying Carter Capps, non-traditional starting rotations, and more.

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In the year 2016, pitchers continued to hit, even though they are very bad at it. This is not good for the pitchers’ own teams, but this is good for science. It stands to reason the most terrifying pitcher for another pitcher to try to hit against would be Aroldis Chapman. That doesn’t happen. Among the matchups that do actually happen, it stands to reason the most terrifying pitcher for another pitcher to try to hit against would be Noah Syndergaard. Let’s look at how that just went.

Over the course of last season, including the playoffs, Syndergaard had more than 50 matchups against opposing pitchers. As this particular split is concerned, that’s a fairly large sample size. How do you think the pitchers all did? You might be tempted to believe they all struck out. No, that’s not realistic. They didn’t even go hitless! So maybe the data won’t raise your eyebrows in the least, but don’t be mistaken — Syndergaard was dominant. (Obviously.)

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The Positional Power Rankings series continues, because it would be weird if it didn’t. In here, we’re going to deal with shortstops on a team-by-team basis, wherein all the teams are ranked by projected WAR. The projected WARs, of course, will often end up different from the actual WARs, but these are basically our best estimates of positional true talent given what we know today, and the rankings are an excuse to write some commentary on everyone. I know it’s already linked up there, but here’s the series introduction, again, if you don’t know exactly what you’re looking at. It’s not that complicated! Except the projected-WAR part. That part is incredibly complicated. Here is a graph of everything:

There exists a belief that we’ve entered something of a golden age of shortstops. Relative to the league overall, shortstops just had their best offensive season on record. They also had their best collective WAR season in modern history. The belief begs for an explanation. One potential explanation would be that, no, there’s nothing here, and it’s all just random noise. That’s always one potential explanation for anything, and it’s never the fun one. Another potential explanation would be that, like so many things in baseball, it’s cyclical, and now we see shortstops on a temporary upswing.

My current preferred explanation is that teams now are more reluctant to move good players off shortstop. So many great players throughout baseball history used to be shortstops at some point. Players have been moved off because they got too big, or didn’t have enough mobility. Perhaps now teams don’t care so much about shortstop size. And it makes you wonder about the role of modern defensive shifting. It’s possible teams feel like new defensive alignments have reduced the need for extreme shortstop range. This is speculation on my part, but it’s where my mind is at the moment. Big players can stick, now more than ever. Let’s now talk about some big shortstops, and some littler shortstops. (There are still some little shortstops.) Off we go!

The place people care about most is first place, and here we have the Astros, which I’m sure will provoke something of a debate. I’ll note, though, that the only thing separating the Astros from the second-place team is the depth; the starters are projected to be virtually identical. I’ll say again, lots of teams have good shortstops. Lots of teams wouldn’t want to lose their own shortstops. The Astros are among those teams.

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Getting better at something can open you up to new risks. Or maybe it’s more correct to say that getting better at something can make you realize that you have to get even better at it. Addison Russell has worked hard to become a decent breaking-ball hitter. He’s made strides. Pitchers have responded, though — and used his confidence against him. So he’ll have to take another step forward to keep pace.

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This is Kate Preusser’s third piece as part of her month-long residency. Read her previous posts here. Listen to her appearance on FanGraphs Audio here.

When Benji Gonzalez, a 27-year-old non-roster invitee for the Twins, poked a single into right field to break up a perfect game being thrown by the Rays’ pitching staff one week into spring training, I admit to sighing in relief. No need for asterisks, then. No need for the arguments about whether a perfect game thrown by multiple pitchers counts as much as one thrown by a single pitcher. No reminders that spring training doesn’t count and that this technically wouldn’t go down in the record books as a perfect game.

Of course, spring training doesn’t count, but the white whale of a perfect game, even in spring training, even thrown by multiple pitchers, is such a compelling figure in baseball that discussion of it would have been inevitable — and made more inevitable, perhaps, by the fact that baseball fans haven’t seen a perfect game, spring training or otherwise, in five years.

There has already been one recorded spring-training perfect game — a Red Sox win over the Blue Jays in the year 2000, featuring starting pitcher Pedro Martinez. Pedro would go on to have a complicated relationship with the perfect game and the no-hitter, coming close but never quite getting there. The role he played in the perfect spring-training game is rarely noted. Once more for the folks in the back: spring training doesn’t count. Even Rays pitcher Danny Farquhar thought they were playing shuffleboard:

“It was probably two outs into my first inning when I realized we had a perfect game,” Farquhar said. “I’m like, ‘Wow, we have a lot of points, and they have zero points. I’m going to try and not mess this up.'”

The eloquent Lord Farquhar receives partial credit for this response. The Rays — whose 17-run offensive onslaught managed to so confound all involved parties that even Farquhar himself didn’t realize it was a perfect game until he was two-thirds deep in his own inning — did indeed have a lot of points. The Twins, however, didn’t just have zero points, they had perfectly zero points, and the Rays staff was hurtling toward rarefied air in the baseball sphere, even if this achievement would have to ride in a little sidecar or sit at a table in the back near the kitchen.

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