As the calendar mercifully flips to March, it won’t be long until meaningful major league baseball games will be played in a ballpark near you. Meanwhile, let’s continue our series of position-by-position looks at the ball-in-play (BIP) profiles of 2015 regulars and semi-regulars. We’ve already looked at all the various infield positions, so today we’ll begin our outfield review in left field.

First, let’s review some ground rules. To come up with an overall player population roughly equal to one player per team per position, the minimum number of batted balls with Statcast readings was set at 164. Players were listed at the position at which they played the most games. There is more than one player per team at some positions and less at others, like catcher and DH. Players are listed in descending OPS+ order. Let’s begin with the AL left fielders.

BIP Overview – AL LF

Name	Avg MPH	FB/LD MPH	GB MPH	POP%	FLY%	LD%	GB%	CON	K%	BB%	OPS+	Pull%	Cent%	Opp%
Cespedes	93.18	96.53	89.46	3.4%	34.5%	20.4%	41.7%	156	20.9%	4.9%	137	43.7%	34.8%	21.5%
Brantley	89.11	91.93	87.35	1.7%	30.0%	22.5%	45.8%	107	8.6%	10.1%	130	42.7%	32.7%	24.6%
Gordon	89.00	91.50	86.61	3.0%	34.6%	24.8%	37.6%	123	21.8%	11.6%	120	45.7%	36.3%	18.0%
S.Smith	89.41	91.86	88.29	0.7%	37.3%	19.7%	42.3%	112	21.9%	10.4%	117	38.7%	34.8%	26.5%
Guyer	86.72	90.73	84.81	6.0%	28.6%	21.2%	44.2%	95	15.8%	6.5%	115	44.7%	32.7%	22.6%
Rasmus	90.24	93.42	84.02	5.1%	46.5%	20.0%	28.4%	159	31.8%	9.7%	113	52.8%	27.0%	20.2%
Gardner	88.22	91.69	86.48	2.1%	31.8%	20.8%	45.3%	101	20.6%	10.4%	105	34.9%	34.5%	30.7%
De Aza	86.63	89.12	83.31	0.9%	36.8%	23.4%	39.0%	118	23.0%	8.5%	104	37.1%	39.2%	23.7%
Dv.Murphy	88.79	90.24	87.98	4.1%	28.4%	16.7%	50.8%	92	12.5%	5.1%	101	38.7%	39.6%	21.7%
E.Rosario	87.90	91.11	83.52	4.8%	35.8%	20.3%	39.1%	129	24.9%	3.2%	99	39.0%	35.8%	25.2%
Tucker	90.55	91.38	90.90	4.8%	31.0%	17.7%	46.6%	106	21.1%	6.2%	99	43.1%	33.6%	23.3%
Me.Cabrera	90.19	91.11	91.38	2.7%	27.2%	23.9%	46.3%	84	12.9%	5.9%	97	36.9%	35.4%	27.7%
H.Ramirez	91.16	95.39	89.24	3.6%	26.0%	20.4%	50.0%	91	16.5%	4.9%	90	37.1%	39.5%	23.4%
DeJesus	87.87	91.16	85.21	3.0%	29.8%	23.5%	43.7%	68	16.4%	6.6%	76	42.0%	33.2%	24.8%
Aviles	87.10	88.20	87.75	4.3%	30.2%	16.3%	49.2%	56	12.0%	6.3%	61	38.0%	36.8%	25.2%
AVERAGE	89.07	91.69	87.09	3.3%	32.6%	20.8%	43.3%	106	18.7%	7.4%	104	41.0%	35.1%	23.9%

Most of the column headers are self explanatory, including average BIP speed (overall and by BIP type), BIP type frequency, K and BB rates, and BIP by field sector (pull, central, opposite). Each player’s OPS and Unadjusted Contact Score (CON) is also listed. For those of you who have not read my articles on the topic, Contact Score is derived by removing Ks and BBs from hitters’ batting lines, assigning run values to all other events, and comparing them to a league average of 100.

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To be honest, I didn’t want to write about the “tanking” story anymore. After Buster Olney and Jayson Stark both wrote extensively about the issue in December and January, I published something of a rebuttal, and since then, follow-up discussions haven’t proven particularly useful, as both sides seem pretty entrenched in their interpretations. Olney and Stark are firmly in the camp that this is a huge systematic problem for Major League Baseball, and others — such as Joel Sherman — have also published pieces suggesting that MLB needs to intervene, so this issue isn’t going away.

Yesterday, Stark wrote another piece on the issue, soliciting comments from Tony Clark on whether the MLBPA is going to make this an issue in the CBA. Clark was diplomatic, keeping his options open, but didn’t really say anything particularly newsworthy. But there was an interesting comment in Stark’s column, from Stark himself, that I think is worth discussing.

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Determining profits and losses for baseball franchises is a speculative task. When teams say they’re losing money, we can take them at their word or ignore them. They don’t open their books, so how much money teams make or lose is subject to factors outside of publicly available knowledge — and, therefore, equally subject to a lot of potential “massaging” on the part of the teams themselves.

That state of affairs might change slightly in the near future, however. Liberty Media, owners of the Atlanta Braves — as well as a majority stake in Sirius XM and a substantial stake in Live Nation Entertainment — are planning to offer stock in their separate divisions. As a result, they’ll have to provide more information to the public on the Braves’ operations. The Braves are claiming losses over the past few years, although in a cash sense, those losses are a bit deceiving, and the team is set to make money this season after slashing payroll.

There was a time, not all that long ago, that almost all Atlanta Braves games were broadcast nationally on TBS. The cable network, owned ostensibly by the same person who owned the Braves, Ted Turner, used the Braves to get publicity for his cable network, and the Braves were able to reach a broader base of fans. In the middle of the Braves’ great run of success, Time Warner bought Turner’s broadcasting company and the Braves, and the new owners continued to put Braves games on TBS. Changes to this once symbiotic partnership, however, brought an end to TBS’s almost daily Braves telecasts and saw the team enter one of the worst television contracts of the last few decades.

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Pitchers know hitters. They’ve got to. Sure, for the most part, pitchers want to trust their stuff and hit their spots and any deviation too far from one’s comfort zone is a concession to the hitter, but pitchers have got to know hitters, lest they be made to look silly. Example: pitcher faces high-ball hitter, throws high ball, gives up dinger. Well, duh. We told you he was a high-ball hitter, dumb-dumb. Why’d you put it there?

This is why pitchers read scouting reports, and watch videos, and look at heatmaps, and converse with their peers, and use their human brain to rethink past matchups against whichever opponent looms next on the docket. So they don’t look like a dumb-dumb. That’s all anyone’s trying to do, really. Competitive edge, work ethic, drive, determination — those are all just codewords for “Please don’t let my peers judge me.”

That’s why Mike Trout stopped getting the low fastball last year. It wasn’t for baseball reasons. It was so that anytime a nearby group of people shared a laugh over This Week’s Meme, the group’s laughter would no longer be misconstrued by the dumb-dumb pitcher who threw Mike Trout a low fastball as a public and personal lampooning.

But it turns out nobody is perfect, and that’s why we’re all insecure. Mistakes are made, constantly, by every kind of person at every kind of job. Making mistakes is one of the things humans are best at. All we can do is try to be better at learning from mistakes than we are at making them, and oftentimes it feels like an uphill climb.

Say, speaking of which, plenty of pitchers made mistakes to Nolan Arenado last year. Did you know he hit 42 homers? Don’t believe me? Look, here they are!

Now we have something different to talk about. Now we have something different we have to talk about. You’ll notice I’ve drawn a red line that splits the field in two, and you’ll notice that 40 of the black dots representing home runs are to the left of that dividing red line. You could say Nolan Arenado has a type.

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A cornucopia of promising young hitters lost their rookie eligibility over the course of the 2015 season. Carlos Correa, Kris Bryant, Francisco Lindor and Kyle Schwarber are just a few of the most notable names. Each of them were consensus top prospects, and each looks primed to have an excellent big league career.

However, there was another youngster who eschewed his rookie eligibility with much less fanfare, yet whose future may be nearly as bright — at least according to the stats. As you probably deduced from the title of this piece, that player is Mets second baseman Dilson Herrera. Herrera’s minor league performance yields a KATOH forecast of 10.1 WAR over the next six years. Were he still prospect eligible, he would have landed 12th on KATOH’s top 100.

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And we’re back for the second half of this polling project. If you missed the first half, which was dedicated to the American League, here you go. The idea, in short, is just to gauge community opinion of the team projections, which as of Monday are now updated to include ZiPS, instead of just being based on Steamer like before. What we all see now should be awful close to what we see on the eve of opening day, and so, with that in mind, here’s the projected National League:

The NL projections haven’t been as controversial as the AL projections. On the AL side, we’ve had to talk entirely too much about the Royals, and we’ve also had teams like the Red Sox go off the rails. The NL has behaved more predictably of late, but that doesn’t mean you might not still disagree with some of the projections in that table. Teams are predictable until they aren’t, and this is the whole reason behind the project. I just want to know where you think the numbers are good, and I want to know where you think the numbers are being stupid.

A request, again: when voting below, please try to consider only the information we have at this moment. You can assume that some prospects will or will not eventually show up, but don’t dock certain teams because you think they’ll subtract at the deadline, and don’t boost other teams for expected trade additions. I’m interested in what you think of the teams as we speak. Maybe you just haven’t thought that much about the expected cellar-dwellers, but don’t worry, you can’t actually get this wrong. Once more, thanks for all the help. We’ll analyze all this stuff later in the week.

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