I’ve never been much for this time of year, myself. I haven’t really cared about truck day, because that’s just a day there’s a lot of shit in a truck. And I haven’t really cared about pitchers and catchers, because I don’t need to know when players are being checked for disease. I don’t celebrate spring-training events like they’re holidays, but that even being said, I do understand the symbolism. And I’m aware of a shift within myself — spring training confirms that the season is really going to happen. When the offseason drags along, like it always does, it can be easy to forget there’s an onseason. It’s the stuff that’s coming that we all really care about, and now 2016 feels the most real it ever has.

It’s not that we ever stop looking ahead when we talk about baseball, and offseason analysis always folds in projections or expectations, but this is the time of year you start seeing pictures of teams all together. They stop being teams that exist only on paper, and they start being teams with talent, and health, and confidence, and whatever other qualities you choose to observe. You kind of stop thinking about roster modification, and you start thinking about roster optimization. About how a given team can be the best it can be, with the players in house. I don’t think hope ever dies, but this is when, even for the worst teams, it can awaken from its slumber.

The headline here might be kind of obnoxious. It reads a little like a teacher talking to children before a field trip. I’m sorry about that, but I’m terrible at headlines and I’m not getting any better. As I’m sure you’ve figured out by now, this is another poll post. And this is another poll post where I’m going to be really interested in the results, because I think they could teach us a little about baseball fan psychology. We’re all now aware that games — meaningful games — are going to start taking place in an amount of time we can reasonably say to be weeks. Every team is going to be playing, and every team is going to be playing for something. The season is around the corner. So, how excited are you about it? What is the feeling that you feel in your heart?

When I first constructed this post in my head, it was going to ask only about a few teams. Mostly the bad ones. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized it makes the most sense to ask about everyone, so we can examine the entire landscape. We know the Cubs are supposed to be a hell of a lot better than the Phillies. Cubs fans know that, and Phillies fans know that. Okay. How do Cubs fans feel? How do Phillies fans feel? How much of a difference does that make, if it even makes any difference at all?

I like these polls because there isn’t a wrong answer. You might not even need to think for more than half a second. You should already know how you feel, even before reading this post, so now that you’re here, kindly select the answer that most matches your position. Baseball is ahead. Daily baseball. Overwhelming baseball. Both major- and minor-league baseball. Baseball you have to plan around, and baseball you don’t have to plan around because it’ll be there again tomorrow. How excited do you feel now for 2016? Thank you in advance to everyone who participates and therefore allows me to run little projects like these. They are very obviously nothing without you. (<3)

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Previous editions: Baltimore / Boston / Chicago AL / Chicago NL / Cincinnati  / Cleveland / Colorado / Detroit / Houston.

Yesterday, lead prospect analyst Dan Farnsworth published his excellently in-depth prospect list for the Kansas City Royals. In this companion piece, I look at that same Kansas City farm system through the lens of my recently refined KATOH projection system. The Royals have the 20th-best farm system according to KATOH.

There’s way more to prospect evaluation than just the stats, so if you haven’t already, I highly recommend you read Dan’s piece in addition to this one. KATOH has no idea how hard a pitcher throws, how good a hitter’s bat speed is, or what a player’s makeup is like. So it’s liable to miss big on players whose tools don’t line up with their performances. However, when paired with more scouting-based analyses, KATOH’s objectivity can be useful in identifying talented players who might be overlooked by the industry consensus or highly-touted prospects who might be over-hyped.

Below, I’ve grouped prospects into three groups: those who are forecast for two or more wins through their first six major-league seasons, those who receive a projection between 1.0 and 2.0 WAR though their first six seasons, and then any residual players who received Future Value (FV) grades of 45 or higher from Dan. Note that I generated forecasts only for players who accrued at least 200 plate appearances or batters faced last season. Also note that the projections for players over a relatively small sample are less reliable, especially when those samples came in the low minors.

1. Cheslor Cuthbert, 3B (Profile)

KATOH Projection: 4.1 WAR
Dan’s Grade: 40+ FV

Cuthbert hit .277/.339/.429 as a 22-year-old in Triple-A last year, which earned him a late-season cameo with Kansas City. Cuthbert likely won’t be a star, but he makes a lot of contact, plays a semi-premium defensive position and is young enough that he still has time to improve. Statistically, he looks like a future everyday player, and those don’t grow on trees.

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We don’t really know what to make of hitting coaches, but we know what to make of hitters, and we know what to make of Barry Bonds, so Bonds linking up with the Marlins is at least greatly intriguing. If you let yourself get carried away by your own imagination, you can see Giancarlo Stanton breaking Bonds’ own dinger record. Perhaps more realistically, it’s going to be interesting to see whether Bonds can tap into Marcell Ozuna’s considerable offensive reserves. With Ozuna sticking around in Miami after an active stretch of rumors, which way he goes will play a big role in which way the Marlins go.

For my taste, though, I’m the most captivated by Christian Yelich. It doesn’t need to have anything to do with Bonds, necessarily; I’d be equally captivated if Bonds were somewhere else. But, I think we know about and have observed Giancarlo Stanton’s ceiling. Marcell Ozuna has been good before, but I get the sense he’ll always be streaky. Christian Yelich seems steady, and he seems like he is what he is, yet I think his upside is massive. And I think Yelich stands a good chance of getting there. Quietly, Yelich has hinted at a star-level future.

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The 2010 Mariners were a dreadful baseball team, and an unexpectedly dreadful baseball team at that. They were designed to be competitive — they should’ve been competitive — and from a fan’s perspective, I’m not sure I’ve witnessed a bigger letdown. It was a difficult season for countless different reasons, but what’s been most upsetting, both now and back at the time, is that the Mariners being terrible cost me the opportunity to watch more Cliff Lee on my favorite team. I knew he was awesome when he was first brought in, but I didn’t appreciate the extent until I got to watch him every five days.

I bring this up because Lee is in the news:

Sounds like Cliff Lee’s career is over. His agent, Darek Braunecker, told me, “We don’t anticipate him playing at this point.”

— Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) February 23, 2016

Lee hasn’t officially retired, and you never know when someone might have a change of heart. Yet it’s never been less likely that Lee will return, so I want to take this chance to offer a quick retrospective. Not everyone is deserving of the treatment, because not everyone is equally interesting, but Lee developed into the perfect pitcher. It took him some time, and he’s not going to end up in Cooperstown, but for a good six-year stretch, there was nothing else you could’ve wanted Cliff Lee to be.

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Over the past few days you may have noticed about a billion pieces on Lonn Trost’s recent comments. In fact, I wrote one, too, and you’re reading it now. The difference is I’m less concerned about Trost and his clear disdain for the — let’s call them the “non-rich” — and more concerned about what this means for baseball as a whole.

But let’s back up a second. In case you’re not familiar with what I’m talking about, Lonn Trost is COO of the New York Yankees. Last week he was answering a question about the Yankees’ new ticket policy, a policy which is designed to do two things: first, force people who intended to purchase Yankees tickets by way of StubHub to use the Yankees after-market website instead, and second, make more money for the Yankees.

Of course, Trost couldn’t come out and say that. Nobody wants to hear how the New York Yankees are going to make more money off the sales of tickets they’d already sold once before. So, while attempting to justify the unjustifiable, Trost did what what most adults do. Namely, he lied. Or, if you’re being more charitable, he was disingenuous. But it wasn’t the lie (or the disingenuousness) that was particularly notable. What was notable was how Trost explained the reason for the new policy.

The problem below market at a certain point is that if you buy a ticket in a very premium location and pay a substantial amount of money. It’s not that we don’t want that fan to sell it, but that fan is sitting there having paid a substantial amount of money for their ticket and [a different] fan picks it up for a buck-and-a-half and sits there, and it frustrates the purchaser of the full amount. And quite frankly, the fan may be someone who has never sat in a premium location. So that’s a frustration to our existing fan base.

Did you catch that? Let’s cut out the fat and run it again.

And quite frankly, the fan may be someone who has never sat in a premium location. So that’s a frustration to our existing fan base.

Hello! That statement has been called elitist and vaguely racist by some and you sure won’t catch me blocking the way of anyone making such a claim. Part of the joy of sitting in a “very premium” seat at Yankee Stadium is apparently not having to sit next to a poor person, and having to do so would compromise the quality of the seat and the ticket and, wow, that’s a disgusting sentiment. It occurs to me, though, that Trost might not be the biggest problem here.

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Yesterday, Jose Bautista addressed his contract situation, and he didn’t exactly mince words.

“I did not go to them. They asked me a question, ‘What would it take to get it done?’ and I gave them an answer. It’s not an adamant, drawn lines in the sand or anything. Simply questions were asked, I felt like for this process to go down smoothly there didn’t need to be any time wasted and efforts wasted for either party. If this is going to happen, they should know what it takes, and I told them the number because they asked me,” he told ESPN’s Britt McHenry.

In comments to reporters Monday, Bautista said the Blue Jays came to him with their question two weeks ago. He said he is “not willing to negotiate.”

“I’m not going to sit here and bargain for a couple of dollars,” he said, adding later, “They either meet it or it is what it is.”

So, what is Jose Bautista’s magic number? Well, according to TSN, it’s five years, $150 million.

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The 2015 season represented something of a banner year for position players pitching. That viewpoint assumes, of course, that you, as a baseball fan and reader of this website, consider position players pitching to be a good thing. For me, there’s also the sense, when a left fielder or second baseman — or any position player — takes the mound, that the game has reverted to a time and place when baseball was actually just a game. For some, that state might be viewed as an affront to those players who are seriously trying to win a spot in the big leagues. For others, it’s a time when the sport can shed its heavy cloak of seriousness and indulge in a rare bit of goofy self-deprecation. While I tend to align with the latter viewpoint, I respect and understand the former.

What can’t be argued is the increase in position players pitching over the past couple of years. With Cliff Pennington taking the mound in Game 4 of the ALCS last season, baseball logged its very first instance of a position player pitching in the playoffs, and it actually looked pretty good. In terms of raw appearances, 2015 was something of an apex for the non-pitcher pitching phenomenon. Jeff noted in June that 2015 was projected to equal 2014’s single-season record for the number of non-pitcher appearances on the mound; at the end of the season, 2015 had actually smashed the record (20 in 2014 vs. 27 in 2015).

What we’re after today, however, is how those non-pitcher pitching appearances actually went: what were the highlights? The lowlights? Who seems like he actually might be able to pitch? It behooves us, with the appearance of a new and fabulously interesting trend in major league baseball, to undertake a thorough review of said trend’s 2015 installment, with all the grace and seriousness we might give to potentially far more important subjects. What follows below is an attempt to do just that.

To begin with, let’s look at the overall stat line for the year in non-pitchers pitching compared to all of the “real” starters and relievers in 2015:

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Well, a new team, for starters. What Jay Bruce is missing is a new team. Rather, a new team is missing Jay Bruce. Twice now, the Reds have reportedly been on the verge of trading Bruce. First, to the Mets at last year’s trade deadline, more recently to the Blue Jays, just last night. Twice, Bruce has reportedly been on the verge of being dealt, and twice, the deal has fallen apart.

Maybe that tells you something about Jay Bruce. Or maybe it tells you something about the other players in the deal, as both deals collapsed due to medical hangups concerning the players whom the Reds were attempting to acquire. In July, it was the Reds who backed out of the proposed deal that could have netted them Zack Wheeler, in the midst of his recovery from Tommy John Surgery. Last night, it wasn’t even Michael Saunders‘ bum knee that gave the Reds pause.

Neither proposal fell apart because of Bruce, specifically, but that doesn’t mean the failed deals don’t tell us something about Bruce, because they do. What they tell us about Bruce is this: thus far, teams have only appeared willing to give up already-injured players for him.

Which is shocking, given where Bruce’s career was just two years ago. Just two years ago, he was a 26-year-old Gold Glove-caliber right fielder who doubled as one of the game’s most prolific home run hitters. Now, the Reds are struggling to rid themselves of his salary for anything more than damaged goods.

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