Michael Brantley hurt his shoulder in late September, diving for a ball in Minnesota. He took four games off, and then played two more times, and then called it quits, planning to spend the early offseason rehabbing the joint. He told MLB.com’s Jordan Bastian that he hoped to avoid surgery and that the team had developed a three-week plan for him.

Unfortunately, three weeks later, his shoulder still hurt. Another four weeks after that, the team decided to have surgery, which found a small labral tear. Team doctor James Quinlan thought that Brantley would be ready to start his hitting progression in four months, rehab would be complete in five months, and that the player would see the major leagues again in six months.

Six months from today is May 9th, so no matter what, Brantley looks set to miss a month next season. The question on many Indians’ fans minds is what he’ll be like when he returns.

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What they may lack in impact bats, the Diamondbacks make up for with pitching depth. They have a lot of pitchers with high floors in the upper levels of the minors, and a few in the low minors that should move quickly. A few have top of the rotation potential. The addition of Dansby Swanson to the organization this June does a lot to help reinforce the offensive pipeline, but the team will have to do a better job developing hitters over the next few years.

Their quantity of outfield options is solid, and was something of a logjam in the upper minors this season. That four players who started playing for the team in 2015 make the top eight here is a good sign for their talent acquisition going forward. Look for the pitchers to start making their presence felt in the big leagues in 2016 and 2017, while we wait on some of the lower-level hitting prospects to put things together.

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Pitching in the major leagues is almost incomprehensibly difficult. It’s easy to pick up on that fact by watching the revolving door of pitchers who simply don’t have the talent, health, or stuff to make it. There is no leeway in pitching, no slack, no grace period to ease into: major league baseball is a wood chipper that pitchers are fed into with the hope that they’ll emerge on the other side with a manageable amount of damage.

This is the main reason why pitchers live and die by velocity. With increased velocity, a pitcher’s margin of error grows, and they can get away with making more mistakes. With lower velocity, a pitcher has to rely on guile, movement, and strategy to be successful. Then, of course, there is the extreme low end of the velocity spectrum, which is what we’ll be look at today: the seldom-seen outlier, heir apparent to Jamie Moyer. These are the rare pitchers who have either figured out a way to get by with diminished stuff, or are simply (and cruelly) not long for starting duties.

The particular pitcher we’re talking about is Jered Weaver, whose fastball velocity dropped five miles per hour between the 2014 and 2015 seasons. With his fastball clocking in at just above 88 mph in September of 2014, Weaver was another veteran pitcher in the midst of a lucrative five-year, $85 million contract; a year later, after a month-long stint on the disabled list for hip inflammation, he was throwing at an average of 83-84 mph and had entered the rare territory of soft-throwing starters who are still offered a full workload. Here’s a good visual from Brooks Baseball that tells the story of what happened to his fastball velocity:

The main question today is this: what does Weaver need to do to be able to survive at this unique velocity level, and what might we learn about it from those who came before him?

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Hello friends, and welcome to the National League version of Monday’s American League poll post. This is part of a little project, and after this I’m done gathering information, which means you’re done having to participate. (You don’t have to participate. But please do!) I don’t know exactly where the project is going to go, but I know I’d love to have the data.

I’ll copy and paste. This post is for fans of teams in the National League. If there are multiple teams you hold near and dear, feel free to vote in multiple polls. If you consider yourself more a fan of the game in general, then you can either sit this out, or vote in the poll for the team you feel most strongly about.

All I want to know: how did you feel about the 2015 season? As far as following your favorite team was concerned, how would you rate your overall fan experience? Use whatever criteria you like. How you feel is how you feel — vote according to that feeling. How was the regular season? Did the end spoil the middle? Did your team have a bunch of exciting young players? Did you love going to the ballpark? I understand there’s a lot of input here — there are months of individual days, each day with its own feeling. I just want to know your overall grade, as you reflect on the season that was. There are no wrong answers. Unless you lie to me for no reason.

All the polls are below. Click a team name to go straight to that part and bypass the others.

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Episode 608
Dave Cameron is both (a) the managing editor of FanGraphs and (b) the guest on this particular edition of FanGraphs Audio, during which edition he considers the free-agent cases of Jason Heyward and Ben Zobrist, speculates wildly on Scott Boras’s work week, and discusses another means by which Major League Baseball appears to be turning billions into even more billions.

This edition of the program is sponsored by Draft, the first truly mobile fantasy sports app. Compete directly against idiot host Carson Cistulli by clicking here.

Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @cistulli on Twitter.

You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or other feeder things.

Audio after the jump. (Approximately 42 min play time.)

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With the World Series a week and change behind us, but with the offseason still almost entirely ahead and unknown, now seems like the right time to try a little project I’ve had on my mind for a month or so. The annoying(?) bit is that the project requires your participation, in the form of voting in a poll, but then that’s a really easy thing to do, and the question should be pretty simple, and on my end, I get to spend a couple posts embedding polls for your own feedback. Something easy for you, and something easy for me? Everybody wins!

This post is for fans of teams in the American League. The National League post will go up Tuesday morning. If there are multiple teams you hold near and dear, feel free to vote in multiple polls. If you consider yourself more a fan of the game in general, then you can either sit this out, or vote in the poll for the team you feel most strongly about.

All I want to know: how did you feel about the 2015 season? As far as following your favorite team was concerned, how would you rate your overall fan experience? Use whatever criteria you like. How you feel is how you feel — vote according to that feeling. How was the regular season? Did the end spoil the middle? Did your team have a bunch of exciting young players? Did you love going to the ballpark? I understand there’s a lot of input here — there are months of individual days, each day with its own feeling. I just want to know your overall grade, as you reflect on the season that was. There are no wrong answers. Except probably in the Royals poll.

All the polls are below. Hopefully the anchor text works to send you to your team directly!

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Major League Baseball teams are not in the habit of revealing their expected payroll numbers for the following season prior to free agency. Revealing such figures would provide agents negotiating deals with their clients important information regarding how much teams planned to spend. Additionally, telling fans how much a team plans to spend could be harmful from a public relations perspective: if a team misses out on a desired target, it is not always a great idea to spend money for the sake of meeting a budget if that spending would not improve the team and the money could be better spent elsewhere. None of those reasons obscure the fact that we still want to know how much money teams will spend.

Last year’s spending should provide a pretty good proxy for where teams will end up on Opening Day next season. By looking at guaranteed salaries and arbitration estimates, we can come with a decent idea of how much money each team has to spend going into the winter unless they make significant changes to the budget from previous seasons. In the American League, teams like the Tampa Bay Rays, Oakland Athletics, and more recently the Houston Astros have kept spending to a minimum while the New York Yankees, Boston Red Sox, and Detroit Tigers have had no issues with payrolls double or even triple the size of those at the bottom. Much of next year’s spending has little to do with potential free agents, and more to do with players who have already signed.

American League teams have already committed more than $1.2 billion in guaranteed contracts to 2016 payrolls, equal to roughly two-thirds the amount of 2015 AL Opening Day payrolls. As we might expect, there are considerable differences across the league, per Cot’s Contracts.

The Yankees have committed nearly $200 million in salaries before the offseason even starts. At close to $185 million, the guarantees in the Bronx are roughly equal to Oakland, Tampa Bay, Baltimore, Houston, and Cleveland combined. In Oakland, the team has signed Billy Butler, Coco Crisp, and Sean Doolittle to contracts already, giving them around $24 million in 2016 before arbitration and free agent signings.

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