We’ve started our annual Depth Chart Discussions, re-branded as Playing Time Battles for 2016. You can catch up on every team we’ve covered in the Playing Time Battles Summary post or following along using the Depth Chart Discussions tag.

(I guess we’ve been using that italicized intro for a while now and I never noticed. My bad, my bad.)

The Oakland Athletics project to be the American League’s worst team, per FanGraphs’ depth charts. When your first basemen project to hit for a slugging percentage less than .400, it hurts. Still, the bats aren’t too bad, and some oddly-timed offseason acquisitions make the Athletics offense at least minimally appealing.

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Over the weekend, I had my first normal(ish) keeper deadline. The roster was packed with useful players who could be kept right around cost. It made for quite the challenge deciding on cuts and auction strategy.

Here’s the background – 12-team 5×5 roto (OPS), standard deep rosters (2 C, 5 OF, MI, CI), $310 auction budget, unlimited keepers at previous auction price +$7. And here are my various keep/cuts.

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Las Vegas seems to think that 2016 might just be the year when Cubs fans finally celebrate a World Series win in the streets of Wrigleyville. Stacked with a potent lineup from top to bottom and arguably the best starting five in baseball, Theo Epstein’s deity status could extend westward some 850 miles come October. But while there’s no position battle in the rotation to speak of, injury concerns, like curses, are real something to write about.

John Lackey joins Jon Lester, Jake Arrieta, Kyle Hendricks, and Jason Hammel in a formidable rotation that ZiPs projects for nearly 17 WAR. But they also enter 2016 having pitched a combined 6,674.1 career innings. So with that in mind, let’s take a look at who stands to step in should any of the Cubs’, let’s go with, seasoned starters miss some time.

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Yesterday marked the triumphant return of the Steamer and I series, as I started things off with a comparison of Michael Conforto’s Pod Projection and Steamer forecast. Today I will continue with a player I am much more optimistic about than Steamer, Yoenis Cespedes.

Cespedes had a dreamy two months with the Mets, driving an overall offensive performance rebound back to the level he enjoyed during his 2012 debut. Though no one expects him to repeat that level of production over a full year, lost in what Cespedes did was that he had already rebounded in his first four months with the Tigers. The Mets performance simply made his rebound more dramatic. So let’s dig into the numbers and find out why I’m so much more bullish than Steamer.

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We’ve started our annual Depth Chart Discussions, re-branded as Playing Time Battles for 2016. You can catch up on every team we’ve covered in the Playing Time Battles Summary post or following along using the Depth Chart Discussions tag.

Few teams got quite as much from their rotation as the Pittsburgh Pirates in 2015, and repeating that success will be paramount if they hope to win their first division title since 1992, finally avoiding the coin-flip of a Wild Card game. Last year’s rotation threw 967.1 innings, seventh in baseball, and they backed a 3.53 ERA up with a 3.34 FIP, good for the sixth-highest Wins Above Replacement among all major league rotations.

That group boasted a sky-high ground-ball rate and did well to suppress home runs as a result, and their primary subtraction was the only pitcher in the group with a fly-ball tendency. Gone is J.A. Happ and perhaps the Pirates Pixie Dust they sprinkled him with, with the lefty hoping his newfound approach can produce results in Toronto, too. A.J. Burnett is gone, too, leaving the Pirates preciously thin on starters with initialed names.

Of course, there’s still a lot to like at the top, some intriguing arms on the way, and what could wind up being one of the better relief squads in the National League.
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