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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.

With Chris Davis back in the fold, the Orioles have a surprisingly settled roster. Presently, the battles are all constrained to the outfield and designated hitter role. Davis should claim first base full time while Manny Machado, Jonathan Schoop, and J.J. Hardy will start whenever healthy. Adam Jones has center field on lock down, but his flanks are up for open competition.

Corner Outfield

Left and right field could belong to anybody, even a player not currently on the roster. The Orioles were among the finalists for Yoenis Cespedes, offering a five-year contract that he ultimately spurned in favor of the Mets. The club probably won’t burn their top draft pick to sign Dexter Fowler. However, I could see them signing one of Austin Jackson, Marlon Byrd, David DeJesus, Alex Rios, or Shane Victorino. The trade market also has a few names.

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Yesterday, I shared my plight as the commissioner of my local league and complained about the difficulty of finding good owners who remain active all season long. I made the decision to charge a preemptive league inactivity fee, whereby owners would add a quarter of their entry fee into the pot as we head into auction weekend. If an owner remains active all season, his money is returned. If he goes inactive, he will not be seeing that money again. This seems like a straightforward idea, but the biggest question is how to define inactive. So I asked you all for help, and help you provided, with 66 comments so far as I type this follow up.

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We know that strikeout minus walk percentage is the best in-season predictor, or at least we knew that the last time someone checked. We know that pop-ups are automatic outs, and that they have the same season-to-season correlation (.49) as strikes thrown, or at least we know that if you define pop-ups as infield flies per ball in play (PU/BIP) instead of just IFFB (which is PU/FB). And that means we know that these three metrics are three of the strongest by year-to-year correlation, at least among the metrics that the pitcher has the most control over.

Since we ‘know’ these things about as well as you can know things in baseball, it seems about right to combine them into a simple metric. Strikeouts plus pop-ups (the good things) minus walks (the bad things). It’s a quick and easy way to rank pitchers based on what they actually did last year, and it’s how I’ll sort my rankings the very first time I start working on them.

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There isn’t a top 75 pitcher that is as overrated by his ADP against his projections as Sonny Gray, it turns out. There’s almost 120 spots between where he’s being taken and where he “should” go, at least for now. You can see how that sort of thing happens.

He was 40th in strikeouts minus walks last season. 40th in strikeout rate. 26th in FIP. And ninth in ERA. And the ‘answer’ to that disparity is the worst in the business: he’s fifth in batting average on balls in play since he came into the league. 491 innings isn’t enough to believe that sort of things, so we all just whimper into our hats and wonder what to do about him.

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RotoGraphs writers get invited to be in some way-too-early drafts for various industry sources. I have been lucky enough to be included in a 12-team mock drafts for both Lindy’s and RotoWorld. While I have agreed to not release my full results until the sources are available to the public, I can talk about smaller aspects of the drafts. In this case, I ended up with Masahiro Tanaka in each draft. The doubling up on a risky pick has me wondering if I am overvaluing him. For the formats I was drafting in, I don’t think so. As the league depth increases, I could see his value drop.

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It’s time to stop singing slaying songs about smelly batmen and egg laying robins. It’s time to throw out the cookies Johan Santa Claus left behind. It’s time…to resolve.

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Let’s take a short break from the starting pitcher reviews and move onto recapping something I did for the first time this year. Since we had five rankers for our preseason consensus, it was only natural that there would be some players we disagreed on. Sure, we didn’t rank everyone exactly the same, but most were in the general vicinity. For these players that were part of our preseason top 100, our opinions were all over the map. Let’s find out who got it right.

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A few years ago, I had a fantasy team that won a title in part thanks to a certain fantasy stud named Mike whose last name just happens to be the name of a fish.* My wife – not exactly a baseball fan, though she spends more time around the game than she might wish – thought I should go all in: cut everyone NOT named after a fish and build a team entirely of fish-themed players.

No matter how many times I tell her this would be nearly impossible, she insists I should try (in much the same way I insist that my son should try putting away his toys when he insists he needs help). So today, I try to build a fish-themed team, and look for other, potentially more successful themes.

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For the third year in a row, I decided to put together a little experiment during the all-star break. I took two groups of 10 starting pitchers comprised of those whose ERAs outperformed and underperformed their SIERA marks by the largest margins. Oddly, the poll results no longer show how many readers voted, but of those that answered the question “Which Group Posts a Lower 2nd Half ERA?”, 72.2% of you voted for Group A, the SIERA outperformers. This is actually an increase from last year, when just 61.1% of you voted for Group A! Have you learned nothing from reading my work?! Despite this group actually posting a very slightly higher SIERA than Group B, you felt that the magic would continue. Let’s find out the results and if the majority was correct.

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Welcome to the annual series: ‘A Minor (League) Review of 2015.” This series is a great way to receive a quick recap of the ’15 minor league season for your favorite club(s), while also receiving a brief look toward the 2016 season and beyond. It can also be a handy feature for fantasy baseball players in keeper and Dynasty leagues.

The Graduate: Carlos Correa, SS: The Astros recently traded another first overall pick (Mark Appel to the Phillies for young closer Ken Giles) but you won’t see them flipping Correa any time soon. The 21-year-old shortstop was an offensive force for the surprisingly-successful Astros in 2015. He was worth more than three wins for the club and slugged 22 home runs and adding 14 steals. He also showed an advanced approach at the plate and promise in the field.

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