“Cincinnati Reds manager” might be most attractive opening in baseball

A quick trip over to FanGraphs to check out a few team batting statistics left me cracking my knuckles and rushing to my keyboard earlier today. If you take things all the way back to the beginning of the 2017 season and sort by fWAR, you get a pretty predictable ranking of how each team’s total position-player production has stacked up against the rest of Major League Baseball over the last 250+ games, at least at the very top.

Topping that list, as you’d expect, is the Houston Astros, winner of the 2017 World Series and currently in the driver’s seat in the AL West with an imposing 64-35 record. Next up are the New York Yankees and Chicago Cubs, juggernauts in their own divisions again…