Thursday morning odds and ends

Some random thoughts on a Thursday morning in mid-January, with the Nationals now having gone a full 30 days since making their last player transaction ...

* It's about that time in the calendar when projections for the season begin to come out. FanGraphs.com, for example, has its 2017 standings projections up now, and though these can and will change as teams make more moves before spring training, it's interesting to note how the Nats stack up with the rest of the league.

FanGraphs has the Nationals winning 90 games, a full six games better than anybody else in the National League East division. The Mets check in second with 84 wins, followed by the Marlins (80), Braves (75) and Phillies (70).

Now, it's important to remember that these win totals are an average of thousands of simulations FanGraphs' algorithms run for the full season. It doesn't mean the site predicts the Nationals will end up actually winning 90 games. There are plenty of simulations in which they win more and plenty in which they win less. The final averages for these things tend to be compressed, with the best teams not winning as many games as you'd think and the worst teams winning more games than you'd expect.

For example, the most games FanGraphs projects anybody to win in 2017 is 95 (Dodgers). The fewest wins is 66 (Padres). In all likelihood, some team is going to win more than 95 games this season (Cubs, anyone?) and some team is going to win fewer than 66 (the Padres aren't a bad choice here).

Point is, the Nationals project at the moment to be the best team in the NL East by a significant margin. They also project to be the third-best team in the NL, behind only the Dodgers and Cubs.

Nothing left to do at this point but bookmark this and check back in October to see how it all worked out ...

* Speaking of projections, Buster Olney has been publishing his annual positional player rankings this week on ESPN.com. And you may be surprised (or not) to learn that Bryce Harper isn't rated the No. 1 right fielder in baseball by the talent evaluators Olney polled for these stories.

That honor went to the Red Sox's Mookie Betts, who admittedly is coming off a tremendous season and looks poised to keep this up for years to come.

But the fact Harper fell out of the top spot on the heels of a season in which he was the unanimous choice as NL MVP tells you there are plenty of people out there who have some doubts after his decline in 2016.

Olney notes how Harper's hard-hit ball rate dropped last season while his soft-hit ball spiked up. He also notes how many people believe the young slugger was hampered to some extent by a right shoulder/neck ailment, despite his and the Nationals' insistence he was healthy last summer.

This is the first time Harper has ever really had to deal with significant questions about his playing abilities. It'll be interesting to see how he deals with that. The educated guess here: Provided he's healthy, he's going to be an extremely motivated ballplayer in 2017 and is going to put on quite a show and reclaim his place at the top of these kinds of rankings.

* We are now just shy of one month away from pitchers and catchers reporting for spring training. Which means the brand-new The Ballpark of the Palm Beaches needs to be ready for use one month from now.

Fortunately, it looks like some significant progress has been made on the project.

All seats (painted navy blue) have been installed in the ballpark, and yesterday workers installed the pitcher's mound. The great Joe Capozzi of the Palm Beach Post has a new article posted with plenty of photos of the facility, which is worth checking out.

No, the ballpark isn't finished. And there's a good chance it won't be 100 percent finished by the time pitchers and catchers report on Feb. 14. But every indication remains that the facility will be usable when it needs to be, and that it will be ready for the first exhibition game between the Nationals and Astros on Feb. 28.