Which MLB Teams Are Expected to Rise and Fall the Most in 2017?

Spring is in the air, baseball games are being played in Arizona and Florida, and before you know it, the games will actually start to count. Baseball season is around the corner, and numberFire's MLB projections are another tell-tale sign that Opening Day is fast approaching.

With fantasy baseball draft season starting to get underway, a lot of focus is on particular players, how they'll perform and what it means for your specific squad, which makes a lot of sense. It's also important to take a look at the bigger picture to see how all these individual performances will impact their respective teams and their chances of capturing postseason glory in October.

Nobody has played a baseball game since the Chicago Cubs beat the Cleveland Indians in Game 7 of the 2016 World Series, but a lot has changed with regard to the composition of each MLB team. Our preseason power rankings were released this week, which are based on our nERD metric. This number shows the expected run differential between each team and a league-average opponent at a neutral-site park.

So, if the New York Mets have a nERD of 0.46, this means they'd be expected to beat a league-average team by 0.46 runs.

Our power rankings show the current nERD score for each team with Opening Day about a month away, so we already know who is expected to be the best and who is expected to be the worst. But who is expected to improve the most over the next seven months? What about the teams who are expected to see the biggest drops in production? And of course, how many are expected to stay the same?

Every team made moves over the winter, so let's see how it's impacted their bottom line compared to what they accomplished in 2016.