The story of the offseason thus far has been the lack of activity on the free-agent market. As has been thoroughly covered elsewhere, this offseason is the slowest in recent memory, with seven of FanGraphs’ top-10 free agents still unsigned halfway through January.

Not only has this lack of activity generated considerable speculation regarding the cause of the offseason’s glacial pace (with theories ranging from a subpar group of free agents and a lack of competitive races to outright collusion), but it has also triggered talk about what the Major League Baseball Players Association should do in response.

Indeed, as I noted back in 2015, major-league players have seen their share of MLB’s overall league revenue plummet in recent years, with player payroll as a share of league revenues falling from a high of 56% in 2002 to just 38% in 2015. So while this offseason’s lack of activity may be unprecedented, in some respects it is simply the culmination of a trend dating back 15 years.

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Major League Baseball’s salary-arbitration process is a pretty ridiculous exercise. A player and team each submit a figure for how much that player should be paid the following season. At some point not long after that, each party argues in defense of their figure, employing an array of statistics that front offices don’t even use for the purposes of evaluation.

If a team’s representatives successfully make their case, then a panel of arbitrators chooses the number they’ve submitted. If the team fails to sufficiently badmouth their own player, then the panel of arbitrators chooses the player’s chosen figure. Even in the best-case scenario — i.e. when the player and team agree to terms before arbitration — they still arrive at that agreement based upon what would would transpire at a hypothetical arbitration hearing. There has to be a better way.

Travis Sawchik recently proposed the introduction of restricted free agency to baseball, an approach that would likely eliminate arbitration, allowing teams to match offers made by other franchises. Like Travis, I would like to see arbitration abolished. Also like Travis, I am concerned about the middle class of players who seem to be shorted in the current system.

I agree that something needs to be done and that restricted free agency represents a better approach than the one currently in place. That said, I do think there might be a better solution, one that doesn’t entirely dismantle the framework of the present system and yet allows players to receive compensation proportional to their talents.

I think the adoption of a new arbitration-type system might benefit from greater use of a mechanism that was first introduced during the 2012-13 offseason — namely, the qualifying offer.

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The 2018 FAN Projection ballots are now open!

Before you can project any players, you’ll have to select the team you follow most closely towards the top of the screen. If you really don’t follow a team, just pick one. You’ll only have to do this once.

After you’ve selected a team, you can begin projecting players. There are nine categories of interest for pitchers and 10 categories for position players. Pick the values in the drop-down boxes closest to what you think the player will do in 2018. Hit the submit button and you’re done! If you made a mistake, you can always go back and change your selection at any time.

Please note that everything is a rate stat. You’re projecting 2B+3B, HR, SB, and Fielding as a measure of 150 games (basically a full season). The player’s previous stats are shown per 150 games in the projection ballot, too. This will make changing playing-time projections much easier, as you’ll only have to change the games played portion.

That’s really all there is to it. You can filter players by team or, if you go to the player pages, you can project players individually. If you want to see all the players you’ve projected, you can click on the “My Rankings” button, which will show you only what you specifically projected a player to do.

FAN Projections will show up on a player’s page after five ballots have been submitted for him.

If you do notice any issues, please let us know.

Ben Lindbergh and a newly engaged Jeff Sullivan banter about Jeff’s absence and return, Willson Contreras and Jon Lester, and the Astros’ and Giants’ ends of the Gerrit Cole and Andrew McCutchen trades, respectively. Then they bring on FanGraphs writer Travis Sawchik to break down the Pirates’ past, present, and future, including their returns in the aforementioned trades, the ways in which baseball has caught up with the Pirates in the past few years, Pirates ownership continuing to cry poor, what Andrew McCutchen meant to Pittsburgh, and more.

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In reality, there is no separating the Pirates from their circumstances. The Pirates are a smaller-market team, and a smaller-budget team, but followers won’t ever let you forget it doesn’t necessarily have to be that way. It’s fair to question ownership’s commitment to winning, as the Pirates never spent big to supplement what became an impressive and successful core. Predictably, the Pirates wound up squeezed, hence the trades of both Gerrit Cole and Andrew McCutchen. They were getting expensive, with decreasing team control. Time to reload. That’s the cycle.

But it’s not like Neal Huntington has a choice. He has to operate within the given constraints, so it started to make sense to deal Cole away. And then it made sense to deal McCutchen away. Ideally, the Pirates wouldn’t be here in the first place, but, well, they’re here, and so trades have been made. And trades have been criticized, the Cole move in particular. There’s the prevailing thought the Pirates didn’t get enough back. Certainly, they didn’t receive the classic headliner. Fans would like to see a better haul for their ace.

Me, I’ve come fully around. I like Joe Musgrove. He’s interesting. I like Michael Feliz. He’s also interesting. Jason Martin is further interesting, as a fourth piece. But I’d like to shed particular light on Colin Moran. Moran has, in the past, been an extremely polarizing prospect, and at this point he might be considered post-hype. Yet Moran made significant changes in 2017, the kinds of changes you’ve heard about elsewhere. Colin Moran is a swing-changer.

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At the completion of trading on January 5, the S&P 500 reached a milestone, having endured the longest interval in its history without experiencing a 5% decline, according to Spencer Jakab of The Wall Street Journal.

In another WSJ story, reporters Chris Dieterich, Ben Eisen, and Akane Otani note that declines have “grown shallower” over the last two years and “are snapping back sooner.” These trends, according to the authors, are a result of “economic optimism” and a growing awareness of the returns enjoyed by those who remained invested in “riskier assets” during the rebound from the Great Recession. Investors are jumping on the smallest signs of value, buying the smallest declines.

From that piece:

“The investor base has been conditioned to buy the dip,” said Mohamed El-Erian, chief economic adviser at Allianz SE. “And the reason why they have been conditioned is because it has been an extremely profitable trade.”

Buying the dip has been profitable — and particularly so in this bull market.

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Last week, we ran Part 1 of what is planned to be a six-part series chronicling Lars Anderson’s experiences in Australia. As was the case last summer with Japan’s Kochi Fighting Dogs, Anderson is enjoying a different brand of baseball, and culture, than he did as a member of the Red Sox, Cubs, and Dodgers organizations.

In the second installment, Lars introduces us to a colorful member of the Henley and Grange Rams, and explains what happened after he cleared a fence while acclimating to velocity he hasn’t seen since the Clinton administration.

———

Lars Anderson: “My personal favorite player on the Rams is 39-year-old Wayne Ough (pronounced ‘Oh’). An Australian national who spends his summers managing in the German professional league, Wayne arrived a couple weeks after me. ‘You’re going to love him, mate,’ our manager Russell told me before I met him. He was right. Wayne embodies the role of journeyman ballplayer with that certain lack of grace only obtained through years spent in dugouts with underdeveloped man-children.

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After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for half a decade. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Los Angeles Angels. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Batters
During each of the last two offseasons, Jeff Sullivan has written a post about baseball’s best outfield. In each case, said outfield has belonged to the Los Angeles Angels — not, that is, because of a particularly notable breadth of talent, but rather due to the presence of Mike Trout (653 PA, 7.9 zWAR) on the roster. The 12-win mark typically represents the threshold those Angel outfields have transcended. The combination of Trout, Kole Calhoun (629, 2.4), and Justin Upton (607, 2.6) is forecast for 12.9 wins.

Trout’s excellence isn’t much of a surprise, of course. Much more mysterious is the near future of Shohei Ohtani (355, 0.9). ZiPS calls for the Japanese wunderkind to record a league-average batting line in his first year stateside. Combined with standard corner-outfield defense (Szymborski projects Ohtani in right field), the result is just less than a win in just more than a half-season’s worth of plate appearances. The strength of Ohtani’s forecast is his .333 BABIP, the highest mark assessed to anyone on the club. The weakness? His 31.0% strikeout rate, itself nearly the highest. Ohtani, meanwhile, is projected for a relatively modest .186 isolated-power figure. Overall, it’s less promising than his pitching forecast.

None of this, of course, addresses offseason acquisition Zack Cozart (467, 2.7) or other offseason acquisition Ian Kinsler (584, 3.0). Nor will it. Address them, that is.

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If you’ve read any of the dozens of articles over the years trying to create a framework for player asset values (putting a dollar amount on a player’s value), you’re aware of the biggest weakness of this genre of article. Take a star player, run him through a marginal-value analysis, and you’ll be disappointed in what it says about his trade value. Before we jump into the Gerrit Cole and Andrew McCutchen trades, follow me down a thought-experiment rabbit hole.

Clayton Kershaw is the best pitcher in baseball and Steamer projects him as a six-win player next year. Using the roughly $9-10 million at which a win is currently valued on the open market, Kershaw is likely to produce something between $50 and $60 million of value next year; let’s call it $55 million. Would multiple teams bid that amount for his services on a one year deal? Probably yes, because there’s some surplus value at that salary for which the formula fails to account. It doesn’t consider, for example, either extreme payrolls (i.e. the Dodgers’ on one hand, the A’s on the other) or more critical spots on the win curve (moving an 87-win team to a 93-win team is worth far more revenue-wise than 65 to 71).

So what would the A’s bid? They had an $86 million payroll last year, and they obviously wouldn’t give nearly two-thirds of it to one player. Oakland’s value for Kershaw would likely be whatever the maximum is that they would pay for any player, but that number is much lower than what the Dodgers would spend, maybe $20 million. Granted, these are extreme cases, but it illustrates the limitations of using a one-size-fits-all dollar-per-win calculator in specific instances, even if it works fine in aggregate.

More Granular Valuation

I point all that out to illustrate the fact that players aren’t worth the same to every team. Kershaw’s value, on which we all basically agree, varies by $30-40 million from the A’s to the Dodgers on just a one-year deal. So wouldn’t it follow that the A’s and Dodgers would value other players differently, too?

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Earlier in the offseason, the Giants came ever so close to trading for Giancarlo Stanton. Stanton has been one of the most important players in the Marlins’ admittedly limited history, but all that got in the way was a well-earned no-trade clause. Which is what ultimately took Stanton to the Yankees, instead of the Giants or the Cardinals.

Shortly after that all went down, the Giants traded for Evan Longoria. Longoria has been the most important player in the Rays’ admittedly limited history, but, well, the Rays are the Rays, and Longoria is both increasingly old and increasingly expensive. The commitment meant that Longoria had to go, and the Giants were there to welcome him with open arms.

And now the Giants have traded for Andrew McCutchen. McCutchen has been one of the most important players in the Pirates’ far less limited history, one of the keys to the franchise’s recent return to relevance, but where Longoria’s deal was too big for a smaller-market operation, McCutchen’s was too small. With just one year left, McCutchen all but forced the Pirates’ hand, and the Giants, again, were there. The agreement, as it is:

Giants get

• Andrew McCutchen
• $2.5 million

Pirates get

• Kyle Crick
• Bryan Reynolds
• $0.5 million in international-pool money

For the third time, the Giants targeted the face of another ballclub. For the third time, they reached an agreement. For the second time, a move has been actually made. Because of who McCutchen is and has been, this is an impact transaction, one that’s sure to have widespread consequences. The reality of trading or trading for McCutchen is complex. It’s also quite simple. The Pirates aren’t good enough to keep a 31-year-old staring ahead to free agency. And the Giants are trying to return to the playoffs before the inevitable reckoning. McCutchen gives them something they just didn’t have.

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