Free agency is supposed to be the reward. Of course, not every player gets treated the same, but, in general, free agency tends to reward good hitting. Mike Moustakas has blossomed into a pretty good hitter. Free agency tends to reward good fielding. Mike Moustakas has been a fine defensive third baseman. Free agency tends to reward winning experience. Mike Moustakas was part of a World Series champion. And, importantly, free agency tends to reward youth. Mike Moustakas is 29 years old. He’s just one year older than Eric Hosmer, who signed for massive terms with the Padres. It feels like it should’ve been there. It feels like Mike Moustakas should’ve earned his reward.

Moustakas is returning to the Royals. It’s a one-year contract, with a $6.5-million guarantee, and while there exists a second-year mutual option, those are never picked up. It was the Royals who extended to Moustakas a $17.4-million qualifying offer, which Moustakas, in turn, declined. Now he won’t come close to that money. There’s been talk for a while this market is strange, but the Moustakas terms in particular are jarring. It’s incredible that his free agency got to this point.

MLB Trade Rumors figured Moustakas would sign for five years and $85 million. The FanGraphs community figured he’d sign for five years and $85 million. Dave Cameron figured he’d sign for five years and $95 million. Now, Moustakas can still earn big money. He won’t have a qualifying offer attached next offseason, and another strong year would improve his stock. And, also, it’s easy to try to point things out after the fact. No one knew this was how Moustakas would end up. But, in hindsight, there were issues from the beginning. A variety of factors came together to prevent Moustakas from finding the commitment he wanted.

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TEMPE, Ariz. — The center-field fence at the Angels’ spring-training home sits 420 feet away from home plate. Beyond it are craggy, red-rock hills, and nearer but still beyond the playing field, a green, aluminum batter’s eye that has a height perhaps around 30 feet.

At Angels camp last week, I asked the club’s hitting coach, Eric Hinske, if he’s experienced any “Wow,” slack-jawed moments while observing the early days of Shohei Ohtani as a major-league hitter.

All the time, Hinske says.

“He hits the ball over the batting eye like with every swing in batting practice,” Hinske said.

To get a sense of what that swing looks like at its best, here’s footage of all Ohtani’s NPB home runs:

The power — at least the BP variety — is real.

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Justin Upton hits the ball in the air. Just over 63% of his batted balls were classified either as liners or flies in 2017, the 28th-highest mark among 144 qualified hitters. His career mark of roughly 60% is nearly as high. At a time where launch angle is all the rage, the 30-year-old outfielder is doing what a middle-of-the-order hitter is expected to do. That includes output. Upton is coming off a campaign where his loft-efficient right-handed stroke produced 109 RBIs (yes, those are still counted), a .540 slugging percentage, and a 137 wRC+.

It would be inaccurate to say that J-Up is following a trend.

“I don’t try to hit the ball in the air,” Upton told me recently at the Angels’ spring camp in Tempe. “To be brutally honest with you, I’ve never in my career tried to hit the ball in the air. I’ve always tried to hit line drives, and if you just miss a line drive it becomes a deep fly ball.”

He hits a lot of deep fly balls. The lucrative contract he signed with the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim in November came on the heels of a 35-dinger explosion. The total represented a career high, but it wasn’t an anomaly. Over the past five seasons, Upton has bopped 148 home runs, 11th most during that stretch.

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Everyone knows not to make too much of spring-training numbers. This is a time for everyone to be optimistic. Good results are signs of improvement; bad results are to be dismissed because, come on, the games don’t even count. No one takes this time of year too seriously. Not even the players! But especially the fans. Look around. The current league leader in batting average is Mike Freeman. The current league leader in OPS is Billy McKinney. The current co-league leaders in at-bats are Raimel Tapia and Sam Travis. The Marlins, at 7-4, have a better record than the Nationals and the Dodgers. This is all practice. It’s practice, with the pointless quirk of keeping score.

But a funny thing happens when you have enough high-level baseball players playing enough practice games. As noisy as all the individual numbers are, when the sample size gets large, you can start to see real signal. Even in spring training, baseball has a way of finding its level — spring numbers often predict what we’ll see league-wide the subsequent summer. As such, I’ve gone in to investigate, because I’m impatient. This year’s spring training is roughly 40% complete. The league is past 15,000 total plate appearances. What might we be able to tell about the 2018 regular season? The answers might surprise you. (They will not surprise you.)

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The Mariners made the Ichiro Suzuki signing official on Wednesday, returning the 44-year-old outfielder to the team for whom he starred from 2001 until mid-2012, when he was traded to the Yankees. Aside from a genuinely useful 2016 season in a part-time role — highlighted by his 3,000th major league hit — he hasn’t been a very productive player over the past five years, totaling 2.5 WAR over the span, and he may not have much to offer the Mariners beyond wisdom, leadership, warm fuzzies, and other soft factors. Still, there are worse ways to end a storied career, as Rian Watt pointed out when the news of Ichiro’s westward return first broke.

The history of such homecomings among Hall of Fame-bound players isn’t filled with many resounding successes, and in Seattle’s case, the most immediate example that comes to mind represents a worst-case scenario in this realm: an old, underperforming player outright embarrassing himself in some way, as Ken Griffey Jr. did in 2010. Junior hit just .184/.250/.204 without a homer before being released on June 2, shortly after he allegedly fell asleep in the clubhouse and missed a pinch-hitting opportunity. That’s no way to go, whether or not you’re a member of the 600 home-run club.

Via a quick skim through annals of the game, I counted 13 other stints in which a Hall of Famer wrapped up his career with a return to his original team, plus one that deserves an asterisk. That count doesn’t include players who finished with the team for whom they became stars after previously breaking in elsewhere, as was the case with Early Wynn coming back to the Indians, Dennis Eckersley to the Red Sox, or Fergie Jenkins and the Cubs. Nor does it include players who moved on again after their second stint with their original team, such as Greg Maddux with the Cubs, Tim Raines with the Expos, or Ivan Rodriguez with the Rangers. Listed chronologically, these are the most noteworthy.

Eddie Collins (A’s 1906-14, 1927-30)

During his first run with the A’s, the Columbia University-educated Collins played the keystone in Connie Mack’s “$100,000 Infield,” which led the team to four pennants and three championships. But after losing the 1914 World Series to the “Miracle” Braves, Mack broke up the team for financial reasons — one of the earliest tank jobs. Sold to the White Sox for $50,000, Collins spent 12 years on the South Side, helping the team to pennants in 1917 and 1919 (he was not part of the World Series fix), becoming the sixth player to collect his 3,000th hit in 1925, and serving as player-manager for that season and the next.

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Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Oakland Athletics. Scouting reports are compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as from our own (both Eric Longenhagen’s and Kiley McDaniel’s) observations. For more information on the 20-80 scouting scale by which all of our prospect content is governed you can click here. For further explanation of the merits and drawbacks of Future Value, read this.

55 FV Prospects

Puk had back issues in college and scouts weren’t enamored with his conditioning, but he also featured premium velocity and a plus slider while performing against SEC hitters. He somewhat surprisingly fell to Oakland’s sixth overall selection in the 2016 draft. Reports were even stronger in 2017.

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Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about the Rays’ latest Tommy John surgery victim and the team’s potential plans for a four-man rotation, players’ decreasing IP and PA totals, exhibition-game walk-off celebrations, Marlins spring-training invitees, and Jon Lester’s new bounce pass to first base, then answer listener emails about lower-level clutchness, how quickly changes to the ball would be noticed, Shohei Ohtani’s underrated offensive ability, how teams could spend their way out of scrutiny by the Players Association, whether teams should swap outfielders in certain parks, how much MLB might expand in the future, Jason Heyward opt-out scenarios, a non-throwing Mike Trout, the value of a player who doesn’t fly for road trips, and how much experience helps players, plus a Stat Blast about league-wide spring-training rates so far.

Audio intro: Shout Out Louds, "Four By Four"
Audio outro: The Posies, "That Don’t Fly"

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Earlier, Travis Sawchik wrote about the struggles of the middle class in this free-agent market. Sawchik called attention to those players predicted by the FanGraphs community to sign for under $45 million, and he found that the actual terms have been significantly lower than expected. Sawchik highlighted eight players in the group who have done better than the forecasts, despite the trend around them. Something those eight players have in common? They’re all relievers.

For all the talk of how slowly the free-agent market progressed — and, I suppose, continues to progress — relievers have seemingly been the exception. Relievers have come off the board in droves, and even back around the winter meetings, when all anyone could think about was Giancarlo Stanton and Shohei Ohtani finding new teams, relievers were finding contracts left and right. There was some obvious market enthusiasm, and to this point, free-agent relievers have signed for more money than free-agent starters. There are 24 relievers who have signed for multiple years, and that doesn’t count Mike Minor, who’s going to be tried as a starter again. One market is only one market, but still, what’s going on? It’s actually pretty simple to understand. You might even already know the answer.

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