On Tuesday, SI’s Tom Verducci reported that a Bud Selig-chartered committee has begun to discuss a principle of “floating” realignment, whereby teams could choose their division of choice on a yearly basis “based on geography, payroll and their plans to contend or not.” The committee is largely made up of senior managers, front office personnel, and corporate executives — so they aren’t exactly teenage Bolsheviks. (Notably, there are no players on the committee, which means the union would be another hurdle if MLB ever decides to move forward.)

Rob Neyer was quick to point out the extreme logistical impracticality of it all: because of the Byzantine complexity of the baseball schedule, teams would have to decide “their plans to contend or not” months ahead of time and coordinate them with the team they were going to swap with. The basic tradeoff: a team (like the Orioles) might want to move from the AL East to an easier division, but they would be foregoing the revenue injections that come from 18 home games a year against the Yankees and Red Sox. A smaller-market team (like the Indians) might want to increase revenues by facing the juggernauts more often, but it might lose a few more games. The notion of a team willingly admitting that it has no “plans to contend” seems a bit hard to swallow, but the “rebuilding” euphemism is used all the time, so it’s quite likely that fans could come around.

The real issue is fairness. Ever since the beginning of divisional play in 1969, postseason play has not necessarily been awarded to teams with the best postseason records, but rather to the teams that ended the year at the top of their division. Famously, the 103-win 1993 Giants tied the NL West, lost a one-game playoff to the Atlanta Braves, and watched the rest of the postseason from home, while the 97-win Philadelphia Phillies won the NL East and went on to win the World Series. The Wild Card was meant to allow a good team in a strong division to make it into the playoffs, but even the Wild Card can’t change the fact that the Baltimore Orioles and Toronto Blue Jays are stuck in an essentially unwinnable division, with three strong teams, two of which are the richest teams in the game. Thanks to the unbalanced schedule, they play a third of their games against those three teams, which Neyer notes isn’t fair either.

The AL East has been broken for some time now. The five teams finished in the exact same order for seven straight years from 1998-2004; since the beginning of the three-division era, either Boston or New York won the division every year from 1994-2009, with the exception of the Orioles in 1997 (the following year, they had baseball’s highest payroll!) and the Rays in 2008. The thing is, no one’s going to move heaven and earth to make life more convenient for the O’s and Jays. Floating realignment is a fascinating solution to the structural disparity in the AL East, and the fact that it’ll never happen doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be taken seriously.

Historically, realignment has been tied to expansion, but we’re not getting a 31st team any time soon. Periodic realignment may not be such a bad idea, though, especially considering that the NL Central has 6 teams and the AL West has 4, bizarrely handicapping those teams’ relative postseason chances. Especially if baseball is going to continue to operate without a payroll cap or payroll floor, other solutions like this need to be considered in order to ensure that every team has a fair shot at October. Baseball’s inequality need not be iniquitous.

(An earlier version of this blog post messed up the entire chronology of 1993. The Giants lost the NL West and the Phillies lost the World Series.)

According to a presentation on Wednesday by Eric Ding of the Harvard School of Public Health, more baseball players are overweight than at any previous point in history — according to the numbers, 55.5% of players from 2000-2006 were overweight by Body Mass Index. (Only 46.5% had been overweight from 1940-1950.) Moreover, “greater home-run (HR) hitters were also more overweight,” and “overweight HR hitters had a significant 19% higher mortality risk… while no elevated risk was found among greater HR hitters who were not overweight.”

There’s an obvious elephant in the room, of course: the study didn’t address steroids, one of the most likely reasons that a player’s Body Mass Index might have increased between 2000 and 2006. All the same, it’s an important study, for two reasons: we don’t have any reliable way to know how many players juiced during the steroid era, but this is a vivid illustration that steroids were prevalent enough to change the average ballplayer’s shape — and prevalent enough to increase the mortality rate of the most successful ballplayers.

Naturally, the news article written about Dr. Ding’s presentation finds someone willing to dispute the study’s findings, especially as they relate to power hitters. “Baseball players are getting heavier because they are getting stronger,” says Mets team physician Struan Coleman. He suggests that steroids themselves are the true reason for increased ballplayer mortality, but that the bigger bodies that steroids may help develop — making someone technically overweight by Body Mass Index — are no health risk. I find his argument a bit hard to swallow, however, in light of the Harvard study, which covers 1876-2007. The height of the steroid era is generally acknowledged to be just the last two decades of that 131-year period, and the study is clear to note that “effects were similar across different leagues and different baseball eras.” (Also, it’s unkind of me to point this out, but Dr. Coleman didn’t have a very good year last year, as much of the Mets roster went down with injury.)

I’m afraid I need to get on my soapbox for a second. The thing is, the worst part of the steroid era isn’t necessarily behind us. The worst part will be watching the tragic, untimely passing of many who played in the past decade and who put unsupportable weight on their bodies, like Ken Caminiti. Absent a perfect laboratory environment (or exact documentation of who used and who didn’t), we can’t know exactly what effect PEDs have between the foul lines. But public health officials have a much better sense of what steroids do to the human body. They take years off a person’s life. On that point, both Dr. Ding and Dr. Coleman can agree.

In case you missed it, play-by-play man Jon “Boog” Sciambi (hired away from the Atlanta Braves by ESPN this offseason) wrote a terrific guest piece at Baseball Prospectus on Tuesday about how sportscasters can better integrate the kind of advanced baseball analysis that goes on here and at BP, inspired by Will Carroll’s recent post “Be Stupid(er).” It’s all worth reading, but here’s the heart of the piece:

The goal is not unveiling newfangled stats; it’s about getting people to understand basic ideas and concepts. To achieve that, we can’t just slap stats up on the screen and explain them. Understanding has to come in the form of analysis. We have to use the stat and explain it…

If Ryan Howard is up, I can talk about RBI and why dependent stats don’t evaluate individual performance well; RBI aren’t what reflects Howard’s greatness, his SLG does. I can mention that Howard’s massive RBI totals may be due to the fact that no player has hit with more total men on base than Howard since 1492 (I believe this is a fact but didn’t feel like looking it up). Point is, there are dead people who could knock in 80 runs hitting fourth in that Phillies lineup. (OK, I probably wouldn’t say that on-air.)

The metrics are getting so advanced that we’re in danger of getting further away from the masses instead of closer… We can’t assume that’s understood just because we understand it. And the only way it gets embedded is to keep beating the audience with it so that it becomes ingrained the way ERA eventually did, even though that once passed for advanced math.

As R.J. Anderson recently wrote, this offseason has featured a terrific number of sabermetric primers (including a series by yours truly). But it has also heard a few “let me catch my breath!” pleas, from fans as varied as John Sickels, Bill Simmons, and Russ Smith of SpliceToday (who quotes the beloved Craig Calcaterra for cover).

Sciambi’s a good broadcaster, and he clearly has his heart in the right place: his goal is to enhance the viewers’ experience of the game, by giving them useful information that they can understand, neither dumbing it down nor sailing it over their heads. That’s a tricky assignment, because it’s always hard to be all things to all people, and it’s hard to be part of any movement pushing a paradigm shift. It’s hard to please a casual watcher who doesn’t know the acronyms or methodology of advanced sabermetrics at the same time that you’re trying to say something that Dave Cameron doesn’t already know. (As Will Carroll notes, last year ESPN tried to make OPS a regular feature of their baseball broadcasts, but apparently their viewers thought it was “too complicated.”)

So what can be done? I think a lot of non-saberheads get hung up on the constellation of acronyms that we use, getting so hung up at all the capital letters that they miss the meaning behind them. (Like Jim Bowden, creator of “OBPATUZXYZ,” or Jon Heyman, inventor of “VORPies.”) So, pace Will Carroll, we need to be willing to let broadcasters be stupid — but with a purpose. The stats around here are pretty easy to read, because they’re all scaled to look like things we’re more familiar with, but we’re not going to see a broadcaster talk about FIP any time soon. However, everyone understands runs and wins, and, as Will Carroll says, anyone can understand a statement like “Albert Pujols was two wins better than Zack Greinke last season.” It has to be justified, but we’ve all heard broadcasters make unsupportable assertions about how many more wins a player adds to his team, or how many runs he saves with his glove. These are just numbers that add support to things they already say. And it can easily be understood. Both by the Jon Sciambis of the world, and the Russ Smiths.

I suppose we shouldn’t have been surprised by reports that the New York Mets are going after Rod Barajas. Though most fans and observers alike acknowledged that the Mets’ greatest needs were in their tattered starting rotation, Omar Minaya has focused the bulk of his attention on his second-string catching corps, signing Henry Blanco, Chris Coste, and Shawn Riggans, and retaining Omir Santos, September callup Josh Thole, and farmhand Robinson Cancel.

Of course, it kind of makes sense that Minaya doesn’t think that any one of those six is a starting catcher. But he spent much of the offseason pursuing Bengie Molina, whom no one would mistake for Gabby Hartnett. Molina was the Mets’ second-highest free agent priority behind only Jason Bay, and after Molina jilted them a month ago, they remained unable to think of any other position on the diamond. Despite the number of backup catchers the organization already possesses — and the paucity of reliable batterymates in the starting rotation — the Mets still seem to be focused on finding 162 games worth of backstops.

Considering the massive holes on the team — a first baseman who can’t play first base, a right fielder with a career OBP of .311, and a starting rotation with one sure thing and four question marks — it’s hard to understand why the team is still fretting about upgrading from Henry Blanco to Rod Barajas, whose career OBP is exactly 8 points lower than Blanco’s.

Many people have already noted that the Mets’ offseason plan this year has seemed rudderless, including Ken Rosenthal. He explains that part of this is due to the Wilpons, the owners, who haven’t given Minaya a budget figure and also retain a great deal of influence over baseball operations. Some of Minaya’s moves make some sense in a vacuum: Jason Bay may be hard to distinguish from Josh Willingham, but he’s a three-win player with a booming bat and a legitimate presence in the lineup. And, certainly, no one would mistake Henry Blanco, Chris Coste, or Omir Santos for a true starting catcher. But no one would look at this team’s lineup and view left field or catcher as the team’s most pressing needs, either.

One of my favorite sportswriters, Allen Barra, tries to put a positive spin on all the madness, writing, “The good news is that the Mets can expect an enormous turnaround in fielding with the return of just two players — Carlos Beltran… and Jose Reyes.” And, of course, that’s the point. If the Mets can’t get healthy comeback years from Beltran, Reyes, and David Wright, then the rest of the offensive overhaul will hardly matter. And if they can’t get healthy comeback years from Mike Pelfrey, John Maine, and Oliver Perez, then little else will matter, either.

Still, if there’s one thing the Mets can count on, it’s the fact that they have a whole lot of people ready for spring training. Today’s the day that pitchers and catchers report to Port St. Lucie — or, in the Mets’ case, pitchers, and catchers, and catchers, and catchers…

We’re pleased to welcome another new writer to the fold – Alex Remington. He’ll be holding down the fort every Thursday around here. Welcome, Alex.

Greetings to all! I’m Alex Remington. You may know me from Big League Stew at Yahoo! Sports, or the Atlanta Braves blog Chop-n-Change. (I also blog on pop culture at Huffington Post and my own blog, Remingtonstein.) I’m excited to be a member of the FanGraphs community, with so many of my favorite writers. I’m looking forward to hearing from you! I’m interested in looking at some of the narratives of the season. Today I’d like to look at one of the most obvious: money.

For the second straight offseason, the uncertain national economy has noticeably affected the baseball economy. It’s a different world out there. So far in 2009, there have been just six contracts worth at least $20 million in 2009; in 2006, there were 20. What’s more, over the past two years, many of the biggest contracts have been given out early, rather than late. In 2008 and 2009, there were 20 contracts worth at least $20 million. 11 of them were handed out before New Year’s (ten of those were in December, around the Winter Meetings), and another six were handed out by mid-January. After that, almost no one signed for even semi-big money.

Of course, the free agent market is fairly segmented. Eight of the 20 biggest contracts — a full 40% — were handed out by the Mets, Yankees and Cubs, the three highest-payroll teams in baseball last year. Four more were given out by the Dodgers and Braves, both in the top 12. The other 25 franchises were more parsimonious with their funds. So it really is a buyer’s market: a free agent has to know that there are only a handful of teams from whom he’ll be able to get a big-money contract. If those teams take a pass, then a free agent is basically left chasing table scraps, along with every other free agent out there.

Several free agents this offseason have notably erred in their negotiations. Adam LaRoche reportedly spurned $17.5 million from the Giants, and wound up signing for $6 million with the D-Backs. He explained his reasoning: “I just had to weigh it. Was it worth going there for a couple of years or just riding it out and seeing what kind of options were available? They kind of started dwindling fast.” No kidding. These days, it seems that “riding it out” is a poor financial decision, as Johnny Damon is also learning. Damon rejected two years and $14 million from the Yankees, and is now mulling an offer in the $5 million range from the Atlanta Braves. And Jarrod Washburn, who turned down a $5 million dollar offer from the Twins, has received so little interest from elsewhere that he’s considering retirement.

Of course, the waiting game isn’t always disastrous. Manny Ramirez got $45 million last March, after all. But he’s Manny Ramirez, and most free agents are not. The longer they wait, the longer other teams are able to think of other, cheaper ways to fill their team’s holes than the free agent market. If there’s any chance of getting the Yankees or Mets interested, then waiting may be a good strategy. If not, then most free agents should really just sign on the dotted line.