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The Tigers have six good starting pitchers, if you believe that Drew Smyly should be able to transition back to starting after a successful pitstop in the bullpen. Steamer projects all five of their current starters for at least +3 WAR next year, and it’s not at all crazy to think that Smyly will be a +2 to +3 WAR pitcher as a starter, given his track record and stuff. The desire to move Smyly back into the rotation meant that had someone to go. For the last few months, the rumored trade candidates have been Rick Porcello and Max Scherzer.

Those guys can officially unpack their bags, however, as the Nationals have solved the Tigers pitching problem by relieving them of Doug Fister instead. And they did it at a shockingly low price, considering that Fister is one of the game’s most underrated pitchers. But let’s deal with what they gave up first.

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This is an overly simplistic generalization, but when signing free agents to contracts smaller than $100 million, you can choose performance or health, but probably not both. Players who play everyday at a high level command massive paychecks, and are pursued by nearly every team with money to spend. When you’re shopping in the lower rent districts, you can sign healthy players with mediocre performances, or broken players with good performances, but there aren’t many good healthy free agents signing short term contracts these days.

The A’s, over the last few years, have very clearly prioritized performance over durability. When they wanted a center fielder back in 2010, they signed Coco Crisp despite the fact that he was coming off shoulder surgery. When they traded away Andrew Bailey in 2011, they targeted Josh Reddick from the Red Sox, who had been an interesting player when he was able to stay on the field. When they needed a shortstop last winter, they turned to the Astros and acquired Jed Lowrie, who had a history of both hitting well and breaking down regularly.

They’ve done it with pitchers too, acquiring guys like Brandon McCarthy, Brett Anderson, and Jarrod Parker at various points over the last few years. Because of their budget constraints, the A’s have to shop from the bargain bin, and they have consistently chosen to buy talented broken players over more reliable mediocrities. When faced with a choice between talent and health, the A’s have chosen talent and hoped that the health would get better.

Today, they’ve done that again, signing Scott Kazmir to a two year contract for a little more than $22 million. And based on both the A’s history and Kazmir’s 2013 season, this looks like a strong bet to be one of the best contracts given to a free agent starter this winter.

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Today, the Baseball Writer’s Association of America has released the official 2014 Hall of Fame Ballot, and because the organization did not induct a single candidate last year, the ballot is more crowded than ever. For reference, here are the 36 names on the list, along with their career WAR.

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Over the last few years, we have analyzed nearly every notable contract signed in Major League Baseball, and one of the tools that we have used regularly is a pricing model that we often refer to as $/WAR. Basically, this calculation takes a look at the expected production from a player during the life of the contract that he just signed, then also the total cost of the contract over the length of the deal, and divides the production by the price. This calculation attempts to estimate the price paid for the expected production, and gives us an idea of what teams are paying for projected wins in baseball’s closest thing to a free market.

To be clear, FanGraphs didn’t invent this calculation, and this isn’t an idea specific to us. Doug Pappas was doing similar calculations a decade ago using a method he called Marginal Payroll and Marginal Wins. Nate Silver also wrote about the marginal value of a win during his time at Baseball Prospectus, and Tom Tango has been calculating $/WAR for contracts for years on his blog. Over the last few years, plenty of others have written about the price of a win in MLB, and there are multiple methods to perform this kind of calculation.

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Over the weekend, the Cardinals signed Jhonny Peralta to a four year, $53 million contract. I think it’s fair to say that, heading into the off-season, he was expected to sign for much less. The Tigers didn’t bother making him a qualifying offer. He was coming off a 50 game suspension for using PEDs. Some teams that expressed interest in him saw him as an outfielder, not a shortstop, and his offensive production levels aren’t that fantastic for a corner OF. He was so overlooked that Carson Cistulli even forgot to include him in the Contract Crowdsourcing series, but the general consensus from other contract prognosticators was something in the range of $20 million over two years.

But Peralta landed a deal for twice as long and more than twice as much money, as the Cardinals spent aggressively for the right to fill their shortstop hole without trading from their base of young talent. They could have acquired a cheaper shortstop from a financial perspective, but the cost of talent would have been substantial, so they chose to spend their monetary resources rather than their physical ones. Eno’s already talked about some of the risks and rewards of signing Peralta, so rather than rehash that post, I wanted to talk about Peralta’s price, and perhaps how we should have seen this coming.

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In the World Series, broadcasts from both TBS and Fox kept telling us how good of a center fielder Jon Jay was. In between plaudits, Jon Jay would inevitably get a poor jump, take a bad route, or just drop an easily catchable ball, sometimes all in the same game. It became something of a running joke, as Jay appeared to be a defensive disaster in the postseason, even while the networks kept insisting that he was terrific with the glove.

Well, the Cardinals clearly weren’t swayed by the rhetoric, and today, they’ve acquired Peter Bourjos from the Angels to be their new center fielder. And now TBS and Fox can properly say that the Cardinals have one of the best defensive center fielders on the planet, because Peter Bourjos is what Jon Jay was supposed to be.

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Before free agency began, I ran down five potential bargains that I thought had a good chance to be worth more than the contracts that the FanGraphs Crowd projected them to sign for this winter. On that list was Chris Young — the outfield version — who the crowd forecast for $7 million per year over two years. Today, the Mets have signed for him $7 million for a single year, and I continue to believe that this will likely go down as one of the best free agent signings of the off-season.

It is very easy to focus on Young’s warts. He hit just .200/.280/.379 last year. He doesn’t hit right-handed pitching all that well. Now 30, his defense probably isn’t what it used to be. These statements are all true, but they simply explain why Young was signing for 1/$7M instead of 5/$75M like B.J. Upton last winter. If Young was coming off a good year, and had historically better numbers against right-handed pitching, and was still in his defensive prime, he’d be signing a big money long term deal. For 1/$7M, you get warts. You just pick and choose which warts you’re okay with.

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