Well, this is a bit of a surprise. This morning, the Braves have announced that they’re going to move to a new ballpark in 2017 following the expiration of their lease with Turner Field. Citing traffic problems and the fact that Turner Field would require “about $150 million in infrastructure work, including replacement of seats, upgrading lighting and plumbing, etc., to remain viable”, the Braves are instead just going to relocate out of a 20 year old stadium in search of something shinier and newer.

Also, importantly, the location for the new stadium is in Cobb County, which is adjacent to Fulton County, where Turner Field is located. Without the threat of potentially losing the revenues that come from having the Braves stay where they are, Fulton County is very unlikely to kick in public money to make the kinds of upgrades the Braves would like to see. Cobb County is almost certainly going to pay a significant chunk of the cost of this proposed new stadium, so now the Braves have some real leverage to get more public funding, either from Cobb County or Fulton County.

The terms of the project and who pays for what haven’t yet been released — though the Atlanta Journal Constitution is reporting that the stadium includes $450 million in public financing, nearly 2/3 of the cost of the project — so it’s impossible to make specific statements about this particular deal, but in general, publicly funded stadiums are a terrible deal for the taxpayers, and the people of Cobb County and Fulton County are likely to be the real losers of today’s announcement. For some more in depth reading on why these deals are so bad for the public, here’s one of the many papers that have been written and tackle the topic.

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Robinson Cano just turned 31, and the FanGraphs crowd expects him to sign an eight year contract this winter that will take him through 2021, his age-38 season. It’s not out of the realm of possibility that he lands a nine or ten year deal, as Prince Fielder and Albert Pujols did a couple of years ago, and ends up getting signed through age-40. And it’s not a controversial statement to say that Robinson Cano is unlikely to still be a highly productive player at that point in his career.

Any team that signs Cano this winter is going to be be guaranteeing him in the range of $25 million per year for years in which Cano should reasonably be projected as a below average player, and maybe even a guy who shouldn’t be starting for a big league team. The negotiations for his services are essentially going to center around how many years a team is willing to guarantee Cano a significant paycheck while expecting almost nothing in return. The team that eventually gets to sign him will be the team that gives him the most “dead money” years.

This is what free agency for elite players has evolved into. Instead of negotiating on annual salary, the market has evolved to negotiate on years. Let’s look at some data, so you don’t have to take my word for it.

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Yesterday, I looked at five players who I thought would be significant bargains if they signed for the expected contract produced by the FanGraphs Crowdsourcing series. Today, let’s go the other direction, and look at five players who I think might be significant overpays at their projected salaries.

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Free Agency starts today. Well, sort of. Teams and agents are now allowed to start fully negotiating with each other, though they’ve been flirting with each other ever since the World Series ended, and no one really comes close to signing with a new team at this point in the off-season anyway. It’s kind of a symbolic opening, but it does bring with it one reliable event: the release of Top X Free Agent lists and predictions. Everyone does them, even though we’re all basically the saying the same thing — Jacoby Ellsbury and Robinson Cano are good players — and our predictions are all mostly useless.

We presented our version a couple of weeks ago, ordered by the total guaranteed dollars expected by our readers in our crowdsourcing project. I don’t necessarily agree with all of the prices or the ordering of the players relative to each other, but rather than present another Top 50 Free Agent list, let’s try something a little different. Today and tomorrow, I’ll go through the crowdsourced expected prices and present the players that I think are worth significantly more and significantly less than the crowd expects them to sign for. Today, let’s start with the guys who I’d target as values, if their market price was their crowdsourced expected signing price.

We’ll go in reverse order, because why not.

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Today is the first of the off-season’s many deadlines, as MLB has a pretty rigid schedule that determine the timing of various events over the winter. Today, being the fifth day after the end of the World Series, is the deadline for teams to extend qualifying offers to their own free agents, giving them the right to compensation if the player signs with another team this winter.

Last year, nine players received a qualifying offer of $13.3 million, and all nine rejected the contract and signed a larger deal thereafter. This year, the price of the qualifying offer has gone up to $14.1 million, and it seems likely that more than nine players will receive an offer. Here’s what we know so far.

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Worth noting: Joel Sherman of the New York Post suggests that pretty much everything written below is wrong.

It is certainly possible that I’ve interpreted the luxury tax calculations incorrect. The post will be updated once I have clarification.

Derek Jeter is going to stay with the Yankees, surprising absolutely no one. This was never really in doubt, especially because Jeter had the right to ensure he played 2014 in New York, thanks to a player option that was added to the end of his three-year, $51 million option on the deal he signed in 2010. He could have exercised his right to become a free agent, but heading into his age-40 season and coming off the worst year of his career, interest probably wouldn’t have been overwhelming. And it’s unlikely he wanted to end his career in any other uniform, so this was always the expected outcome.

However, the actual announcement sheds some fun light on the details of how the CBA works and how the luxury tax is calculated. The Yankees could have just let Jeter exercise his player option — listed as $8 million, but reported by Jon Heyman to actually be worth $9.5 million — but instead, they signed him to a new contract that will pay him $12 million next year instead. Why the $2.5 million to $4 million raise over what his own player option called for?

Three words: the luxury tax. The Yankees have been desperately trying to get under the $189 million threshold, and by paying Jeter more, their tax calculation is actually going to go down.

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Thanks to the initial hard work from Steve Adams at MLB Trade Rumors, we were able to provide some custom leaderboards for free agents back in August. Well, with the postseason officially over and the hot stove season kicking off, we’re rolling out updated versions of these leaderboards, which also account for some of the transactions we’ve seen over the last few months; say goodbye to Hunter Pence and Tim Lincecum, for instance.

These lists are still a bit fluid, as there are option decisions that still have to be made, so I’ve made some assumptions about which options are going to get picked up versus getting declined. Over the next few days, as players officially can put on or taken off the market, I’ll update these lists to reflect that information. Since these are manually created, there are almost certainly going to be some mistakes, so feel free and point out which players are on the list and shouldn’t be or which players are missing from the leaderboards.

Also, I’ve set the default viewing timeline as 2011 to 2013, as making a decision based on a player’s longer track record is better than simply targeting players who performed well in 2013. This also serves to list players who missed the entire 2013 season, and wouldn’t otherwise appear if the data only displayed most recent year. The great thing about the custom leaderboards, though, is that you can change all of this, and tweak it to display what you want to see.

Without further ado, the 2014 free agent custom leaderboards.

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The St. Louis Cardinals are often referred to as a “model organization”, and for good reason. Despite playing in one of the smallest markets of any team in Major League Baseball, they have built a sustainable model of success, flowing through nearly every aspect of the game. They draft and develop talent exceptionally well, leading to a seemingly never ending pipeline of young talent flowing into the big leagues. They manage their financial resources very well, and consistently add quality veterans at prices that won’t prohibit them from making other necessary improvements. They have a formula in place that has allowed them to win in both the short and long term, and have shown that it doesn’t take a $175 million payroll to be one of baseball’s elite franchises.

But, of course, they aren’t perfect. No organization is. So, while the Cardinals 2013 season was a remarkable success, and should be viewed that way no matter how the season ended, there may be a few things that can be learned from their final series loss to the Red Sox.

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Source: FanGraphs

Congratulations, Boston. From 69-93 to a World Series title. The curse is well and truly dead.