Last night, the Indians signed Michael Bourn to a four year, $48 million deal. It’s less than he was asking for, but still a pretty significant investment for a low power/high strikeout guy headed into his thirties. I’ve already written about my questions over how much of his value he’ll retain, both on offense and on defense, but 4/48 isn’t paying Bourn to retain most of his skills. At that price, the Indians just need him to be an average or slightly above average player for the life of the deal, which gives him a lot of room to decline and still be worth the contract.

As others have already written, this was a deal worth doing for the Indians, even if they aren’t necessarily expecting to keep up with the Tigers in 2013. Value is value, and adding good players to the organization at reasonable prices is something every team should be interested in doing. But, perhaps more than just Bourn’s role on the team, the more interesting story is how the acquisition of one of the game’s elite defensive players actually solves the void the Indians had at DH.

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Last summer, Major League teams had to operate under the new rules imposed on amateur signings put in place by the CBA last winter. While international free agents had previously signed for whatever the market would grant, MLB imposed a $2.9 million spending cap on each Major League team. As Ben Badler noted over at Baseball America today, however, the Rays exceeded the limit and are going to face some significant penalties for doing so:

The CBA limited every team to a $2.9 million bonus pool for the 2012-13 international signing period that began on July 2. The strongest penalty in the CBA is that any team that exceeds its international bonus pool by 15 percent or more will pay a 100 percent tax on the overage and won’t be able to sign a player for more than $250,000 during the 2013-14 signing period. Since July 2, the Rays already have spent more than $3.7 million (not counting players signed for $50,000 or less, since there are exemptions for those players), which is 28 percent beyond their international pool.

As a result, the Rays won’t be able to sign anyone next year for more than $250,000 and probably won’t make any major international splashes until July 2 either because of the tax. Going well beyond the bonus pool is a curious move, but the Rays did pull in a considerable amount of talent, including arguably the two best 16-year-old pitchers on the market. Given that their 90-win season last year will give them one of the lower bonus pools for the 2013-14 signing period, which many scouts believe is shaping up to be a down year for international talent, perhaps it will be a worthwhile gambit.

The 100% tax means that the Rays will owe the league an extra $800,000, which isn’t a huge penalty, but the inability to sign any player for more than $250,000 next summer is a significant issue, and continues to show why the current international limits simply don’t work to promote competitive balance.

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Last week, I presented my list of the 10 best transactions of the off-season. Of course, if there’s a best, there also has to be a worst, so today, we look at the flip side of the winter maneuvers. I will note, however, that this list was harder to put together than last week’s version, as MLB teams are getting smarter and there simply aren’t as many total head-scratching moves made anymore. No one’s giving out Gary Matthews Jr or Barry Zito contracts these days. The biggest potential landmine of the winter was paying Kyle Lohse as if his ERA represented his actual talent level, and every team in baseball decided to pass on that kind of signing. So, while I don’t love most of the moves below, several of them are more defensible than moves in previous off-seasons. The worst moves aren’t as bad as bad as they used to be.

Without further ado, on to the list.

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I was going to do my list of the 10 worst off-season transactions today, but I’m going to push it back to next week, since I have some things to say about yesterday’s news.

The Mariners are apparently set to sign Felix Hernandez to the largest contract ever given to a Major League pitcher. The total commitment is $175 million over seven years. It’s a staggering amount for a guy who wasn’t eligible for free agency until after the 2014 season, and in many ways, this contract is the continuation of the trend that we saw begin last year with Joey Votto’s deal with the Reds. Here’s what I wrote a year ago when that deal was announced:

So, at this point, we have a couple of options – we can continue to be shocked and amazed at the growing rate of contracts that guarantee big money to players from 2018 and beyond, or we can adjust our expectations for what premium players are going to be able to command going forward. With the promise of new money flowing into many organizations over the next three to five years, I’d imagine we’ll see more and more teams being aggressive in trying to lock up their young stars before they get to free agency and have to bid against whichever franchise just happened to renegotiate their television contract a few months prior.

For the Reds, the equation was pretty simple – keep Votto and contend during the run-up to the expiration of their television deal, or trade him away, rebuild, and come to the table asking for more money after a couple of years of going young and probably taking their lumps. Given those options, giving Votto a couple of extra years at the back end to increase their bargaining position doesn’t look quite so crazy.

…

This deal is going to have lasting repercussions on the sport. Not only does it suggest that the Reds are going to remain competitive in the NL Central going forward, but it also resets the price expectations for every pre-free agent player in the sport. Congratulations, players, all of your expected prices just went up. Way up.

Felix’s deal with the Mariners is the pitcher’s version of Votto’s deal with the Reds. It’s a free agent price for a pitcher who wasn’t a free agent, and in that sense, there’s a pretty good argument to be made that it’s too much money. The Mariners are taking on significant additional risk by guaranteeing him his 2015-2019 salaries now, and like with Votto, that risk wasn’t offset by getting a below market price on the deal. Given the history of pitcher attrition, there’s a significant chance that this deal will go south for the Mariners, and they’ll end up with an expensive and overpaid former ace. Most good young pitchers don’t turn into good old pitchers, and the Mariners have just made a huge bet on Felix being the exception rather than the rule.

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The off-season isn’t technically over yet, as there are still a few free agents to be signed, and there’s a chance we could see another significant trade before spring training opens. However, most teams have essentially finished their off-season shopping at this point, and now we can look back and see which teams did the best in terms of adding talent to their organizations, or made a good move that pushes them closer towards serious contention without doing long term damage to their franchise.

Keep in mind, just because a trade is listed here as a win for one franchise doesn’t mean that I think the decision was necessarily a poor one for the other side. There are several deals below that I think served both teams interest, and in fact, one deal is listed twice, because I think both teams got exactly what they needed in the transaction. There are win-win deals, so the support for one side of a transaction should not be read as condemnation of the other side. We’ll look at the worst transactions of the winter tomorrow, and it won’t simply be the flip side of the trades listed below.

Final disclaimer: only transactions made after free agency began were considered. While Jake Peavy and David Ortiz re-signed to team friendly deals, we’re excluding them from the discussion, as they came before the off-season began.

If you’re interested in such things, here’s the list of moves I liked from last off-season. The teams listed below are probably hoping that their moves turn out more like the Carlos Beltran signing and less like the Michael Pineda acquisition. On to this year’s recap.

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One of the most often cited criticisms of WAR is that replacement level is essentially an arbitrary construct, making the entire model just an act of theoretical speculation. The idea of replacement level is to essentially set a baseline for expected performance from a team that invested the absolute minimum in putting together a Major League roster. This replacement level team wouldn’t have a farm system, so that they didn’t have to spend money on draft picks, coaches, equipment, or facilities. They would rely entirely on league minimum veterans to build out their roster, thus allowing us to see how approximately many wins a team could expect if they did the absolute bare minimum in terms of organizational investment.

That team doesn’t exist, obviously, as even organizations that completely tear down their big league roster work to rebuild through accumulation of young talent, and no team actually spends the league minimum on its Major League payroll. Thus, the criticism that the entire exercise is a thought experiment, not applicable to the Major Leagues and incapable of serving as a baseline against which Major League players should be judged.

However, that argument misses out on the fact that MLB teams give us a pretty great list of replacement level players every winter, thanks to the processes of minor league free agency and the waiver system.

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On Friday, ESPN.com’s lead baseball story was title “Let’s Corral the WAR Horse,” and the image used in the rotation feature box was simply a white sign with the words “NO WAR” attached to a stick, presumably a stock image of a sign from an anti-violence protest. In the piece, Jim Caple — a writer I like, have spent a little bit of time with, and who is a pretty good advocate for logical thinking, by the way — explained why he’s a little frustrated with what he perceives as an over reliance on WAR as the stat’s popularity grows.

Quoting Caple:

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