Tonight, Mike Trout is going to be named the American League Rookie of the Year, and it’s almost certainly going to be unanimous unless one voter is just completely out of his mind. Bryce Harper is also likely to take home a rookie of the year trophy tonight, though his win isn’t as certain, nor will his margin of victory be as large. You can actually make a pretty good case for Wade Miley, and it wouldn’t be a travesty if he ended up pulling off the upset tonight. Harper was excellent, but he wasn’t the dominating force that Trout was in his first season in the big leagues.

And yet, as we look forward to their respective careers, I’d still lean ever so slightly towards Bryce Harper having a better future than Mike Trout.

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Brandon McCarthy is a popular guy in sabermetric circles. He’s a good pitcher who reads FanGraphs and looks at PITCHF/x data, and in his spare time, interacts with fans on Twitter. McCarthy’s also a free agent this winter, and his ability to throw strikes and get hitters out is going to make him a popular guy with teams looking to upgrade their rotation as well.

Outbidding everyone for the popular guy doesn’t always lead to great results, though, and there are teams who will be looking for a rotation upgrade who won’t be able to afford McCarthy. So, to those teams, I present Scott Feldman, a free agent starter with none of the publicity who might be able to do a pretty decent impression of McCarthy next year.

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Stop me if you’ve heard this before; the Diamondbacks are listening to offers for Justin Upton again. These aren’t even just courtesy phone calls to check in on his availability, or speculation from other teams about his availability – Kevin Towers flat out confirmed that he’s in trade negotiations with other teams about his star right fielder.

“I’m open-minded and I’m going to listen to what people have to say,” he said. “If a deal presents itself that makes the Diamondbacks better, I think I need to be open-minded. The last two years, there has not been a deal that we felt made us better. That’s why we’ve retained him and we’ve kept him.”

“He will not be an easy guy for us to move. I think we’ve said it’s probably unlikely we end up doing something with him, but if somebody is willing to step up and we think it’s a deal that’s going to make the Diamondbacks better next year and going forward, we’ll talk about trading him.”

When you keep making a player available every winter, the differentiation between “shopping” and “listening” becomes meaningless. And so, with Upton back on the market, the search for a logical trade partner has once again brought the Texas Rangers back into the rumor vortex.

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For the Mets, three years of Jason Bay was enough. This afternoon, they announced that they have agreed to part ways with Jason Bay, meaning he’s being released from his contract. Joel Sherman has the details.

Bay is getting all $21M he is owed, the $16M salary, the $3M buyout and the $2M left on a signing bonus. Some is being deferred #Mets

— Joel Sherman (@Joelsherman1) November 7, 2012

The Mets don’t get any financial relief in terms of actual payouts, but by deferring some portion of the money he was set to be paid in 2013, they can reduce the actual value of those payouts and create a little extra flexibility for this off-season. Because the Player’s Association has fought hard for guaranteed contracts, players are unlikely to accept contract buyouts, but this is probably the best result for both parties.

Now, Bay gets to pick his own landing spot for 2013, and he should pick an AL team that can give him some at-bats at DH in hopes of a rebound season. Bay was terrible last year, but he was an average-ish hitter as recently as 2011, and it wouldn’t take a large bounce back to make him a decent enough platoon DH for a team that already had a part-time left-handed bat in their starting DH spot.

At age 34, it’s also quite possible that Bay is just done, but at least now he gets a chance to save his career and get a fresh start in a new organization. And now Mets fans don’t have to watch him play anymore. Win-win, as they say.

If you’re reading FanGraphs, you’re probably familiar with Nate Silver. He’s known nationally now for his political projections at Five Thirty Eight, but of course he made his name on the internet writing about baseball, creating the PECOTA projections, and penning some of the best articles about the economics of baseball written over the last decade.

Even if you’re not a political junkie, it was hard to get away from discussions about Nate Silver over the last few weeks. The final few weeks of the election saw a Nate vs Pundits fight that looked like something straight out of Moneyball. Last night, my Twitter feed probably had more references to Nate Silver than either Barack Obama or Mitt Romney. Needless to say, the performance of his model was a major storyline during last night’s election, especially if you were following the election through the eyes of people who write about baseball for a living.

If you haven’t already heard, Nate’s model did pretty darn well. As in, he got every projection right, going 49 for 49 in states that have projected winners and nailing the fact that Florida was basically a coin flip. But, I’m not writing this post to talk about how Nate Silver is a witch or to bleed political discussion over into yet another area of your life, but instead, I think that there’s an important takeaway from this that applies to baseball and what we do here at FanGraphs: the fact that imperfect models with questionable inputs can still be quite useful.

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You can’t talk about Major League Baseball’s financials these days without hearing about how much money is flowing into the sport. New television contracts are everywhere. MLB Advanced Media is one of the most valuable technology companies in the world. The Dodgers ownership group has their own printing press, apparently. Baseball is rolling in cash, and everyone involved with the sport is getting rich.

Except for Joel Peralta. If he pays attention to any of this stuff, he has to be wondering why his own personal experience is so different than everyone else’s.

In 2010, Joel Peralta threw 49 excellent innings for the Nationals, posting a 50/76/86 ERA-/FIP-/xFIP- line thanks to his excellent command of the strike zone. For his efforts, he was non-tendered, as the Nationals decided they didn’t want to give him a raise that a pitcher with those numbers would get in arbitration. The Rays eventually signed him for $925,000, or about $500K more than the league minimum.

Since joining the Rays, Peralta has thrown 135 innings, with his minus stats lining up nicely – 84 ERA-/83 FIP-/87 xFIP-. His fly ball tendencies finally turned into a small home run issue, but his ability to limit walks and rack up strikeouts allowed him to be a good reliever even while putting the ball in the air all the time. While there is understandable skepticism about putting homer prone pitchers in the game with one run leads, he has basically the same skillset as Huston Street, and he’s had no problems collecting big paychecks throughout the years.

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Last week, the Angels shopped Dan Haren around the league, as it was common knowledge that they weren’t going to pick up his $15.5 million option for 2013, and were willing to trade him to a team that wanted to take a one year flier on a pitcher was among the game’s best as recently as 2011. Because they owed him a $3.5 million buyout, the marginal cost of acquiring Haren was really $12 million, the same amount that the Royals agreed to take on in acquiring Ervin Santana in the same style of trade.

While Santana found a new home, Haren did not, and after a deal with the Cubs fell through — after the Cubs supposedly pulled out of the trade — the Angels allowed Haren to become a free agent. So, now, he’s at the top of everyone’s free agent bargain list. And, given his skills and track record, the idea that a team could sign him for less than 1/12 seems to be a potentially huge bargain. But, given what transpired last week, we have to at least consider that perhaps Haren is more broken than is obvious from the outside.

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