Don’t forget – you can view all of the free agents stats and compare them side by side on our Free Agent Leaderboard.

Free Agency officially starts tomorrow, as the kinda-sorta-but-not-really-exclusive negotiating period comes to an end today, and players who haven’t re-signed with their former teams are free to sign with anyone they choose. Well, that’s not really true. They can sign with any team that makes them an offer. I’m pretty sure Jose Valverde couldn’t re-sign with the Tigers no matter how much he wanted to.

With free agency starting up, you’re also about to get inundated with lists of the top free agents. 50 seems to have been the agreed upon number, as Tim Dierkes already has his Top 50 up at MLBTradeRumors, while Keith Law has said that his list goes up on ESPN Insider when the clock strikes midnight. I’m sure there will be others, and some of them will probably ask you to view their list in a slideshow. Those people are the Jose Valverde of list makers. Don’t be one of those people. Slideshows are the worst.

Here at FanGraphs, we’re not giving you a slideshow. We’re not giving you a Top 50 Free Agent list either, because, to be honest, my list would have looked an awful lot like Tim’s, and probably an awful lot like Keith’s. I just didn’t see a lot of usefulness in telling you that I agree that Zack Greinke and Josh Hamilton are the two best free agents on the market, nor was I super interested in trying to draw a distinction between Carlos Lee and Carlos Pena. They’re both not good anymore. Does anyone really want to read about those guys today? Me either.

So, instead of producing our own list of 50 best free agents on the market in some order, we’re going to provide a different slant – using the Contract Crowdsourcing results that went up in full this morning, I’m going to provide a list of the 25 players that I would be most interested in signing at those given prices. And, for extra fun, the five players who I would not go anywhere near at the prices you guys projected them to sign for.

You’ll see bigger contracts at the top than at the bottom, even though you can get a better ROI on a smaller deal if the guy goes bananas, as Aaron Hill did last year. That said, those kinds of years are tough to predict, and in general, I think teams are better off getting a good player at a good price rather than a role player at a great price, even if in retrospect, some of those players will turn into good players and provide a lot of value beyond what they’re being paid. The goal here isn’t to provide the best value in terms of $/WAR, but to identify — at least, in my view — which contracts are likely to have the biggest magnitude of effect on a team’s chances of winning going forward. And, on the flip side, the contracts that could do the most harm to a team’s ability to contend over the life of the deal.

So, without further ado, here are my Top 25 Free Agent Values, followed by the Five Free Agent Landmines to avoid this winter.

1. Nick Swisher, OF: 4 years, $56 million

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Yesterday, the Royals acquired Ervin Santana, agreeing to pick up his $13 million option (of which they’ll be paying $12 million) after acquiring him from the Angels, who would chosen to make him a free agent instead. The Angels made it pretty clear – to them, Santana wasn’t worth $12 million for 2013. They would rather allocate that money towards a bigger offer for Zack Greinke, and if that fails, they’ll likely attempt to replace Santana with another free agent.

In other words, the Angels have options. They’re a winning franchise in a major metropolitan city with nice weather, so attracting free agents isn’t a big challenge, so long as they’re offering something close to market value. The Angels can afford to take calculated risks with players, knowing that their pool of potential replacements is pretty large.

That doesn’t describe the Royals at all. They’ve lost 90+ games in eight of the last nine years, and haven’t had a winning season since 2003. They haven’t had back-to-back winning seasons since 1988-1989. A good chunk of the players currently active in MLB weren’t alive the last time the Royals made the playoffs (1985). They play in middle America, and Kansas City isn’t known as a melting pot of society. If the Angels and Royals make a player the same offer, odds are pretty good that most players would choose to the Angels. So, any time a mid-to-small market team with a track record of losing signs a free agent, you always hear that “they had to overpay” in order to get that player.

And while it’s a true statement, it doesn’t mean that these teams should actually do it.

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The Angels had until today to decide whether to exercise Ervin Santana’s $13 million option or pay him a $1 million buyout and make him a free agent. After a miserable 2012 season, it was pretty obvious that they weren’t interested in picking up the option, so today, they shipped him to Kansas City.

The deal, as reported by Ken Rosenthal, is Santana and cash for LHP Brandon Sisk. Given that the Angels could have made Santana go away for $1 million and that Sisk is a 27-year-old reliever who has never pitched in the Majors, it’s a pretty safe bet that the Angels aren’t kicking in much more than that $1 million they would have owed either way. The Royals are almost certainly going to have to pay $11-$12 million of Santana’s salary in 2013.

So, is he worth that kind of cash? Well, maybe.

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I’ll be honest, I wasn’t planning on writing about the Gold Gloves today. They were announced on a Tuesday evening at 10 pm eastern, having been delayed because ESPN2 had a racing program go overtime. Or at least that’s what I gathered on Twitter, because I wasn’t watching them. It seems like these awards are getting the recognition they deserve based on their years of hilariously poor selections.

But, in this afternoon’s chat, there were a lot of Gold Glove related questions. Most of them were outrage based, wanting to know who was the biggest snub or who was the worst recipient of the award. There were jokes about Adam Jones. People are good at making fun of the Gold Gloves, because for a long time, the Gold Gloves have been the most mockable award in sports. At this point, they might as well change the cliche to death, taxes, and making fun of bad Gold Glove selections.

And, of course, there were some bad Gold Glove selections this year, so there has been mocking today. But, perhaps lost in the annual tradition of scorn heaping is the fact that there’s pretty clear evidence that the managers are getting better at this.

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Faced with a $22 million team option for 2013 or paying Jake Peavy a $4 million buyout and letting him hit free agency, the White Sox went with Door #3; re-sign him to an extension that lowers his annual payout but keeps him in Chicago through 2014 and gives them a team option for 2015.

The new deal is worth $29 million guaranteed, with a few million of that likely being a buyout of the 2015 option, so Peavy’s salary each year is probably going to be $13 or $14 million. Given his performance history, that’s a bargain if he stays healthy. Of course, with Peavy, that’s a bigger if than with most.

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With the World Series behind us and free agency officially kicking off on Saturday, the Hot Stove season is now upon us. While it’s unlikely that you’ll see anyone change teams immediately, there are always some free agents that sign pretty quickly, setting the market for others to follow. Before we get too far into evaluating the moves and the contracts of the winter, though, I thought it would be useful to walk through some of the changes that the new CBA has brought on that have a direct impact on free agency and will likely have a trickle down effect on trade evaluations.

Obviously, the biggest change is the overhaul of the free agent compensation system. Gone are the ridiculous Elias ratings that separated players into Type A or B free agents, taking with it the necessary component of offering arbitration to a pending free agent in order to collect that compensation. Instead of offering arbitration, teams must now submit a qualifying offer equal to the average salary of the 125 highest paid players in the game – this year, that works out to $13.3 million. In essence, a team that wants to be compensated for losing a free agent has to be willing to bring that player back for $13 million in 2013, which will greatly reduce the amount of players who get tagged with a compensation requirement.

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When the World Series began last week, the Tigers were considered strong favorites, with 23 of 28 ESPN commentators selecting Detroit as the eventual champion, myself included. After they rolled over the Yankees in four games to win the ALCS, the story became that the Tigers were “built for the postsesaon”, with four strong starting pitchers, two premium power hitters, and the ability to overwhelm their opponents with star power. Just based on their six best players — Justin Verlander, Miguel Cabrera, Prince Fielder, Austin Jackson, Doug Fister, and Max Scherzer — there probably isn’t another team in baseball that can match up with the top end of Detroit’s roster. After all, those six combined for +32.5 WAR in the regular season; 10 teams didn’t match that total with their entire rosters.

From 1-6, the Tigers are probably the best team in baseball. From 7-25, however, there isn’t a team in baseball better than San Francisco, and those 19 players were the guys who made the difference for the Giants in their playoff run.

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The last WPA graph of the 2012 season.

Source: FanGraphs

Congratulations on a fantastic season to the Giants organization, their players, and their fans.