Last year, two of the most notable free agent signings of the winter were inexplicably terrible. Carl Crawford went from being an All-Star to a replacement level scrub, while Adam Dunn went from productive slugger to the worst hitter in baseball – well, almost – Orlando Cabrera just barely edged him out. Obviously, Crawford and Dunn are about as different as any two players in baseball, as Crawford is a speed-based gap hitter who produces a lot of value with his glove, while Dunn is a walks-and-homers guy who rightfully spent the year as a DH.

Neither player had shown any real sign that their skills were regressing, and while Dunn’s struggles could have just been a guy with old-player-skills getting old early, Crawford was 29 and in his athletic prime. It’s possible that either or both could bounce back and resume their previous levels of production, but their struggles got me wondering about whether there are certain player types that are more prone to this kind of out-of-nowhere collapse of production.

In order to look at this a little closer, I polled our FanGraphs staff looking for guys who were quality players for multiple years and then just turned into a pumpkin overnight. Because I was looking for guys whose decline wasn’t easily explainable, we’re omitting players who had significant injuries or were too far on the wrong side of 30 – this isn’t so much a question about aging curves or the effects of a body breaking down as it is a question of whether players who derive value from a certain type of performance are more likely to just see that value dry up overnight. We’re also only looking at position players, because pitchers are their own complicated story with a totally different mix of problems.

Here’s the list of guys that we came up with last night – it’s not a comprehensive list, and I’m hopeful you guys will add more names to the pile, but it’s a decent start.

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Last week, the Marlins made an offer to every free agent with a pulse. At the heart of their “Sign Everyone!” plan is Jose Reyes, who reportedly received a six year, $90 million offer to move to Miami. While this was just an initial offer and Reyes will likely extract a bit more from whoever ends up signing him, it seems likely that he’s going to end up getting significantly less than Carl Crawford received from the Red Sox last winter.

That seems a little odd to me, given that they’re almost identical players.

Source: FanGraphs — Carl Crawford, Jose Reyes

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With a relatively weak free agent pitching market, more and more teams are turning to the trade market to try and upgrade their rotations this winter. The White Sox have taken note of this shortage and inserted themselves as sellers of pitching, and are rumored to be taking offers for both Gavin Floyd and John Danks. With Kenny Williams talking about rebuilding, moving one or both could make some sense, as Danks is a free agent after the 2012 season and Floyd is only under team control for two more seasons.

Despite being under contract for one fewer year, however, Danks has proven to be the hot name on the market over the last week. Jon Paul Morosi reported that the Rangers are interested in a reunion, which Jon Heyman also reported and noted that Danks would be “very popular”. On Saturday, Keith Law tweeted that he thought Danks would get more than C.J. Wilson if he was a free agent this winter.

Clearly, Danks’ skillset as a quality young pitcher is in demand, and it seems likely that someone will pay a significant price to acquire his services for 2012. However, I’d like to suggest that if someone wants the package that Danks can bring to the table, they could save themselves the hassle of giving up talent and just sign Edwin Jackson instead.

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During a discussion with reporters on Wednesday, Brian Cashman talked about the budget that he was operating under. Or perhaps more specifically, the lack of a fixed budget.

“There’s always the target area (for the payroll),” Cashman said. “But obviously we’ve always been in the position thankfully that depending on what becomes available, how it looks, what our current circumstances are, if we’re quote unquote in trouble, we have an ownership that’s receptive to having conversations obviously regarding that. I’ll give you an example.

“Like last year, Russell Martin became available so we stretched to make that work. There wasn’t an intention there. But that was something that he allowed me to do a little bit more on because … we weren’t expecting that. We were going to go with the young catchers. But when he became non-tendered, and if we could get a deal at a certain amount, it took a lot of conversations with Hal Steinbrenner. He allowed that to happen and it was a real big benefit for us and we appreciate that.

“So you have those give and takes that take place. Sometimes it’s no, and sometimes it’s yes, but obviously the flexibility, as you already know, there’s no set number where you can’t exceed it that obviously exists in other environments.”

Not that this is any real surprise, but the Yankees don’t have a payroll limit, they have a “target area”. Ownership probably wouldn’t go for a $300 million payroll, but as long as Cashman can make a compelling case that there’s value to be had in spending a bit more money, he has the ability to dip into an essentially unlimited pool of resources.

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If there’s one truism in baseball that rings more true than all the others, it is probably that pitchers are just remarkably inconsistent. Even putting injuries aside, you have things like Ryan Vogelsong coming out of nowhere to solidify the Giants rotation or Javier Vazquez just randomly vacillating between one of the league’s best pitchers and serving as a batting practice machine. No matter whether you look at ERA or xFIP, the reality is that predicting how a given pitcher will do going forward is challenging.

So, it’s understandable why Mark Buehrle is such an attractive free agent this winter. He’s thrown 200+ innings in every season since 2001 and he’s produced remarkably similar results in each year since coming to the big leagues. Here are his ERA- for each year of his career:

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While our writing here on FanGraphs normally revolves around news and transactions related to the Major League clubs, I wanted to take a quick break today and highlight two items that are probably of interest to people who read FanGraphs. Or, at least, are of interest to me, and so I’m choosing to share them with you here.

On Monday, MLB Network rolled out a new show hosted by Brian Kenny called Clubhouse Confidential. The show billed itself as an analytical take on the day’s news and the happenings in the sport, and the description of the show mentioned that it would involve contributions from the sabermetric community. Given that I’ve always enjoyed Kenny’s work and that this was something of a new venture, I was interested enough to watch the first couple of episodes on Monday and Tuesday.

So far, I have to say that I’ve been pleasantly surprised with how well the show has been produced. Since we’re at the start of the off-season and there isn’t a ton of news to report on just yet, the show centered around a different central topic each day, and I thought both were interesting and well-handled.

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From 2008 to 2011, Jonathan Sanchez has the fourth highest strikeout rate (24.1%) of any starting pitcher in baseball (500 IP minimum), ranking behind only Tim Lincecum, Clayton Kershaw, and Yovani Gallardo. Given this ability to consistently miss bats, Sanchez is often lauded as a pitcher with a lot of untapped potential. Pitchers who can post those kinds of strikeout rates are often quite successful, and if Sanchez could just refine the other parts of his game, he looks like he could turn into a dominant starting pitcher.

There’s just one problem – Sanchez isn’t even close to refining those other parts of his game, and we simply can’t ignore that he’s a massively flawed pitcher. Over the same time period (and again, 500 inning minimum), no starting pitcher has posted a worse walk rate than Sanchez’s 12.3% mark, and it’s not even all that close. The next worst mark is Gio Gonzalez, more than a full percentage point behind, and he is then followed closely by Barry Zito.

Sanchez’s high walk and high strikeout rates are the product of his propensity for pitching up in the strike zone, where contact is less frequent but so is the likelihood of getting a called strike. By pitching up in the zone, Sanchez is essentially choosing a strategy that increases the likelihood of deep counts, thus increasing both his walk and strikeout rates. Unlike some other high walk/high strikeout pitchers who simply need to improve their command of premium stuff, Sanchez is getting his whiffs through location, and if he began to throw more strikes, he’d likely see a significant drop in his strikeout rate as well.

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