As noted by Mike Newman and Jim Breen this morning, a recent report out of New York suggested that the Mets would be willing to trade David Wright for Peter Bourjos (and some other stuff). I’m not going to get back into the issue of David Wright’s trade value, but I do want to point out the obvious – Bourjos is a far more valuable asset than Wright, and the Angels would have to be crazy to trade him at all.

Bourjos’ availability is only discussed because the Angels have some kid named Mike Trout, who you may have heard of, and also happens to be a pretty terrific young center fielder. If you view both as true center fielders (and you probably should), then you could argue that the Angels have a surplus of players at the position, and perhaps trading one to get an upgrade at another position would be a decent use of resources.

Of course, that’s only true in a world where center fielders can only play center field, and teams can only have one at a time. In reality, Major League teams need three outfielders per game, and there’s no rule preventing a guy with the ability of a center fielder from playing left field or right field. In fact, with players like Brett Gardner, Carl Crawford, and Ichiro Suzuki establishing themselves as legitimate assets in corner outfield spots over the last decade, teams have become more and more open to the value of having multiple center fielders playing side by side.

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For those of you who have been reading sabermetrically inclined blogs for the past five years or so, you’ve probably come across a discussion of whether a player’s value is linear or exponential – in other words, is each extra win added more valuable than the one that came before it? I wrote about this here about nine months ago, in fact, but given the discussion (uproar?) that has arisen over yesterday’s post on the potential rewards of trading Tim Lincecum, it’s probably time to talk about it again.

The goal of every team is obviously to get as much production as possible out of their roster. Each team is essentially working towards this goal with two constraints – a budget constraint and a roster constraint. Teams can only spend up to a certain figure on their total payroll, and they can only have 25 players on their team at one time. Within those limits, each team – one that is trying to contend, anyway – tries to maximize production from the roster as a whole.

The discussion of whether a player’s value is linear (all wins are worth about the same amount) or exponential (each additional win added by a player is worth more than than the one before it) essentially is born out of the roster constraint. Since a team has a finite number of spots to hand out, getting consolidated value creates a higher potential maximum than if everyone on the team was of equal value. If you have a +5 win player and a +0 win player, you can theoretically replace the +0 win guy and end up in a better position than if you have two +2.5 win players who you don’t really want to replace.

This idea certainly has merit, and given that premium players give teams higher potential production from the roster as a whole, it’s natural to think that the market would account for the value of the scarcity of superstars in this way. However, in reality, it doesn’t really work that way.

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With CC Sabathia re-signing in New York, this winter’s crop of free agent pitchers can be safely described as not overly exciting. C.J. Wilson is the only thing resembling a front-line starter, and after his shaky performance in October, it doesn’t seem like anyone is in a hurry to make him their new ace. And yet, despite the lack of supply, there appears to be strong demand for starting pitching this winter – the Yankees are definitely looking for rotation help, the Red Sox might need two starting pitchers before all is said and done, and the Rangers may need to replace Wilson if he leaves. The big spenders are all looking to substantially upgrade their rotations, and any team who decided to make a front-line pitcher available would be able to negotiate from a point of significant leverage.

Enter the Giants. Their rotation is the clear strength of their team, but an inept offense kept them from repeating as World Series champions last year. While their hurlers are terrific, they have a lot of work to do on the position player side of things, and it’s unclear whether they’ve got enough money to spend this winter to make the necessary upgrades in a single off-season. They owe around $82 million to just eight contracted players for 2012 – Barry Zito, Matt Cain, Aaron Rowand, Aubrey Huff, Brian Wilson, Freddy Sanchez, Javier Lopez, and Jeremy Affeldt – and are looking another $30 to $35 million in payouts in arbitration if they bring back most of the guys who they should probably want to return. Without a significant addition, their payroll looks to be about $115 million, giving them about $10 million to spend to get to the expected $125 million mark.

Can the Giants upgrade their roster enough to make themselves contenders again with that little flexibility this winter? Maybe, if Brandon Belt and Buster Posey come back as gangbusters next year and the Giants hit a home run on whichever free agent outfielder they sign, but it’s a path full of risk. So, instead, perhaps they should explore the never-mentioned alternative – trade Tim Lincecum.

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Earlier this afternoon, Patrick Newman presented you with some Yu Darvish Facts, while Eno Sarris broke down the differences between Darvish and Daisuke Matsuzaka. I’m finishing off Yu Darvish Day here at FanGraphs, but I’m actually not going to write all that much about Darvish specifically.

Instead, I want to talk about Darvish’s price. Over the last few weeks, there’s been a lot of speculation about what kind of money it might take to obtain his services. Last week, Tim Dierkes of MLBTradeRumors.com polled five agents and a team executive on their expectations of Darvish’s cost, and they came in with an average of a $45 million posting fee followed by a “five or six year contract in the $72-$75 million range.”

I’m not here to say that those sources are incorrect, but I will say this – any team willing to pay that much money to acquire Yu Darvish is kind of crazy.

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The 2011 season is officially over, so today, we kick off our coverage of the Hot Stove League. Over the next few months, we’ll have coverage of every transaction, breakdowns of how each move will impact the various teams going forward, and analysis of the market as a whole.

We begin our off-season coverage with a look at the 50 best available free agents. Obviously, any ranking is going to be subjective in nature, and I’m sure that there will be disagreements in placement, but overall, it looks to be me like there are some pretty distinct tiers that the players fall into.

This is a pretty top heavy group, with a big five who should all land pretty large deals, and then a significant drop-off after you get past those guys. There’s a half dozen or so good players beyond them, and then you get into guys who can fill a hole but aren’t really difference makers. Then, it’s 10 guys you want on your team but shouldn’t pay an arm and a leg to acquire, followed by 20 useful players who shouldn’t be counted on as regulars but could be useful if used correctly. I’ve used these breaks to show where I think each respective player fits, but if you think he should be higher or lower within that tier, I probably won’t argue with you.

Also, I’ve included each player’s WAR total for the prior three seasons. One of the regular traps in free agency is paying for a player’s most recent performance and ignoring prior history, so using 2009-2011 data will help put some context into what they’ve done over a larger sample. It’s not perfect, of course, as most recent data is most important, but in most cases the three year window gives us a better view of a player’s true talent level than just looking at what he did in 2011.

Oh, and one last thing before we get to the list – using the Custom Player List feature on the leaderboards, we’ve created a Sortable Free Agent Leaderboard for everyone to use. Now you can compare free agents within specific positions, over various periods of time, or check out their data on a specific split. Want to know which free agent outfielders performed the best against LHPs from 2006-2011? Now you can.

The report will soon be added to the leaderboards, where you’ll always be able to just click on it to get an updated list of free agents. We’ll maintain that list all winter so you’ll always be able to see who is still available and how they compare to their peers still on the market. The link above will stay static, however, so you can refer back to that one to see the market as it is today.

Now, without further ado, our top 50 free agents of the winter.

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You are the champions of baseball, and you just completed one of the most miraculous comebacks in the history of sports.

Source: FanGraphs

The last day of the regular season was perhaps the best evening of baseball I’ve ever seen. It was the kind of unbelievable night that justifies the “once in a lifetime” tag. And yet, exactly one month later, we’re sitting here recovering from a World Series game that might just have been the most exciting game in the history of the sport.

There were 108 plays in last night’s game – 46 of those occurred when the leverage index was at least 1.50. Perhaps more staggeringly, there were 18 plays where the LI was above 3.00 and 11 of those came with an LI of 4.00 or higher. When you think about some of the great World Series games of all time, we think of specific moments – Kirk Gibson‘s home run in 1988, Joe Carter‘s in 1993, Luis Gonzalez’s bloop single in 2001 – but most of those were isolated instances within that game. Those games offered one great, unbelievable moment – last night offered us about a dozen of them.

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