I legitimately have no idea what to expect for Juan Uribe’s next contract. The results should be pretty interesting.

When it was announced that the A’s had won the bidding for Japanese RHP Hisashi Iwakuma, there were generally two reactions:

1. Who knew the A’s had any money?

2. Why are they spending it on a pitcher, when their starters had the lowest ERA in baseball last year?

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While it has generally been assumed that Adrian Gonzalez won’t be in San Diego much longer, the Padres front office confirmed these beliefs with some public comments last week, stating that Gonzalez’s asking price was not something they could afford and suggesting they would listen to trade offers for their star first baseman this winter. The question is no longer whether the team will trade Gonzalez – it is simply a matter of when. For Jed Hoyer, the biggest decision they will make all winter is whether to start the season with Gonzalez at first base. Should they?

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Over the last two days, two American League teams have had to make decisions about their aging yet productive designated hitters. The Rangers held a $9 million option on Vladimir Guerrero, while the Red Sox had a $12.5 million option on David Ortiz. Boston decided to pay Ortiz, while the Rangers chose to let Guerrero become a free agent. Why the different decisions?

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The overwhelming expectation is that Cliff Lee will end up as a Yankee. They have the resources to pay him more than anyone else, the need for him in their rotation, and they expressed heavy interest in acquiring him in July, even going so far as to include Jesus Montero in their offer. It is no secret that they plan to offer him a lot of money to come to New York.

What if he doesn’t take it?

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Well, the market might be expecting inflation, but it doesn’t seem like FanGraphs readers are. The results for Cliff Lee’s contract estimate is in, and it’s quite a bit lower than I expected.

Average length: 5.37 years
Average salary: $20.73 million

Median length: 5 years
Median salary: $21 million

Standard deviation, length: 0.84 years
Standard deviation, salary: $2.84 million

$105 million over five years is a lot of money, no doubt. Only CC Sabathia and Johan Santana would make more per season among starting pitchers, and both signed their deals with New York teams before the economic downturn took hold. But, still, it seems light for the best player on the market, especially when the Yankees are known to be among his most serious suitors.

A year ago, John Lackey got $83 million over five years from the Red Sox, without the Yankees being very involved in the bidding. Is Cliff Lee, who has put up +20.8 WAR over the last three years, really only worth a 20 percent premium over Lackey, who had put up 11.8 WAR in the three years preceding his free agency?

I’m just speculating here, since we didn’t have a box indicating which team you thought he was going to sign with, but I’m guessing that there’s a decent block of voters who are expecting Lee to spurn the Yankees, and they submitted lower figures to account for him signing with Texas or another club without unlimited financial resources. If you took the Yankees out of the picture, then I could see 5/105 as a realistic figure for what he might get from the Rangers.

I’d be shocked if he wasn’t offered more than that by New York, though. In the end, I’m guessing whoever lands him will have to pony up more than this expectation. I’d guess he’ll end up somewhere closer to $140 million over six years. $105 million over five would be a relative bargain.

The big one. This should be interesting. You knoow the drill.

We are one day into baseball’s offseason, but teams and players have been making decisions on the expected market valuations of the winter for a couple of weeks now. It’s early, but we’ve got some interesting data points to look at when trying to ascertain what MLB clubs think salary inflation will be like this winter, after several years of deflation or stagnation.

The decisions that look like they may give some insights into the expectations of what players will cost this winter.

Dodgers sign Ted Lilly to a 3-year, $33 million contract.
Reds exercise Bronson Arroyo’s $11 million option.
Tigers sign Brandon Inge to a 2-year, $11.5 million contract.
Twins exercise Jason Kubel’s $5.25 million option.

These four moves are the most significant that we’ve seen to date, and they all point in a similar direction – these four teams all seem to believe that we’re in for some inflation this winter.

Ted Lilly is pretty comparable to Randy Wolf, in that both are soft-tossing lefties who pitched well in Los Angeles. After wisely deciding to let Wolf leave, however, the Dodgers ponied up for Lilly, paying a bit of a premium to keep him over what Wolf got from Milwaukee last winter.

Bronson Arroyo is a useful innings eater, but it would be hard to argue that he’s appreciably better than Joel Pineiro, who got just $16 million over two years as a free agent last winter. While the commitment is shorter in term, the difference in per-season salary is significant.

Inge doesn’t have a great comparison from last winter’s class, but overall, last year’s market price for a starting infielder seemed to be around $6 million per year. Placido Polanco, Marco Scutaro, Mark DeRosa, Freddy Sanchez, and Miguel Tejada all signed deals in that range. Inge, coming off a worse season than almost everyone in that group, got essentially the same number for two years with a team option for a third.

And finally, there’s the Kubel decision, which is probably the most curious of the bunch. Despite wanting to retain the services of Jim Thome, the Twins were willing to pay $5 million to keep Kubel on the roster, despite a down season and no obvious starting position on the 2011 team. Given how the market for designated hitters cratered last winter, with good players having to settle for $5 to $7 million on a one-year deal, the Twins decision to give Kubel a similar amount is either a miscalculation of his value or the priced-in expectation of coming inflation.

Until we see teams start to bid openly for players, we won’t really know what the going rate for talent is this winter. Early returns, however, suggest that we may be in for a pricing increase.

The San Francisco Giants are the 2010 World Series Champions, and they won in impressive fashion. They went 11-4 in the postseason, handling teams easily even while maintaining the identity of an underdog. While hindsight is 20/20, perhaps they shouldn’t have been underdogs – this team really was one of the best in baseball all year.

In total team WAR, the Giants ranked 4th at +47.4 wins. Our replacement level is set at about 48.5 wins, so that number makes the Giants something like a team that deserved to win 95 games this year. They had more total team WAR than the Rangers, Yankees, or Phillies, and the roster they brought into October was the best version of any they had put together all year.

If they had started the year with Buster Posey at catcher, Pat Burrell and Cody Ross on the team, and Madison Bumgarner in the rotation, they would have almost certainly finished better than their final 92-70 record. That was a ~95 or so win team that ran over the Braves, Phillies, and Rangers.

While a few of the guys on the team were discards from other organizations who the Giants picked up on the cheap, those guys surrounded a core of extremely good players: Posey, Tim Lincecum, and Brian Wilson are all among the best in the game at what they do. Getting career years from role players like Andres Torres and Aubrey Huff certainly was a huge part of why the Giants won, but those guys were more exception than rule. By and large, the Giants collected a bunch of quality role players who did their jobs well and didn’t prevent the legitimate stars on the team from carrying them to a championship.

Were the Giants the best team in baseball? I don’t know, but they were certainly in the discussion, and they made a pretty strong case the last couple of months of the season. Brian Sabean should be proud of his guys for playing well in October, but he should also be proud of his staff for putting together a roster that could contend. The Giants may have been underdogs, but only because we didn’t give them enough credit in the first place. They were a championship caliber team, and they proved it on the field.