Tonight, the results of the voting for the AL and NL MVPs will be announced. In the NL, Kris Bryant will likely win in a landslide, as he was the league’s best player, played on the league’s best team, and put up big numbers in the categories that get the most attention. Daniel Murphy and Corey Seager also had terrific years, but I’d be surprised if either got more than a handful of first place votes. And when Bryant wins, everyone will mostly nod along in agreement, as the process will have worked to select the right candidate.

In the AL, though, it’s going to be a different story. Mookie Betts is probably going to win, and instead of celebrating the accomplishments of one of the best young players in the game, there is going to be outrage. There is going to be yelling. There is going to be anger and frustration. Twitter is going to be a dumpster fire, even more than usual. Because once again, Mike Trout is going to finish second, and the best (human-sized) player we’ve ever seen is going to say something nice about an inferior player who got rewarded for having better teammates again.

And then there’s going to be the same arguments that got trotted out every year. “It’s the Most Valuable Player Award, not the Best Player Award”, they’ll say. And then people will point out that it’s a distinction without a difference, and back-and-forth things will go until everyone gets distracted by a trade or something. And then we’ll do all this again in another 12 months, since the Angels don’t look like they’re really in any kind of position to put Trout in the playoffs. And round and round we’ll go.

Tonight, we could be celebrating the fact that we’ve had the privilege to watch a guy who has outgrown the Mickey Mantle comparison. We could be talking about the obvious greatness of one of the very best baseball players who has ever lived. We could be collectively thankful that we happen to be alive at a time where everyone gets to watch Mike Trout play, to see what an all-time great in his prime looks like.

But unless things have changed more rapidly than we currently think, we’re going to end up debating the meaning of the word valuable, and congratulating Mookie Betts for having the good fortune to be drafted by a team that has other good players too.

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For the second year in a row, I was given the opportunity to cast a ballot for the National League Cy Young Award. For the second year in a row, this was a very difficult task.

Last year, I had to pick between three aces who had historic seasons, finally settling on Jake Arrieta by the tiniest of margins over Clayton Kershaw and Zack Greinke. This year, no pitcher pitched a full season at the level that those three reached a year ago, so this year’s task was more about picking between good-but-flawed seasons rather than trying to decide which great year was the greatest.

And there was no shortage of options. In the end, I strongly considered eight players for the five spots we were asked to rank, and the guys who ended up at six through eight all had very strong cases for spots on the ballot. While the ordinal-rank system will make it look I saw a real difference between the guys ranked #3-#5 and the three notable omissions, the reality is that there was a six car pile-up at the back end of my ballot, and I think you have to split hairs to pick between the three guys who rounded out my ballot and the three guys who just missed.

But, it is an ordinal rank ballot, so let’s go through the ballot spot-by-spot so I can explain my rationale.

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Yesterday, we looked at the five players I think have the best chance to outperform their expected contracts among this class of free agents. Today, we’re going the other direction, looking at the five players I think represent the biggest chances to be regrettable contracts.

Last year, this was an easier task. With a pretty deep free agent class, it wasn’t that hard to find five guys who looked like overpay candidates, and so I tagged Dexter Fowler, Yovani Gallardo, Justin Upton, Jordan Zimmermann, and Chris Davis as the five guys to avoid. Fowler, of course, was also treated as something of a landmine by the league, and ended up being one of the best bargains of the off-season after re-signing with the Cubs for one year. The other four, though, lived up to landmine status, combining for a grand total of about +6 WAR despite making about $75 million between them.

This year, finding five guys to fit here was tougher. The diminished free agent class means there are just fewer guys who are going to command big deals, and fewer guys getting big contracts means there are fewer guys who will sign albatross deals. So, while we’re still naming five guys to avoid, the magnitude of the problem if a team signs one of these players will likely be a lot smaller; we’re mostly talking overpays of $10 or $20 million or something, not $50 million like some of the guys last year. These guys are probably inefficient signings, but not franchise-killing disasters.

With that said, let’s get to the guys I’d suggest avoiding this winter.

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On Friday, we rolled out our list of the top 50 free agents available this winter, with the crowdsourced contract estimates gathered over the last month, along with my guesses as what players will sign for. In the blurbs on each player, I noted a few guys I thought could be good values this year, but it’s always helpful to get it on the record; that way you can see whether I’m worth listening to.

For instance, last year, I identified Rich Hill, Ben Zobrist, and Steve Pearce as bargains based on the contracts we were expecting them to get, and all performed quite well, justifying my faith in their skills. My other two picks? Wei-Yin Chen and Jason Heyward. Yeah.

To some degree, this is the nature of playing in the free agent pool. Even the guys who look like values come with risk, and many times, the reason I think they may be underpriced is because they have some identifiable flaw. When you’re shopping in this kind of environment, you just have to hope your hits are bigger than your misses, and accept that a fairly high percentage of players you sign will end up not being worth the money. But if you get a Hill or a Zobrist, you can get enough value to make up for some of the signings that don’t work out so well.

So let’s try to find some guys who might be undervalued in this class. As other years, I’ll try to sort them by the magnitude of impact, so an undervalued high-end player will rank higher than a similarly underpriced role player; you’re better off landing a Zobrist than a Pearce, for instance. And I’ve included my contract and the crowdsourced projections, along with their 2017 Steamer forecast, as a reminder of what we think the market might pay them this winter.

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Free agency is here. As you’re well aware by now, it’s not a particularly great crop this year, but there are still some solid players out there to be signed, and some interesting high-risk bets to be made by teams that don’t mind a little (or a lot of) uncertainty. To help you get a sense of what we feel the market might look like this winter, we’ve decided to present the results of the Contract Crowdsourcing project along with my predicted contract values in one big list. We’ve previously done these in separate posts, but this year, we thought it made more sense to collect all the information in one place.

In terms of the numbers, keep in mind that the crowdsourced values are generally a good bit lower than what players actually sign for, because the player signs, most often, with the highest bidder, while the crowdsourced results are an average of what our readers think a player should get. My guesses are generally a bit higher than the crowd’s estimate, though that isn’t true for every player. It’s also worth noting that opt-outs are still likely to be a thing this winter, and they’re basically impossible to price into a series like this, so we didn’t really try. You might see guys sign for less than expected, but with an opt-out, which they’re accepting as part of the value of the deal.

Oh, and before we get to the list, I’d like to suggest that you not get too worked up over the ordinal rank of players, especially outside the top 20. There are ~15 to 20 solid players in this class, and then there are just a whole bunch of flawed role players who could be seen as not too different from one another. There are even some guys who didn’t make this top 50 that you could argue are as valuable some of the guys in the 30-50 range. The difference between players on the back half of the list is pretty small, for the most part, so if you think a guy should be No. 29 instead of No. 42, you’re not going to get much argument from me.

Also, the actual rankings themselves reflect my preference; they aren’t sorted by expected contract, either my guess or the crowd’s. There are some players who are going to get paid a lot more or less than their placement on this list indicates, and we’ll cover them in more detail next week when we look at the potential bargains and landmines this class offers.

With all that said, let’s get to the list.

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Heading into the winter, there has been one thing that’s pretty much universally agreed upon; this is a bad free agent class. After chasing Zack Greinke and David Price last winter, the best arms on the market this winter include the likes of Jeremy Hellickson and Ivan Nova. When it comes to just throwing money at veterans in an attempt to upgrade a team’s roster, the pickings are slim this go around.

Naturally, any time there is a diminished supply, thoughts go towards price inflation. And we see this all the time in our daily lives. Gas pipeline bursts? Gas prices go through the roof. Grower strike in Mexico? Avocados now cost like $20 apiece. We need more avocados, people; the lack of guacamole in my life lately has been a real problem.

So, it’s tempting to look at this winter’s sparse free agent crop and think we’re about to see some truly crazy contracts. After all, teams are still making money hand over fist, and there are only so many ways to spend money in baseball, with the path of least resistance being to hand it over the best free agent that will take it. This kind of landscape leads to tweets like this one, from Ken Rosenthal the other day.

Craziest prediction I’ve heard so far from a GM: Ivan Nova, five years, $75M.

— Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) November 7, 2016

I don’t know, maybe Ivan Nova really will get $75 million. I’d take the under, but Ian Kennedy got $80 million (and an opt-out!) while tied to draft pick compensation, so we can’t really say that anything is completely out of the realm of reason. But, as much as there is a supply shortage of upper-end talent in the free agent market this winter, there is one reason to think that prices might not be as outrageous as some expect. That reason? A reduced supply of free agents also means reduced demand for roster spots to be filled.

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The offseason is upon us. Free agency officially begins tomorrow, as the five day exclusive window ends, and teams and agents are free to begin officially negotiating with anyone they choose. But as we’ve seen in past years, the start of the free agent period doesn’t really set off a signing frenzy; the baseball free agent market moves pretty slowly for most players.

And that’s because teams generally want to kick a bunch of tires before committing to one path, and that tire-kicking includes exploring the trade market, figuring out who is buying and who is selling. The last few years, the league has seen a drastic shortage of sellers, as teams within spitting distance of .500 decided to fancy themselves as contenders thanks to the addition of the second Wild Card and the financial incentives related to making a deep postseason run. The reality of 22 or 23 teams trying to add talent while only six or seven teams were looking to unload veterans made for a challenging trade environment, and resulted in a bunch of teams deciding that free agency was the way to go last year.

This year, though, the free agent market stinks. There just isn’t the kind of impact talent out there that teams are used to being able to throw money at, so the trade market is likely to be even more active than usual. And yet, we might be in a similar position in regards to the ratio of buyers and sellers.

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So that was a pretty enjoyable postseason. A terrific World Series, with one of the best Game Sevens of all-time, wrapped up a month of high-quality baseball, with only a few duds mixed in here and there. As usual, it was a low-scoring month, with cold weather and elite pitchers serving to make offense scarce, but that just makes for more tense, high-leverage innings.

Of course, there was one notable change this year, particularly emphasized because of Cleveland’s run to the championship. More than ever before, managers were willing to use their bullpens without regard for role or inning, with Andrew Miller serving as the platonic ideal of a relief ace. It wasn’t just Miller, though; Cody Allen entered in the middle innings a few times, while Kenley Jansen and Aroldis Chapman both entered in the seventh inning in several outings.

Some of this change was the inevitable rationalization of Major League organizations, as the concept of strict relief usage has never really been the optimal way to run a bullpen in the postseason. That was an idea in need of challenging, and it was only a matter of time before the incentives to win overcame the notion that relievers could only be used in the way they were deployed in the regular season.

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