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Ben Zobrist has been something of a polarizing figure in the game for seven years now. Ever since his 2009 breakout — where a 28 year old with -0.4 career WAR put up an +8.6 WAR season — his place among the game’s best players has been a point of discussion, with some pretty wide ranging opinions regarding his value. To the sabermetric community, he was a legitimate superstar, putting up +35 WAR over a six year stretch, coming in behind only Miguel Cabrera among position players in MLB during that time. To those who evaluate players more by their physical tools and traditional performance markers, Zobrist was a good player but an archetype of the guy overrated by FanGraphs-style analysis, with too much emphasis placed on his defense and baserunning and not enough on his moderate power.

During those six years where he graded out as an elite performer by WAR, he only made the All-Star team twice, and his only top 10 MVP finish was in 2009, the year he led the majors in WAR; he finished 8th on AL ballot that year, and his next-best MVP finish put him 16th. Zobrist is about as close to a litmus test as you’re going to find for how much emphasis someone puts on metrics versus tools.

This winter, we’re finally going to get to see how the market evaluates Zobrist’s abilities, but because he signed an extension with Tampa Bay that sold a few free agent years in exchange for some guaranteed income, we still won’t really get to find out what the market thought of peak-Zobrist. Instead, Jason Heyward is taking the role of being the defense-and-baserunning superstar this off-season, and Zobrist’s market will give us more of an idea of how teams see the late-career aging curve in the post-PED era.

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On Tuesday, I looked at five free agents who I think have a chance to provide some positive value for the team that signs them, based on our expectations of what the market will pay out this winter. Today, we’re going to look at the flip side of that coin, and I’ll identify five players who I think pose the highest risk of ending up as expensive disappointments.

Of course, based on my recent suggestions, maybe teams should just sign all of these guys. Last year, I warned teams off of Max Scherzer, Nelson Cruz, and Edinson Volquez, all of whom went on to have one of the best years of their careers. At least I got Victor Martinez right, and I did a little better a couple of years ago, but even Curtis Granderson’s appearance on that list is a reminder that these guys aren’t fated for disaster. Or that I’m an idiot, depending on your interpretation.

But for various reasons, I’m still skeptical of the five players listed below, and wouldn’t want to approach their expected market price this winter.

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Congratulations to Jake Arrieta, who was just named the National League Cy Young Award winner, edging out Clayton Kershaw and Zack Greinke in one of the best Cy Young races in baseball history. Gerrit Cole and Max Scherzer rounded out the top five in the voting, just released over at BBWAA.com.

Back in mid-August, I was informed that I had been chosen to vote on the Cy Young Award in the National League this year; it would be my first time getting to vote on the pitcher awards after being an MVP and Manager of the Year voter last year. As a voter, I feel an obligation to the players to try and acquire as much information as I can in order to make the most educated decision possible, and so I spent the next six weeks working my way through various ideas and philosophies about how to evaluate a pitcher’s performance.

About a week after receiving the ballot, I wrote a piece exploring the idea of using a pitcher’s hitting performance as a variable in deciding the Cy Young Award, and I asked a lot of people in the game whom I respect about their views on that issue. A month later, I worked through some of my thoughts on how to best separate out a catcher’s value from his pitchers’ results, and then the next day, I looked at some other factors mentioned by the commenters, including the potential value of consistency.

In writing those pieces, I wanted to lay some groundwork for how I was attempting to put this puzzle together, because I knew that when the time came to actually show my ballot, no one was going to read a 5,000 word treatise on the complexity of evaluating pitchers with the tools we currently have available. But given the abundance of worthy candidates this year, even that kind of article probably wouldn’t provide enough room to lay out the case for each of the pitchers who had deserving years. In my view, there were three guys who all had seasons that would be easy choices for a Cy Young Award in a normal year, and picking between them was basically an impossible task.

While I eventually had to settle on a 1-5 order, a more realistic assessment of my view is that I turned in ballot with #1A, #1B, #1C, #4, and #5. As I write this, I don’t actually know who is going to win, and I’m not going to feel the wrong guy won no matter how the top three end up being ordered. You can make a strong case for any of them, and the gaps between them are so slight that I don’t think we should be arguing with significant conviction that there is a right answer. There are three deserving Cy Young winners in the National League this year, and I only wish there was some mechanism in place where I could have voted for a tie.

But, at the end of the day, we were asked to split hairs and determine an order. So, now that the voting has been revealed, here is a look at how I filled out my ballot, with some brief overviews of the reasoning behind those decisions. And by brief overview, I mean there are another 2,500 words to this post, but I left out some discussion of things I looked at that ended up not having a huge impact on my decision, such as quality of opposition, park factor adjustments beyond what is already calculated, and which umpires they pitched to, among other things. I’ve tried to lay out my thoughts as coherently as possible while also keeping this post on the shorter side of War and Peace. With that said, on to the ballot itself.

One of the best young pitchers in baseball, Cole turned into a dominating #1 starter this year, and when I began the process, I assumed I’d have him somewhere on my ballot. In the end, though, he fell just short, coming in at the sixth spot on a ballot with only five openings. While his numbers were excellent, a few small flaws in his resume conspired to push him just outside the top five.

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Last week, MLB saw two of their first big trades of the winter, as both the Red Sox and Angels gave up significant pieces of their farm system to acquire upgrades to their big league roster; Boston acquired closer Craig Kimbrel, while Anaheim landed shortstop Andrelton Simmons. In both cases, the acquisitions are not rentals, as Kimbrel is signed for two more years with a team option for a third, while Simmons is under contract through the 2020 season. To get high-quality players with multiple years of team control, both teams had to give up significant prospects from their farm system.

For the Red Sox, that meant parting with a pair of consensus Top 100 prospects in outfielder Manny Margot and shortstop Javier Guerra, along with a couple of lower tier add-ons. For the Angels, the cost was left-handed pitcher Sean Newcomb, the team’s first round pick in the 2014 draft and the most coveted player they had in the minor leagues; they also sent along with a second pitching prospect and shortstop Erick Aybar, who had been their everyday player at the position for the last seven years.

Both teams surrendered talent they would rather have kept, but felt strongly enough about the players they were receiving to make the trades anyway. And both teams did get very good players, among the best at their respective positions. But in terms of what these deals did to the remains of their respective farm systems, the situations could not be more different.

In making the Kimbrel deal, Dombrowski referenced the Red Sox loaded farm system, which has regularly been seen as one of the best in baseball.

“You don’t ever like to give up young talent,” Dombrowski said. “We think they’re very talented individuals. But I do think that (because of) the good job that the people at player development, scouting, international operations have done, we do have some depth at those positions. And we do have some other quality young players that we were asked about repeatedly.”

Those quality young players Dombrowski is referring to? They are almost certainly Mookie Betts and Xander Bogaerts, the team’s pair of 23-year-old big league cornerstones, who happen to play center field and shortstop, respectively, the same positions that Margot and Guerra are playing in the minor leagues. With those positions locked down at the Major League level for the foreseeable future, Margot and Guerra were seen as somewhat extraneous to the team’s long-term plans, and were likely going to be traded at some point. The primary justification for paying a very high price for Kimbrel is that the team’s depth of prospects allowed them to make a trade like this, because even after surrendering good young talent, they have other good young talent to help them keep their future looking bright.

The Angels are in a very different situation; Newcomb was essentially their only prospect of significance, now that Andrew Heaney has too much time in the majors to qualify as a prospect. Roberto Baldoquin, the team’s top-rated prospect after Heaney and Newcomb heading into the 2015 season, just hit a meager .235/.266/.294 in A-ball, to give you some idea of the organization’s current crop of hitting prospect. With Newcomb, the team’s farm system would have been rated as one of the worst in baseball; without him, it unquestionably is so.

So, relative to their stock of future utility to the organization, the Angels probably gave up a greater percentage of their inventory than the Red Sox did, even though it’s pretty clear the package San Diego got for Kimbrel is a better one than the Braves got for Simmons. But even though Newcomb had more utility to his own organization than Margot or Guerra did, I can’t agree with the notion that highly talented prospects should be viewed as having significantly diminished value to an organization simply because of the presence of other highly talented players, even other talented players at the same position.

Read the rest on Just a Bit Outside.

While the early off-season has mostly been driven by trades — with Jerry Dipoto seemingly involved in about 80% of them — we’re reaching the point of the winter where we should expect to start seeing some free agents come off the board. Teams have had a few weeks to negotiate with various options, narrow down who might actually be a viable acquisition, and pick a direction in which to head. While there’s often a lot of activity at the winter meetings, a number of significant free agents likely won’t wait three more weeks before they pick their next home, and so I’d expect a few big dominos to start falling into place relatively soon.

So, with that background, it’s time for my annual list of free agent recommendations. For the last few years I’ve picked through the crop of free agents and selected a handful of players I think would be good values at the prices that we expect players to sign for, and as you’d expect, looking back at those recommendations is a pretty mixed bag. Teams following my suggestions maybe would have landed some bargains in Francisco Liriano, Scott Kazmir, and Russell Martin, but they also would have been stuck with Omar Infante, Nick Swisher, and Melvin Upton. Picking free agents is fraught with risk, and it’s not like we have it all figured out over here.

But as is the case every year, there are some guys that I think would be worth pursuing, as my perception of their value is higher than what we think the market is going to give them. In some cases, MLB teams might agree with me and drive up the bidding to a reasonable point — Brian McCann a few years ago, for instance, when the crowd’s estimate proved way too low — but some of these guys will likely sign a diminished price due to some flaws that teams discount more heavily than I do. In my view, these are the guys who are present the best opportunity for upside value in this free agent class.

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Last night, the Braves traded Andrelton Simmons to the Angels for Erick Aybar and a couple of pitching prospects. While it’s likely that Atlanta’s staff made this deal primarily to acquire Sean Newcomb, a big left-hander with high-end stuff and strikeout rates to match, I think it’s fair to categorize this return as surprisingly light. Newcomb is brimming with upside, but he’s still a pitching prospect who hasn’t yet figured out how to throw strikes on a regular basis, and has made all of seven starts above A-ball. He could figure things out and become an ace, or he could go the Archie Bradley path, where the stuff declines before the command gets better, and the Braves could end up with little to show for trading away the best defensive player on the planet.

But therein lies the rub. While everyone agrees that Simmons is a great defensive player, the Braves don’t appear particularly interested in betting on elite defenders aging particularly well. They balked at Jason Heyward’s salary requests in long-term negotiations, then traded him last winter, rather than keeping a 25 year old star outfielder around as a core building block. Now, for the second time in as many years, the Braves have traded elite defense in a young player for pitching potential, seemingly believing that it is easier to find a good defender with offensive question marks than a power arm who racks up strikeouts.

And as I noted yesterday, there might be some logic to that idea, given that there’s evidence that defensive skills peak earlier than offensive skills. The athleticism that allows a player to make plays that his peers can’t make is more vital for defensive value than hitting skills, and it’s possible (and probably even likely) that the Braves saw the potential for Simmons to lose value in the near future, if his defensive value dipped and his offense didn’t improve to offset the decline. So, it’s probably worth exploring how previous elite defenders have aged, and see if we can find support for the idea that the Braves were selling high before a coming decline.

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Last night, Jonah Keri got the baseball world buzzing with a series of tweets.

Source: #Braves deep in talks with NL West team about possible trade.

— Jonah Keri (@jonahkeri) November 12, 2015

Source: #Braves trade talks with NL West team revolve around Andrelton Simmons.

— Jonah Keri (@jonahkeri) November 12, 2015

While we’ve seen a few deals struck already, Andrelton Simmons going west would be qualify as a pretty significant move, and so immediately, other reporters started checking in to see who the unidentified NL West club could be.

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While it’s not going down as any kind of blockbuster, the Twins and Yankees struck a deal today, with Minnesota sending outfielder Aaron Hicks to the Yankees for catcher JR Murphy.

Hicks, a former highly though of prospect, finally showed some signs of life in 2015, putting up +1.5 WAR in 97 games after getting called back up from Triple-A. The improvement primarily came from his ability to avoid strikeouts, which looks to be potentially caused by a new-found willingness to swing at pitches in the strike zone; his in-zone swing rate jumped to 66%, significantly higher than it had been in his first two runs through the big leagues. With enough power to not just be a slap hitter and a good enough eye to draw some walks, Hicks profiles as something like a league average hitter going forward; Steamer projects him for a 99 wRC+ in 2016.

With some baserunning value and decent enough defense in center field, that makes Hicks a potentially interesting piece. In fact, if you look at the Steamer600 projections, where playing time is equalized for all players, you’ll note that Hicks looks like the kind of outfielder the Yankees have shown affinity for.

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