With free agency now officially underway, we’ve reached the point in the off-season where baseball scribes roll out our annual warning to Major League teams: DON’T DO IT! The history of the $100 million contract is served up as a reminder that these mega-contracts have often turned out poorly, with names like Mike Hampton and Carl Crawford trotted out as reminders that big pricey off-season additions don’t come with any kind of guarantee of success. Because most free agents reach the open market around (or after) their 30th birthday, teams are often signing players whose best days are behind them, and end up paying big money to players who are in decline before they even put their new uniforms on.

The newest entry in the annual reminder of big contract risk comes from Will Leitch over at Sports on Earth. In his piece on Tuesday, Leitch notes that players who have been paid an annual average value of $20 million or more during their long-term deals have fared particularly poorly of late.

That is the dirty secret of every free-agent season: Almost every long-term deal that will be signed will be bad. In FanGraphs’ rankings over the summer of the worst five contracts, all five were massive free agency “victories” for the team that signed them, all within the past three years. These deals are terrible business. I know this is exciting. I know we can’t wait to talk about them all. I know some long-term deals even work out (though the only one immediately coming to mind is Matt Holliday). There are 34 players — not counting the free agents signing new deals — who will be making $20 million or more in 2016. The majority of them will absolutely not be worth it.

Leitch goes on to note that just eight of the 34 players scheduled to make $20+ million next year are “boons” to their franchise, while another eight are “up in the air”, leaving 16 as “drains”, including several players who might not even have jobs next year if it weren’t for their guaranteed contracts. It’s unquestionably true that a lot of these major signings in recent years have gone poorly, and undoubtedly, many of the teams who will be celebrating their new acquisitions over the next few months will end up wishing they’d been outbid instead.

But while I agree with Leitch’s overarching point about free agency being an inefficient way to build a roster, I think there are a couple of reasonable counters to his claims. Let’s attempt them.

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If you’re a team looking to add a significant piece to your roster, this is a pretty great winter to be a buyer. Unlike most recent free agent crops, this group of available players boasts both legitimately elite players and a host of quality mid-tier options. Especially for teams looking for starting pitching or outfield help, the supply of talent is unlike anything we’ve seen in a while, since the boom of early-career extensions has served to keep a lot of the game’s best players from reaching the open market.

Of course, supply and price are often inversely correlated, so when there’s a lot of talent available, it’s easy to conclude that teams will price-shop across multiple options, and we might see less inflation this year than we have in previous years. However, in this case, I don’t know that the increased supply of talent is actually going to lead a stagnation in salary inflation; in fact, I think there are some reasons to believe that we may see some significant spending, above and beyond what is already expected, by MLB teams this winter.

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Four days. It took MLB all of four days to bring us the first transaction of the off-season, as the Mariners and Rays got together on a six player trade that ships some interesting players in both directions. The full trade, as announced on Thursday evening.

Tampa Bay receives:

SS Brad Miller
1B Logan Morrison
RHP Danny Farquhar

Seattle receives:

RHP Nate Karns
OF Boog Powell
LHP C.J. Riefenhauser

While this is a six player deal, for simplicity, we can mostly break this down into three one-for-ones.

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Yesterday, Carson Cistulli revealed the results of our Contract Crowdsourcing project, listing the aggregate salary projected for 82 different free agents this winter. The project is a very useful tool to get an understanding of what a broad spectrum of perspectives see as fair market value, but the nature of aggregation means that the totals — especially on the high-end — will almost always end up being a bit lower than what the players actually sign for. After all, players don’t sign for the median value of all of their offers; they take the highest one, in most cases.

So, as a follow-up, I’ve put together my predictions for the 50 largest free agent contracts signed this winter. I did this last year too, though I took some pretty big wild guesses when it came to putting players and potential teams together, so some of my guesses look pretty ridiculous in hindsight. I did get a few contract terms right, and managed to match the Yankees with Chase Headley and had the Tigers re-signing Victor Martinez, but we’ll see if we can clear last year’s pretty low bar.

Obviously, this is mostly just for fun, since predicting what teams will do in advance is very difficult. But it also serves as a chance to talk about what I think teams may do in general this winter, even if the specific players end up going elsewhere. As we did last year, we’ll go team by team, then put the full table of contracts at the end. Just for fun (or because that’s how I sorted the list in Excel), we’ll go in alphabetical order of team nickname.

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With the World Series in the rear view mirror, MLB’s hot stove season is just about to get warmed up. The exclusive negotiating period for teams to negotiate with their own players ends on Friday, opening the doors for 139 free agents to hit the open market. And with names like David Price, Jason Heyward, and Yoenis Cespedes up for grabs, this is a star-laden free agent class, far better than anything seen in recent years. But despite the availability of a host of All-Star caliber players, the man with the most power this winter might very well be Dave Dombrowski.

After being let go by the Tigers on August 4th, it took Dombrowski all of two weeks to land a job as the President of Baseball Operations with the Red Sox. His history of success with the Expos, Marlins, and Tigers made him a coveted free agent in his own right, and the Red Sox wasted no time in giving him the keys to the office in an effort to get the franchise back on the winning path. While the previous regime left a strong core in place, it’s clear that Dombrowski is going to want to remake the roster to better align with his own philosophies, and that means that the Red Sox may very well be the busiest team in baseball this winter.

As his first priority, Dombrowski has made it pretty clear that he’s going to target high-end pitching this winter.

“Our depth in starting pitching is pretty good,” said Dombrowski. “I don’t think the back end of our rotation is going to be the difficult part. When I say ‘back end,’ I mean (Nos.) 3-4-5 — Porcello, Miley, Kelly. We saw Owens, he pitched well. We had Rodriguez and he can take that step forward at any point. So I don’t think it’s the depth, as much as you’re looking for that one guy who can maybe be your horse, if you can get him.”

Read the rest on Just a Bit Outside.

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The Kansas City Royals are World Champions. Last night, they finished off another spectacular playoff run, this time pushing the envelope on a play at the plate instead of having the tying run get stranded at third base. Despite being continually underestimated — including here, frequently, in things I’ve written over the last few years — the Royals ran away with the AL Central, aggressively loaded up on reinforcements at the trade deadline, and then trounced everyone in their path during the postseason. After years of enduring criticism during the building of this roster, Dayton Moore and his staff can certainly feel a significant amount of vindication this morning; they won with exactly the kind of team they believed could win.

Because baseball is a copycat industry, we are almost certainly going to see the other 29 teams look at KC’s success and try to figure out which parts of it can be reproduced. Certainly, they aren’t the first team to win with mostly home-grown talent, but they are a bit unique in that they refined a certain style of play until that model became synonymous with their organization, so it might be a little easier to copy “the Royals way” than if they just won while playing a more conventional style. So let’s see if we can tease out some lessons from Kansas City’s roster construction that other teams might be able to learn from.

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Source: FanGraphs

Of course it involved a crazy comeback. Congratulations to the Royals and all their fans on another remarkable run.

Yesterday, Alex Anthopolous left the Blue Jays, turning down a contract to remain with the team because, as he said in his conference call, he didn’t think it was a good fit anymore.

“I don’t know that I’ve had to make a harder decision in my life, but I did what I felt like I needed to do,” Anthopoulos said. “I just didn’t feel like this was a right fit for me going forward.”

It’s pretty clearly not a coincidence that Anthopoulos’ exit coincides with the arrival of Mark Shapiro, who was hired in August to take over as the new team president. Shapiro was brought in to replace Paul Beeston, so while it’s not a new position in the Blue Jays organization, the fact that ownership openly courted guys with baseball operations backgrounds — first Kenny Williams, then Dan Duquette, and now Shapiro — makes it seem that they’re changing the responsibilities of the position. Beeston was a business guy, an accountant who worked his way up through the organization’s financial side, but the Blue Jays actions over the last year make it clear they wanted a baseball guy in the team president role.

This is the new trend in baseball, of course. Over the last five years, it has become en vogue to promote the General Manager to President of Baseball Operations, or some similar title. The Blue Jays, in fact, became the 12th team to employ a recently promoted GM (or manager, in one case) in that job, with the title of GM going to someone else in the baseball operations department.

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