Over the weekend, the long saga of James Shields, Pitcher For Hire finally came to a close, with Shields accepting a four year, $75 million contract from the San Diego Padres. $75 million is a pretty nice payday, but it’s a little less than half of the $155 million that Jon Lester received from the Cubs, and nearly one-third of the amount the Nationals will pay Max Scherzer over the life of his new contract. Because of how long it took Shields to sign, and the vast difference in guarantees between what he got and what the top two hurlers on the market got, Shields’ agent — Page Odle — has come under some criticism for how he marketed his player.

Yahoo’s Jeff Passan, for instance, offered up some interesting information about Shields’ early off-season asking price.

Shields found himself mentioned with the other two big-name free agent starters, Max Scherzer and Jon Lester. Consequently, his agent, Page Odle, started asking for terms in similar neighborhoods.
As the Red Sox proffered a six-year, $120 million opening offer to Lester, Odle sought terms in that range, according to multiple clubs involved early in the negotiations. One executive said Odle started discussions with a six-year deal in mind. Another confirmed what the Kansas City Star wrote Monday: He simultaneously was shooting for a five-year, $125 million pact with others.

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After Lester signed, Shields could have pounced and ramped up negotiations. GMs expected that parry. They held firm, figuring Odle would lessen his demands. That never happened. Shields ended up in San Diego of his own volition, because had he budged earlier, executives believe he would have received plenty more.

There’s a reason no pitcher had signed for more than $50 million in February: No pitcher was foolish enough to wait until February to sign. Most teams, at this juncture, have locked-in budgets that need special dispensations to move. San Diego happens to be in the midst of a complete overhaul, so general manager A.J. Preller walked into negotiations with monetary flexibility – and the knowledge that were he to whiff on Shields, he could trade for Cole Hamels.

A simple move – lowering the expectations on the deal to four years – would have sparked the market. The San Francisco Giants originally were interested at around $80 million over four years. At least a dozen teams would listen at four years, and of those, surely one would pledge $21 million a year times four to separate itself. Which would prompt a jump to $22 million a year, maybe $23 million, and when you add in a club option as a sweetener, that’s a contract that potentially jumps comfortably into the nine-figure range.

$125 million to $75 million is a big drop, and Passan’s information adds context to the question of why Shields sat unsigned for so long. That said, I am left wondering if perhaps what we saw was not so much Shields’ agent overplaying his hand, but instead, the market gently reminding us all that major league teams aren’t valuing pitchers the same way anymore.

Read the rest on Just a Bit Outside.

With James Shields finally signing, the off-season is probably closed for business now. Sure, there are a few veteran relievers still out there, and Rickie Weeks still has to find a new home, but most of the money has been spent and the trades have been made. We’ll see a few more deals in Spring Training, but with pitchers and catchers reporting next week, the Hot Stove is now more of a pile of smoldering coals.

And that means you’re about to be inundated with various lists and rankings of off-season moves. You’re going to read about the best and worst individual moves of the winter — I’ll likely have my own posts on those at the end of the week — as well as the always popular “winners” and “losers” of the off-season. In general, I find the winners/losers recaps to be a little bit formulaic, as they could almost always just be rewritten as “teams that made the most win-now moves” and “team that made the fewest transactions”.

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Matt Kemp, Wil Myers, Justin Upton, and now James Shields. No team has had a splashier off-season than the San Diego Padres, as new GM A.J. Preller overhauled the team’s roster to ensure that the 2015 Padres would actually be able to score some runs. This team now has an unmistakable identity — they might as well call themselves the San Diego Right-Handed Sluggers — and nearly as much star power as any team in the league. The organization is now a far cry from one whose best players were Rene Rivera and Seth Smith.

The Padres are now undoubtedly interesting. Are they going to be good, though? I remain a bit skeptical. As Mike noted this morning, their infield is still kind of dreadful, and while their outfield will hit a lot of home runs, they’re primarily one dimensional players who aren’t as valuable as their reputations. The pitching staff is deep — especially if Brandon Morrow and Josh Johnson figure out how to stay healthy — but not as strong up front as the other contenders in the NL.

Mostly, I see a lot of solid contributors, but very few players who are likely to be among the best players in the league. The Padres have imported three big names (and a former big time prospect) but I’m not sure any of them are going to perform like All-Stars in 2015. Given what Petco Park is likely to do to the raw numbers of Upton and Kemp, Joaquin Benoit might actually still be the team’s most likely All-Star representative.

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Yesterday, Major League Baseball officially declared Yoan Moncada — perhaps the most coveted player to defect from Cuba in the last few years — free to sign with any Major League club. The bidding is expected to be intense, with the Yankees, Red Sox, and Dodgers tabbed as the early favorites. Given the tax that will be levied on on the team that signs Moncada, the high-revenue clubs are at a significant advantage, and Moncada’s signing will likely be used as evidence of the need for an international draft.

In his conversation with Ken Rosenthal last week, Commissioner Manfred publicly supported such an idea, stating that his “long haul goal” would be “to get to an international draft.” With the big money clubs blowing up the league’s system for signing young international free agents, an overhaul of the process is inevitable. But while the draft has become the de facto method for sports leagues to distribute incoming young talent — under the guise of competitive balance, but with the primary goal of holding down acquisition costs — I’d like to suggest that Major League Baseball go the other direction instead.

The logistics of incorporating international players into a draft are problematic, which is why baseball settled on its current recommended bonus system instead. And there is merit to the structure that the league created; if you have various spending allocations in place, you don’t actually need to go through the process of draft positions. The best players want the most money, so by simply creating a system where some teams have more money to spend than others, you can funnel incoming talent to certain types of teams even without handing out specific draft positions.

The problem lies in the execution of MLB’s international system, as the bonus pools are akin to speed limits instead of actual barriers. Because teams have calculated that Moncada’s talent is worthy of paying the penalties associated with blowing their budgets out of the water, the limits are functionally useless. But if the limits were firm caps, and teams were unable to exceed their pool allocations, then we wouldn’t be facing a situation where the richest teams in baseball were flexing their financial muscles to add an elite talent while the have-nots sit on the sidelines wishing for a more level playing field.

So what if there was no draft? Instead, what if we just lumped all new players — foreign or domestic — into a single acquisition system where each player was free to sigh with the team of their choice, only with firm spending caps in place to ensure that young talent flows more freely to clubs who can’t compete on Major League payroll alone? In other words, a team’s talent acquisition budget would be inversely tied to their Major League payroll; the more you spend on big leaguers, the less you get to spend on prospects, and vice versa.

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Last night, the New England Patriots snatched victory from the jaws of defeat, intercepting a pass on their own goal line with just 30 seconds to spare. Before the play, Advanced NFL Stats gave the Seahawks an 88 percent chance of winning, as most teams end up converting 2nd-and-1 into a touchdown in that situation. Of course, most teams run the ball into the endzone from a yard out, and in the aftermath of the game, the primary focus was on Seattle’s decision to throw the ball rather than run it.

On both NBC and Twitter, incredulity seemed to be the most popular reaction. The overwhelming consensus appears to be that the Seahawks screwed up, and simply should have run the ball. The tenor of the commentary suggested that any other play call was demonstrably wrong; 2nd-and-1 from that spot on the field, with a running back like Marshawn Lynch, throwing the ball should apparent not have even been a consideration.

Of course, the reaction is inextricably tied to the result. Had the play worked, we’d likely be spending this morning hearing about what a genius Pete Carroll is for his creative play calling, zigging when the Patrios expected him to zag. This isn’t to say that throwing the ball was definitively the right decision, but I’m naturally wary of analysis that suggests that there is ever only one correct strategy to deploy, with no other decision ever being reasonable to consider. But because I don’t know football well enough to have an informed opinion, I started wondering what the baseball equivalent would be to the Super Bowl’s ending.

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Earlier in the week, Rob Manfred laid out some ideas that the sport could consider to both increase run scoring and improve the pace of play. While those seem like competing priorities, there is some evidence that both can be obtained simultaneously, though it seems unlikely that either restricting the shift or implementing a pitch clock would move the game in both directions. Instead, if MLB wants to make changes that serve both interests, they should probably pick a different approach.

If there’s been one significant change to the game over the last 30 years that has both extended the amount of standing-around-doing-nothing time during games and tipped the balance in favor of run prevention, it has been the expansion of the modern-day bullpen. Jonah Keri and Neil Paine covered this well in a piece at FiveThirtyEight last August, and because I like the graph they used in their piece, I’m going to steal it and embed it below.

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