In past years, I’ve often compared shopping in free agency to shopping at Whole Foods, in that everything is just more expensive than it should be. But given that I’m currently writing this post at my local Whole Foods — their oatmeal is actually pretty good, and not too expensive for mornings when work-from-home writers just have to get out of the house — I feel like that would be a hypocritical analogy to make today.

So, Whole Foods, you get a one-day reprieve from being the example of an overpriced market. And to be fair, maybe it isn’t the best analogy anyway, given that Whole Foods does sell mostly high quality stuff, while the free agent market is full of things other teams didn’t really want anymore. Maybe free agency is more like a really expensive Craigslist?

Regardless, you get the point. Free agency is expensive. The winner’s curse often applies, as teams are initially happy with their purchases, but eventually realize that the shiny new thing they just bought isn’t shiny or new. The average age of free agents is going up, and aging curves appear to be getting steeper, and that combination leads to a lot of players selling the last few years of their decline phase, which is not a great time to be investing heavily in an asset.

But, occasionally, the market does undervalue a player. Often it’s health related, but sometimes a bad platform year performance can convince too many buyers that decline has already begun to set in, and teams can buy low on a player poised for a rebound. It does happen, so today, I’m going to try and identify five potential bargains in this class. Of course, I tried this last year too, and came away with Brian McCann, the short Chris Young, Roberto Hernandez, Scott Kazmir, and Omar Infante; a whopping 20% of those guys were worth their contract last year. So, you know, take these opinions with as many grains of salt as you think are necessary.

But let me take another stab at this. Here are five guys I think could prove to be decent buys this winter. For reference, I’m going to list both the expected contracts from our Contract Crowdsourcing project and my own expectations. On to the list.

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Over the last few years, the Pirates have developed a bit of a reputation for being exceptional at extracting value from discarded pitchers: Francisco Liriano, Edinson Volquez, and Mark Melancon are three of the more recent examples, for instance. However, before any of those three got to Pittsburgh, the Pirates worked their voodoo on A.J. Burnett, taking him off the Yankees hands in the winter of 2011 and extracting two excellent years from him after New York decided to pay him to play for anyone else but them.

Over the 2012-2013 seasons, Burnett threw 393 innings with a 92 ERA-/85 FIP-/82 xFIP-, providing well above average performance and durability, and because the Yankees were financing his costs, the Pirates paid just $13 million for those two seasons. However, the cost-conscious organization declined to make him a qualifying offer last offseason, and despite some mutual desire for another contract between both sides, Burnett ended up taking a two year contract to go pitch for the Phillies.

It didn’t go well for either side. Burnett was bad, his teammates were worse, and so both sides decided to opt-out of the second year of the contract, allowing Burnett to become a free agent again. And now, with the choice of where to pitch once again, Burnett has decided to go back to Pittsburgh, signing on for the 2015 season for $8.5 million. By opting out of his Phillies deal and signing with the Pirates, he ended up leaving $4 million on the table, so this represents a pretty significant pay cut for Burnett, but as a 38 year old who has made over $100 million in his career, happiness clearly came ahead of maximizing dollars earned.

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As I noted on Tuesday night, I was privileged to be selected to vote on two postseason awards this year; the National League’s Manager of the Year and the Most Valuable Player. As was just announced, the MVP award went to Clayton Kershaw, edging out Andrew McCutchen and Giancarlo Stanton for the top spot. You can see the full results of the voting at BBWAA.com. Below, I’ll explain each of my selections, and why I voted as I did.

First, a very quick overview of my philosophy. I generally think the best player and most valuable player are the same thing, and I don’t really care too much about a team’s performance when trying to determine the quality of an individual player. However, I also don’t think it’s entirely correct to focus solely on context-neutral numbers, as we generally do when trying to evaluate a player’s true talent level. Context-specific specific performance absolutely drives some of the variation in team win-loss records, and distributing your performance into the most critical situations can definitely affect your teams record one way or another.

My goal was to identify the players who added the most wins to their team in 2014, and even though “clutch performance” doesn’t really appear to be a thing a player has much control over, it still matters when tallying up wins and losses. The Royals won 89 games instead of 81 games primarily because of the distribution of their performances, and if we focused solely on the context-neutral contributions of their individual players, we’d come up eight wins shy of their actual total.

So, on my MVP ballot, the timing of performances mattered. I leaned more on RE24 rather than wRC+, and attempted to incorporate high leverage performance into the calculations as well. It might not be a repeatable skill, but I don’t think that’s what we’re trying to measure. We’re just trying to look for who added the most value in 2014, and for that question, I thinking including the timing of events is important.

Okay, now to my ballot.

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If you like big trades with flashy names, this isn’t the post for you, because this one is dedicated to the Tigers swapping second base prospect Devon Travis to the Blue Jays for center field kinda prospect Anthony Gose. Neither Travis nor Gose looks likely to turn into any kind of star, but this trade is still interesting — to me at least — because both look like potentially useful pieces that help fill a need for their new teams.

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On Monday, the Mets made the first significant free agent signing of the offseason, bringing Michael Cuddyer to New York on a two year, $21 million contract. Because the Rockies anticipated Cuddyer’s market and made him a qualifying offer, the deal also cost the Mets the 15th pick in next summer’s draft, so this move exchanges potential future value for a short-term upgrade. In other words, this is a win-now move, and signifies that the Mets are probably set on improving their 2015 roster, even if it comes at the cost of sacrificing assets that may prove valuable in the long run.

This seems like a bit of a weird decision, given that the team finished 79-83 last year, and perhaps more importantly, finished 17 games out of first place in the National League East. 17 games is not a trivial gap to overcome, and so the Mets don’t necessarily seem to be in a traditional position that incentivizes future-for-present talent swaps. However, I think it’s worth considering that perhaps the Mets position is perhaps more advantageous than it looks at first glance.

The primary variable in whether a team’s status as a potential contender is, of course, that teams own talent level. On this test, the Mets seem to fall a bit short at the moment; the Steamer projections hosted at FanGraphs currently have the team pegged for approximately +27 WAR, roughly the same as the Cubs and Diamondbacks, and well behind the +41 WAR that the Nationals are currently projected to produce. A 14 win gap might be slightly less intimidating than a 17 win gap, but either way, it seems nearly impossible that the Mets could improve enough this winter to match up with the best team in their division.

But being a contender is no longer just about being the best team in your division. We just had a World Series where neither team accomplished that; in fact, neither reigning league champion even won 90 games. MLB’s current playoff system offers some potentially lucrative rewards for being a respectable runner-up, and thanks to the non-Nationals teams in the NL East, it is not entirely crazy to think that the Mets might be able to aspire to that more realistic goal.

Read the rest at Just a Bit Outside.

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As a BBWAA member, I was privileged to be asked to vote on two awards this year; the NL Manager of the Year and the Most Valuable Player. As you just saw on MLB Network, Matt Williams was just named the winner, with Clint Hurdle finishing second and Bruce Bochy rounding out the top three. Below, I’ll list my ballot, as well as explain my line of thinking in how I approached the voting.

Before I get to the ballot, I feel like it’s necessary to state that, during the entire process, I felt a bit unqualified for the job. Evaluating player performance is tricky enough even with all the amount of information we have about their performance; with managers, we’re basically just guessing. We can speculate about things that we think matter, but we don’t really have much objective data to support these thoughts.

Often, we judge our opinions of a manager’s quality based on how well their in-game strategy lines up with the public research, but measuring a manager by how often he bunts or how he sets his line-up is like measuring a catcher solely based on how well he controls the running game. It matters, and there’s a point at which you’re too poor at that specific skill to qualify for the pool of candidates, but in-game strategy isn’t even a manager’s primary responsibility. And it’s pretty much the only thing we see.

So, in determining my vote for Manager of the Year, I honestly didn’t put a lot of weight on in-game strategy. Instead, I tried to focus on the leader-of-men part of the job, looking for candidates whose teams overcame some legitimate adversity, or who succeeded in accomplishing a difficult task. Isolating a manager’s impact on these results is near impossible from the information we have available, so I focused less on trying to figure out exactly how much they mattered, and looked for places where it seems reasonable to assume that another manager might not have been able to do as much with what they were given.

That said, there’s plenty of room for reasonable disagreements with my approach and my results. Feel free to think my picks are terrible. I won’t push back much, as they might be terrible. Maybe in 20 or 50 years, we’ll have a way to evaluate a manager’s impact, and we’ll learn that I got this all wrong. I tried not to, but I went in to the process knowing that evaluating the performance of a manager from our perspective is very difficult, and I don’t think I figured out the secret during the process.

So, with that caveat in place, on to my ballot.

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Free agency is the land of false hopes and dreams. While nearly every major signing is heralded as good news for the organization making the commitment, they often turn quite poorly; note the very high number of overpaid veterans being shopped around the league at this moment. Signing the wrong free agent can actually do more damage than not signing any free agents at all, and especially for teams with average or below average budgets, payroll efficiency is a necessity.

So, with that in mind, I’m going to present my annual list of free agent landmines, or players to be most actively avoided based on my expectations of what they’re going to produce versus what they’re going to get paid. Appearing on this list doesn’t make you a bad player, but just one where I think the market’s assessment of your value is too high for the actual production.

For reference, here’s last year’s version of the list, which included some of the more notable free agent busts of last winter: Joe Nathan, Jarrod Saltalamacchia, and Curtis Granderson, as well as two of the three guys who got rejected by the market after turning down the qualifying offer: Kendrys Morales and Nelson Cruz. I don’t expect an 80% failure rate for the five players listed below, but I think there are enough warning signs that I probably wouldn’t pursue them this winter.

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Pablo Sandoval is perhaps the most interesting free agent of the offseason. He’s both good and fairly young for a free agent these days, so there’s an argument to be made that his contract might not carry him very far into the steepest of the aging curve, which is when teams have often gotten burned with big money deals. Of course, he’s also a big guy, with the body type of the kind of player who often ages poorly, and he’s spent a significant chunk of time on the DL during his tenure with the Giants.

This makes him a bit of a unique free agent, as you can argue that he’s either lower risk (due to age) or higher risk (due to body type), depending on which one you one put more stock in. And both arguments have their merit. Projecting future playing time is difficult enough for a normal player, much less a guy on the extreme ends of two variables that offer different conclusions.

So, it seems inevitable that whatever Sandoval signs for, it’s going to be a polarizing contract. Especially if he lands the six year deal that he’s seeking. From his agent, Gustavo Vazquez, via Henry Schulman:

“Pablo is 28,” Vasquez said. “He is still young. Maybe if he was 30 or 31 we could talk about four or five years. But he’s 28. He deserves more than that.”

The immediate reaction is to imagine what a 34-year-old Sandoval might look like, and shrink back from the idea of guaranteeing real money to, as Grant Brisbee put it, a “less athletic David Wells.” The odds of Sandoval still being a highly productive player in 2020 are pretty slim, and a six year deal would make it very likely that the signing team would have paid a hefty premium for a pinch-hitter or part-time platoon guy by the time the contract ends. However, in and of itself, that doesn’t make a six year contract for Sandoval a bad idea.

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