Over the winter, Max Scherzer turned down an offer from the Tigers that would have paid him $144 million over six years, and instead, decided to play out his final season in Detroit and then see kind of offers he will get as a free agent. Given pitcher attrition rates, Scherzer was certainly taking on a significant risk to pass up that kind of contract. Jeff Zimmerman’s research pegged Scherzer as having a 31% chance of landing on the disabled list at some point in 2014, and a significant injury likely would have forced Scherzer to forego pursuing any kind of long-term deal this winter. By turning down the offer, Scherzer appeared to have made a big bet on himself and his future health.

However, as Scherzer noted to Tom Verducci over the weekend, he actually hasn’t taken on nearly as much risk as we might have thought. Instead, he sold the risk to an insurance company for what was presumably a better rate than the one the Tigers offered. And I fully expect this to become a trend, with third-party insurance agencies stepping in to correct a market imbalance in Major League Baseball.

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The MLB draft kicks off tonight, and for the third year in a row, the Houston Astros will have the top selection. For the third year in a row, no one really knows what they’re going to do. Two years ago, they went for an under-slot high school shortstop, taking Carlos Correa ahead of Byron Buxton and Mark Appel, though Correa certainly looks like a terrific prospect in his own right. Last year, they went with the consensus, taking Appel and paying closer to the slot value of the pick.

This year, however, there’s a wrinkle; the consensus top prospect is high school left-hander Brady Aiken. No high school pitcher has been take with the #1 overall pick since 1991, when the Yankees picked Brien Taylor. He was a bust, as was the only high school arm who had been taken at 1-1 before him; David Clyde in 1973. In 49 years, teams have picked a high school arm just twice, and both of them failed.

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When the Marlins traded the 39th overall pick in Thursday’s amateur draft to the Pittsburgh Pirates for reliever Bryan Morris, the most common reaction was not that the cheapest organization in baseball was pinching pennies again; it was “wait, MLB teams can trade draft picks?” Unlike in the other major professional sports, MLB has historically not allowed teams to swap draft selections, and only a special subset of draft choices — the ones MLB gives out as Competitive Balance selections, between the first and second rounds — are able to be included in deals now. When the draft begins on Thursday, there will be no drama as to which team will be making the first overall pick, as the Astros are required to keep that selection for themselves.

However, because of the way that MLB’s suggested signing bonus system works, there actually is a way for teams at the top of the draft to “trade down.” Here’s how it works.

Each team is assigned a total bonus allocation based on where their selections in the first 10 rounds are placed — teams with higher picks get more money to sign those theoretically better talents — and the total signing bonuses for selections in those first 10 rounds have to be within five percent of that pool allocation if a team wants to avoid some pretty stiff penalties. However, teams are allowed to distribute their pool allocation however they would like, and they can vary a great deal from the recommended bonus for each particular player.

If a team is able to sign a player for significantly less than their slot bonus with a high draft choice, they can then use the money they saved on that pick to take a player who wouldn’t sign for the bonus recommended with a later choice. A team that saves money on its top pick can be aggressive in selecting a player who fell through the cracks in the first round, and potentially land a second or even third top talent with their following picks.

Two years ago, the Astros did exactly that, selecting high school shortstop Carlos Correa with the No. 1 overall pick partly due to the fact that he agreed to sign for $4.8 million; $2.4 million shy of the $7.2 million slot recommendation for that pick.

The Astros then turned around and gave an extra $1.25 million to the 41st overall pick — right-handed pitcher Lance McCullers — and an extra $1.5 million to the player they took with the 129th overall pick, infielder Rio Ruiz. Correa was certainly a quality prospect, but in effect, the Astros traded the No. 1 overall pick for the No. 3 or No. 4 overall pick, with the value of upgrading their second- and fourth-round picks into late first-round talents as the reward.

Is this a good strategy, though? Should a team with the best chance to land a superstar really take a lesser talent in order to bolster their secondary selections?

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On Sunday, the Marlins made a head-scratching trade, acquiring reliever Bryan Morris from the Pirates in exchange for their Competitive Balance selection — #39 overall — in Thursday’s amateur draft. Morris does have some virtues as a very hard-throwing groundball guy who is decently effective against right-handed batters, but he also has a long list of flaws; his command is lousy, he can’t get left-handers out, and even used as a situational reliever, he’s been pretty terrible this year.

If you evaluate his Major League career solely by runs allowed, he’s been essentially a replacement level arm. If you evaluate that performance by metrics that predict ERA better than ERA itself, Morris has been one of the worst relief pitchers in all of baseball over the last year. Morris is somewhere between bad and unrosterable, and yet the Marlins gave up a draft pick that has some real value in exchange for a right-handed specialist who isn’t even all that great at that very niche job.

But on Monday, we found out why the Marlins made that trade. Rather than justifying the deal, however, the actual motivation for the move reinforces every negative perception about baseball’s worst organization.

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For the last year or so, the Astros have reportedly been offering various long-term deals to some of the young players in their organization, using the carrot of guaranteed millions to try and buy out a couple of free agent years. Up until now, no one had signed the offer, and Evan Longoria remained the record holder for fewest number of days of service before signing a long-term deal. However, with first base prospect Jon Singleton, the Astros have now codified the first deal that officially includes a Major League call-up as part of the package.

According to Jeff Passan of Yahoo Sports, Singleton’s deal is for $10 million guaranteed over the next five seasons, beginning in 2014, with three team options that could push the total value of the deal to $35 million. By getting seven more years of team control after this season, the Astros are essentially buying one free agent year in advance — they would have owned the rest of 2014 anyway, plus six full seasons afterwards — and signing this deal now allowed Singleton to get promoted without worrying about the Super-Two deadline. Had Singleton not signed the deal, he likely would have spent several more weeks in Triple-A.

It goes without saying that this deal is a huge potential boon to the Astros. If Singleton turns out to be a quality player, he would have gone well beyond $35 million in his arbitration years and first free agent season, but if Singleton busts, they’re only out $7 or $8 million above and beyond what they would have paid by going year to year. Risking $7 or $8 million for a chance to save upwards of $30 million — let’s assume a high-quality slugging 1B would have earned ~$40 million in future arbitration earnings and another ~$25 million for his first free agent year — is a total no-brainer for a team like the Astros. There’s a reason they’ve been trying to get nearly every player with any modicum of talent to take deals like these. These deals lean very heavily towards the organization’s favor.

But for Singleton, this represents a significant guarantee. As an 8th round pick in the 2009 draft, he signed for $200,000, so he hasn’t been living in poverty as a minor leaguer, but between taxes, agent commissions, living expenses, and his admitted drug addiction, it’s safe to say that he probably doesn’t have a lot of that money left. In fact, when discussing this particular deal, we cannot ignore Singleton’s past words.

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Four weeks ago, I introduced Expected Run Differentials, using the various linear weights tools we have on the site to construct a metric to evaluate a team’s performance without any timing or sequencing factors. Essentially, this method just counts up the context-neutral value of positive or negative events a team allows, and gives us an expected result if every team had distributed those events in the same manner. While run differential strips timing out of the conversion from runs to wins, this construct strips out timing from the runs themselves, and gives us the most sequencing-free look at a team’s overall performance to date.

Since it’s been nearly a month, let’s go ahead and update the numbers and look at what we can learn from them. There’s a lot of information in the table, and each column is sortable, so you can see where teams stand either by runs scored or allowed, expected runs scored or allowed, run differential or expected differential, or the differences in each section. The table is presented by expected run differential, from best to worst, and a reminder that the differences are set so that positive numbers are always favorable for the team.

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