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It got kind of lost on Saturday, because Eric Hosmer signed with the Padres on Saturday, and that became baseball’s big news. But the Padres weren’t the only team active over the weekend, as the Rays pulled off a trio of transactions. Jake Odorizzi was traded to the Twins for a low-level infielder. Additionally, C.J. Cron was acquired for a player to be named later, and, to make roster room, Corey Dickerson was designated for assignment. The moves all happened so fast it got confusing, but the sequence made an unpleasant impression. Dickerson was a 2017 AL All-Star, and Odorizzi had been a regular starter for four years. It looked as if the Rays were partially tearing down.

Indeed, in a sense, that’s true — ownership was looking for the front office to cut payroll. Even though the Rays’ payrolls have always been modest, money is a factor in everything, and the 2017 club apparently got a little pricey. The owners asked for a payroll reduction, and an ownership ask is an ownership demand. This is how the Rays have long operated. Ideally, it wouldn’t be the case, but it is what it is. I can’t compel the owners to spend more than they do.

But while many have been upset by the departures of Odorizzi and Dickerson — including Kevin Kiermaier — it should also be understood just where the Rays are. The Rays now aren’t really worse off compared to where they were. The team isn’t tanking, as far as I can tell, and they’re not planning to lose 95 games. Two big contributors from the past are now gone, yet the roster is still okay. That’s not a bad outcome after shedding $10 million.

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The only thing that could’ve stopped this would’ve been a mystery team, and such a team never came out of the woodwork. From day one, the Red Sox were the favorites to sign J.D. Martinez as a free agent. The Sox just struggled to hit home runs in the absence of David Ortiz, and Martinez went deep a career-high 45 times. Boston had the desire, the money, and the roster space. Oh, sure, the Diamondbacks were in there somewhere, having fallen in love with what Martinez brought to them down the stretch, but they just had the desire and the space, and not so much the funds. They couldn’t have been considered a legitimate threat. And so there was no legitimate threat. Martinez and the Red Sox just needed to accept the circumstances.

Martinez wasn’t going to hold out much longer. But some late give by Boston compelled an actual agreement. The terms: five years, and $110 million. It’s more complicated than that, however, because Martinez can opt out after two years and $50 million, or after three years and $72 million. As such, what we’re seeing is a front-loaded deal that essentially has consecutive multi-year player options. This is more valuable than $110 million, in other words. Given the market, it’s a good deal for Martinez and it’s a good deal for Scott Boras. The final few years are like a safety net.

The Red Sox being a Dave Dombrowski operation, the future can figure itself out when it gets here. We can talk about Martinez’s contract deeper down. For now, for right now, the Red Sox have one of the best hitters in baseball. They’re not going to give the division to the Yankees without a fight.

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Rob Manfred wants the game to move faster. Funny thing is, he’s not alone. The players also want the game to move faster. Who would ever want to spend more time at work? Everyone’s aware that baseball games now are taking longer than ever. Everyone knows that’s far from ideal. As possible fixes go, there have simply been differences of opinion. The conversation about the slow free-agent market bled into the conversation about making the game speed up, so for some time it seemed like Manfred might unilaterally introduce his own pace-of-game directives. But now we have news that the league and the union have gotten along. There will be new rules for 2018.

A pitch clock isn’t among them. For months, it felt like a 2018 inevitability, because Manfred is so clearly in favor. It’s no coincidence the pitch clock has been implemented at various other levels of competition — Major League Baseball is slowly getting surrounded. The idea of the big-league pitch clock isn’t going to go away. But it has been set aside for now, as players collectively didn’t like it. They didn’t want to agree to such a fundamental change to the game. What we’re going to have are limits on mound visits, as well as shorter breaks between innings and pitcher substitutions. For the most part, for now, baseball is leaving the pace to the players. And the players get to celebrate a victory.

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The last time the Padres won at least half of their games was 2010. Last year’s team finished with 71 wins and 91 losses, and, according to the underlying numbers, the club was actually even worse than that. Looking immediately ahead, the picture doesn’t look much better. Steamer thinks the Padres are the worst team in the NL West. PECOTA agrees. We don’t have everything we need from the ZiPS projections yet, but that system’s probably in agreement with the others. The 2018 Padres almost certainly aren’t going to make the playoffs. They’re just another organization that’s tried to rebuild.

The 2018 Padres are also going to play Eric Hosmer just about every day. News came out Saturday evening that Hosmer finally decided between the Padres and the Royals. The terms from San Diego, given to the 28-year-old first baseman: eight years, $144 million. There’s an opt-out after year five. Hosmer will get $105 million over the first five years, with the last three worth $39 million, in the event Hosmer sticks around. Reports recently had the Padres offering seven years, while Scott Boras wanted nine. These things so often end up with the obvious compromise.

Hosmer has been out there so long, and he’s been polarizing so long, that there’s hardly even anything new to say. If you’re a regular reader of FanGraphs, you know what Hosmer is, and what he isn’t. I wrote about the idea of Hosmer signing a big contract with the Padres back in the middle of December. Everything I said then still applies. This is an interesting deal, of course; Hosmer is admittedly fascinating. But what might be even more interesting is the signal this sends. The biggest contract of the offseason was given by a last-place team. That last-place team clearly has no intention of remaining there very much longer.

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The Mets are giving Jason Vargas a two-year contract worth $16 million. The Orioles are giving Andrew Cashner a two-year contract worth $16 million. The Blue Jays are giving Jaime Garcia a one-year contract worth $10 million, and what’s funny about that is Garcia is probably better than Vargas and Cashner, but, reasonable people may disagree. Clearly, reasonable people do disagree. And, I don’t know, maybe Garcia badly wanted to play for Toronto. Everyone operates under different circumstances, and of the three pitchers, only Vargas was a 2017 All-Star.

Vargas, I guess, was an All-Star in the classic sense, in that he was literally on the All-Star roster. But Vargas isn’t an All-Star in any other sense. He doesn’t have a track record of being an All-Star performer, and very few people would recognize him were he just walking down the street. The Mets aren’t signing Vargas because they think they can put him between Noah Syndergaard and Jacob deGrom. They know what he is. Everyone knows what he is. Vargas himself would understand he belongs at the back of a big-league rotation. That’s his talent level, and it always has been.

That’s not a criticism. The league needs back-of-the-rotation starters. The Mets in particular need reliable back-of-the-rotation starters, given their health problems, although it’s curious that Vargas is considered so safe even though he recently had Tommy John surgery on his elbow. All forms of pitching are dangerous. But anyway, Vargas is being installed to be a provider of half-decent innings. Let us now recall the season he had.

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So much talk of tanking. So much talk about teams allegedly not trying to win. I don’t really buy into the narrative so much — I think front offices, at least, are more urgently competitive than ever. But I will say there are a few teams in position to think about blowing it up. The Marlins? The Marlins have mostly already blown it up. Their rebuild is underway. I don’t really know exactly where the Tigers are. I know they’re not good. And then there are the Orioles. If there’s a trend, the Orioles have defied it. There’s a strong case to be made that the Orioles should have started selling already. But, dang it, they’re sticking together. And now they’re even adding Andrew Cashner.

The terms: two years, and $16 million guaranteed. There’s a third-year option, and incentives, and some of the money is deferred. We know that, if Cashner passes his Orioles physical, he’s going to start, because before now, the Orioles’ rotation depth chart read as such:

1. Dylan Bundy
2. Kevin Gausman

You can plug Cashner in, then. Holes still remain. The Orioles don’t look that good, in particular in a division that already has the Red Sox and Yankees. But if you’re not going to sell, you might as well do something else. Call it optimism or call it stubbornness, but the Orioles are going to give this a try.

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There is no strict definition of what a super-team is. There’s no cutoff at a certain number of wins, no cutoff at a certain number of standard deviations above the mean. We’re objective people with an analytical bent, so we should probably consider working on this, but for the time being, consider it a “feel” thing. Somewhere, there’s a difference between a super-team, and a team that just plain looks good. We mostly know it when we see it.

And it’s been suggested that we’ve entered a super-team era. An era in which there are a number of very clear favorites. This would all be cyclical, and not a permanent state of being, but it’s hard for me to argue with. There are seemingly a number of clear favorites. You know exactly who they are. It’s impressive what they’ve all managed to build, but you could make the case it’s taken some of the thrill out of the offseason, with so many other teams deciding they just can’t keep up. Super-teams have accumulated much of the power.

You’ve seen the various preseason projections. They’re all based on prior data, and projections inform the odds. We already know which teams are going to have strong World Series odds in 2018. In the interest of shining the light on uncertainty, though, I thought it could be instructive to examine a few super-team failures. As a reminder of how baseball could surprise, we can look at a few prior surprises. These are teams that looked extremely good. These are teams that fell short.

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After years of false starts and uncertainty, we’re finally here — the Diamondbacks are going to start storing their baseballs in a Chase Field humidor. The idea itself isn’t particularly new, and of course the Rockies beat the Diamondbacks to the punch by more than a decade and a half. But, well, this isn’t a race. Arizona took its time to get to this point, and Chase does happen to be the second-most hitter-friendly ballpark around. It’s behind only…Coors Field, which the humidor didn’t render neutral, but the humidor there is still serving a purpose.

When the Diamondbacks have talked about this installation, they haven’t so much indicated a desire to drive offense down. Rather, the goal seems to be to make the baseballs more “grippy.” Pitchers have complained about the balls in Arizona being slick, and that has a lot to do with the low relative humidity of the climate. Now, you can’t exactly help pitchers without hurting hitters as a consequence. But there’s also just more going on. A humidor wouldn’t change only the surface of the baseballs. Moving forward, Chase Field might no longer be a hitter-friendly environment.

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