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The pitcher with the highest fastball spin rate in baseball in 2016 was also the first free agent signed this offseason. Maybe that’s just coincidence — Andrew Bailey was re-signed by the Angels to a modest one-year, $1 million deal with incentives, so it’s not like it required a ton of courting — but there are plenty of front offices who’ve designated at least one analyst to comb through the free-agent wires to find a pitcher with good spin rates. Let’s play along.

Of course, we can only play along so much: the major-league front offices have minor-league spin rates easily accessible in their databases, so they don’t have to go looking far and wide for data. Also, spin rates alone don’t tell the whole story, especially when it comes to changeups and sliders. However, we know this: given equal velocities, the fastball with the higher spin rate is superior fastball — and that looks to be true for curveballs, too. (Check the curveball tab of that linked spreadsheet, courtesy Jeff Zimmerman).

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The results are in. Terry Francona is your American League Manager of the Year. Congratulations to him! He’s probably an excellent manager. I actually had a vote for the AL version of the award, and, well, I probably screwed it up. One part of the screw up was on me, and I’ll eat my crow. But here’s my excuse: I didn’t have the most important part of the year at my disposal when I made my vote.

I voted for John Farrell, Buck Showalter, and Terry Francona in that order. I think all three are excellent managers, and so I relied on the numbers I produced to try and help me make the decision.

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Around this time in 2015, right-hander Jeremy Hellickson had just completed a three-year stretch during which he recorded a cumulative ERA near five and experienced some injury troubles to boot. Following his one and only season in Arizona, he was traded to Philadelphia for a young righty who wasn’t even among the Phillies’ top-25 prospects at the time. There wasn’t a great deal of reason for optimism.

A year later, circumstances are considerably different. Following a three-win season, Hellickson received a qualifying offer from the Phillies — and now the 2017 edition of Hellickson will earn $17.2 million. The results were pretty different, in others words. But what about the process? Are these the same Hellicksons?

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I did a presentation in Arizona this weekend for First Pitch Arizona, an event at the Arizona Fall League hosted by BaseballHQ. The presentation served as an introduction to spin rates and exit velocity and so on. I examined the new stat from our friends at Statcast — Barrels — and how Michael Conforto does well by that stat, which attempts to combine exit velocity and launch angles to credit players who make dangerous contact. On the way out, someone asked me, basically: “So if he’s good at barreling the ball, what happened last year? What went wrong on those barrels?” There’s an easy answer and a hard answer.

The easy answer is that even players who are good at barreling the ball don’t barrel it all that often. Conforto is in the top 75 when it comes to barreling, and he barreled only about 11% of his batted balls this year. The elite guys this year — Gary Sanchez, Khris Davis, Nelson Cruz, Chris Carter and Mark Trumbo — barreled the ball around 18% of the time when they put the ball in play. Even among that group, there’s another 80% of batted balls unaccounted for.

That mirrors the difference in home-run rate, sort of. The top two in homers — you might recognize Trumbo and Davis — have a 7% home-run rate, about double that of the 75th guy, Andrew McCutchen (3.5%). But in the gaps between them, you still find interesting players. Conforto, for example, would have been 84th in home-run rate had he qualified, a little worse than (but still comparable to) his barreling rate.

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The biggest reliever contract in baseball history was handed to Jonathan Papelbon in 2012 when the right-hander received four years and $50 million from the Phillies. The biggest yearly salary ever recorded by a reliever remains Mariano Rivera’s $15 million figure from both 2011 and 2012. This year, both of those records will surely fall.

After all, we’ve just concluded a postseason in which starters pitched the fewest innings per start in playoff history. And a reliever won the American League Championship Series MVP award. And relievers, in general, receive much more per win than players at any other position. Against that backdrop, this offseason features two elite free agents in Aroldis Chapman and Kenley Jansen — only a year after Darren O’Day was the best reliever available in November.

It’s a combination of forces that makes you wonder how high the price might go for their services. But before we start predicting nine-digit contracts for either of these closers, we also have to remember that a deal like that would represent a doubling of the previous high.

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“What was working for you today?” someone asked Rays starter Brent Honeywell after his appearance in the Arizona Fall League’s Fall Stars Game. “Everything,” he said matter-of-factly, and it’s hard to argue. He struck out five in two scoreless frames and showcased his entire arsenal of impressive pitches. A few minutes later, he took me through those pitches, and discussed what’s working and what requires more attention in order for him to contribute in Tampa next season.

Let’s start with the least sexy pitch in his arsenal, the curve. It’s the newest piece, and it’s the one with which the righty has been tinkering this fall. He threw one on strike one to Anthony Alford to demonstrate what the pitch can mean to him — called strikes. “Nobody’s going to swing at a first-pitch breaking ball,” he said. “But I’m not going to throw it a whole bunch.”

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“More breaking balls!” That’s how Theo Epstein characterized the postseason for Brian Kenny on the latter’s lead-in show before Game Five of the World Series. It’s a notable observation insofar as it’s a little more actual content than you typically get publicly from a high-ranking front-office exec, but it’s also a matter of public record that his team was seeing a ton of breaking balls in the World Series. Dave Cameron, for example, took an excellent look at the subject earlier this week.

What’s interesting about Epstein’s comment, however, is how he was somehow able to remain vague about his point, even as he seemed to be offering something incredibly specific. He suggests there are more breaking balls in the playoffs, sure. But it’s not clear if he’s implying that there are more breaking balls every postseason for every team, or merely that there were more this postseason for his team, or something in between.

This postseason was defined by a transformation in bullpen usage; that’s not up for discussion, really. But it seems possible that pitching mixes themselves also changed this postseason. And while it would be impossible for Andrew Miller to throw 225 innings and strike out nearly 400 batters — the unfathomable numbers you get if you prorate his postseason work to a full season out of the pen — it might be possible for starting pitchers to throw more breaking balls all season. This postseason trend (if it actually exists) could inform the regular season in a real way.

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By the time a pitcher gets to October, his body and his mind are headed in different directions. The head can’t stop racing, but the body is battered by six months’ worth of battle. That probably seems intuitive, but it’s actually relevant tonight in a very concrete way: Cleveland right-hander Corey Kluber is once again going to climb the mound on short rest, with body and mind at odds. Here’s the good news for Indians fans, though: while the results of postseason short-rest starts isn’t great, the process — which is to say, the movement and velocity recorded on pitches — suggests that adrenaline trumps all when it comes to postseason ball.

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