We haven’t spent much time talking about the Twins this offseason. The last post dedicated to the team was published Dec. 8, when this author wrote about two savvy little trades the club had made after losing out on the Ohtani sweepstakes.

But in what has been a quiet offseason, the Twins have quietly been one of the most active teams, bolstering their bullpen by signing ageless wonder Fernando Rodney, left-hander Zach Duke, and most recently, Addison Reed.

They’ve also made a move with an eye toward improving their 2019 rotation by signing Michael Pineda. Pineda is expected to miss most, if not all, of this coming season while recovering from Tommy John surgery. Given his bat-missing upside, though, the $10-million commitment seems like a prudent value play.

Overall, only 21 of Dave Cameron’s top-50 free agents have signed so far this winter. The Twins are responsible for two of them, however, in Reed and Pineda.

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If you don’t follow college football, you may not be familiar with Baker Mayfield. He is the quarterback for the University of Oklahoma, the reigning Heisman Trophy winner, and a player who is expected to be selected in the first round of April’s NFL draft. What is his relevance to the pages of FanGraphs? Well, what is interesting to me about Mayfield is that he might not hire an agent to represent him.

Writes Mike Florio of NBCSports:

The argument against hiring an agent is simple: Thanks to the rookie wage scale, contracts for incoming players basically negotiate themselves. (Also, agent fees are no longer tax-deductible.)

Earlier today, Nathaniel Grow addressed the difficult situation in which the players union has found itself vis-à-vis owners. “The MLBPA Has No Leverage,” is how Grow titled that post. With baseball having introduced limits on amateur spending and having added recommended bonus for draft bonuses, it’s possible that more high-profile baseball prospects will question whether or not an agent is necessary when entering professional baseball. Several recent first-rounders like Hunter Harvey and Kyle Parker opted to negotiate for themselves and to varying degrees of success.

While negotiating pro contracts for amateur baseball prospects is more complicated than in, say, football as teams try to gauge signability and maximize their bonus pools and agents filter information for prospects, etc., what happens when negotiating major-league contracts becomes less and less about art and more and more about science? How will player representatives add value then?

Is it possible, to borrow Grow’s language, that agents have no leverage, either?

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At the completion of trading on January 5, the S&P 500 reached a milestone, having endured the longest interval in its history without experiencing a 5% decline, according to Spencer Jakab of The Wall Street Journal.

In another WSJ story, reporters Chris Dieterich, Ben Eisen, and Akane Otani note that declines have “grown shallower” over the last two years and “are snapping back sooner.” These trends, according to the authors, are a result of “economic optimism” and a growing awareness of the returns enjoyed by those who remained invested in “riskier assets” during the rebound from the Great Recession. Investors are jumping on the smallest signs of value, buying the smallest declines.

From that piece:

“The investor base has been conditioned to buy the dip,” said Mohamed El-Erian, chief economic adviser at Allianz SE. “And the reason why they have been conditioned is because it has been an extremely profitable trade.”

Buying the dip has been profitable — and particularly so in this bull market.

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There are times when a single statistic grabs your attention. Such a time occurred for this author late last month, courtesy an excellent piece by Sahadev Sharma at The Athletic.

Sharma examined the number of innings recorded for every major-league team by pitchers they’d acquired via the draft since the arrival of the current curse-breaking Cubs regime ahead of the 2012 season.

During that timeframe, which includes six drafts, the Cubs have produced a total of 30 homegrown innings. Thirty! The Blue Jays lead the majors with 1,299 such innings. The Cardinals are second in the majors and lead the NL with 872, according to Sharma’s research.

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As you are probably aware, this offseason has delivered an unusually ice-cold start to free agency. The final months of 2017 facilitated little in the way of movement. The new year, meanwhile, has given us Jay Bruce to the Mets.

There are a variety of reasons for this — reasons that have been examined at this site and elsewhere. For starters, more teams are thinking the same way and believe that free agency is often a losing bet for the club. There are undoubtedly some teams waiting and holding cash in reserve until next year’s historic class. There is the new CBA, which has tougher penalties regarding the luxury tax. And Dave Cameron noted on Tuesday — his last real post for the site — how the presence of a few “super teams” might have removed the motivation for clubs to improve and spend.

Peter Gammons briefly outlined the perspective of clubs and agents last week for The Athletic.

Wrote Gammons:

Management has argued that agents have overrated their clients’ markets, with no Max Scherzer or Zack Greinke to establish the market. Agents feel this is an industry-wide attempt to make players wait and come down to a lesser market.

Last week, I cataloged which of Dave’s top free agents had signed thus far. Little has transpired in the meantime. As of today, Carlos Santana is the only player among Cameron’s top five to have found a home this offseason. Of Cameron’s top-10 free agents, only three have signed. Of the top 20, just six have a new contract, with Bruce representing the latest. That’s a unusually low volume of transactions.

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Hey, something happened!

Outfielder Jay Bruce has signed with the New York Mets, and FanGraphs readers nailed the terms, having collectively produced a median projection of three years and $39 million. [Give yourself a pat on the back!] Six of Dave’s top-20 free agents have now signed.

Notably, the ballots for those crowdsourced predictions were submitted before it was clear just how slowly the free-agent market would unfold. Since contracts signed after Jan. 1 tend to compare less favorably to the crowd’s projections, this contract should be considered a win for the Bruce camp, especially with the supply of sluggers available.

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Gerrit Cole is reportedly on the verge of joining the Astros:

Or… maybe he’s not:

In any case, it sounds like a deal will get done eventually:

Unless it doesn’t:

While something may or may not be imminent, such a trade would not be surprising: the Pirates have decided to retool at some level and Cole’s name has come up all offseason, first connected to the Yankees (though the Yankees were apparently unwilling to part with Gleyber Torres). The Astros are a top AL contender, the sort team looking to consolidate its position.

The possible return is not yet clear, though the Astros possess the sort of high-end prospects which the Pirates currently lack in their system. So, on the surface, this potential trade makes a lot of sense. A club headed for a rebuild sells two years of control of a top-of-the-rotation arm to a contender.

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Instead of covering free-agent signings like usual, members of baseball’s media have been forced to address the conspicuous lack of them this offseason. Dave outlined another possible explanation for the dearth of activity, noting that neither the Haves nor Have Nots are incentivized to spend money on a marginal win or two. There simply aren’t enough teams in the middle ground for whom a move might change their fortunes. There’s increasing speculation on and discussion about whether clubs might be colluding, as Zack Moser argues at BP Wrigleyville.

Wrote Moser:

“Free agency is the most important mechanism by which players can actually earn what they are due—after years of minor league, pre-arbitration, and arbitration salary suppression—and to argue for its obsolescence is to argue against the rights of labor in general.”

More than anything, I suspect the quiet offseason is a product of more clubs thinking alike and increasingly acting rationally. Emotion has largely been stripped out of the market (unless you can negotiate directly with an owner).

The other issue is the more potent luxury tax in the new CBA, which has essentially created a more rigid soft cap. There is an argument to be made that the players did this to themselves by focusing on issues like the qualifying offer instead of selecting bigger fights in the most recent round of bargaining.

While next year’s free-agent class — which features a rare wealth of young and talented players likely to be compensated handsomely — might give the impression that the system is operating in the players’ interest, it might just represent a temporary reprieve from the larger downward trajectory of the value of free agency. This is arguably the most important issue facing the MLBPA.

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Let’s begin by considering the experience of today’s top amateur pitchers. Each time a coveted prospect at the prep level begins his delivery to the plate, he’s confronted by the same vision: a crowd of radar guns raised in unison by the scouts looming just beyond the chain-link fence behind home plate. For them, the radar gun is the objective, truth-telling scouting tool, one that often decides draft-day fortunes.

One of the most notable features on a player’s Perfect Game profile page is not a pitchability score or makeup grade, but rather his top velocity reading. Riley Pint was a top-five overall pick in 2016 because he could hit triple digits in high school. And while the Rockies aren’t particularly worried, he’s demonstrated little command or feel for pitching thus far in his pro career.

It’s not that velocity does not matter. Velocity matters a great deal. It creates margin for error, reduces batters’ timing, and enhances the effects of breaking pitches and off-speed offerings.

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