While next offseason’s historic free-agent class will create quite the hot-stove spectacle — maybe the most memorable in the free-agency era — the current class isn’t without intrigue, either. Yu Darvish and Shohei Ohtani are likely to be the top prizes. That said, first base is shaping up to be an interesting position, too.

Yonder Alonso, Lucas Duda, Eric Hosmer, Logan Morrison, and Carlos Santana, are each available to bidders on the market. Hosmer is the top brand name amongst the group and had the best season, recording a 4.1 WAR and 135 wRC+ in 2017, each mark a career best. Hosmer is among the young players in the game who elected not to trade in earning potential for security in the form of a pre-arbitration contract extension, and he’s being rewarded by entering the market in his prime, having just completed his age-27 season.

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The Dodgers have an unusual surplus: they’re hoarding all the framing runs. Well, many of the framing runs.

Framing and receiving is just another area where the club separated itself from the field in 2017. Even as pitch-framing data went insane this last year, the Dodgers nevertheless extracted considerable value from their catchers, a development illustrated by the following chart.

The Dodgers have on their roster two of the game’s great receivers, Austin Barnes and Yasmani Grandal, each of whom who possess above-average offensive skills for the position.

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There’s a growing number of windmills sprouting around the country. One can see fields of them from plane windows at 30,000 feet. There’s even a giant one on the east side of Cleveland that’s visible, on a clear day, across Lake Erie from the shores of Bay Village, Ohio, a small municipality on the west side of the city, where this author now resides. The windmills are harnessing the power of the wind to create clean energy, which can be delivered anywhere, I presume, including the car-charging stations I’ve noticed pop up in places like the nearby Whole Foods parking lot. Despite very conspicuous advances and installations, we’re apparently decades away — perhaps not until the 2040s — from reaching Peak Oil, according to Reuters. Clean and renewable energy is taking some time to gain market share.

Some innovations take time to grab hold, others advance quickly. It can be difficult to project when a trend will reach its high-water mark. But we might have seen a prominent 21st trend and strategy reach that point in major-league baseball. In 2016, after a dramatic rise this decade, baseball might have reached Peak Shift.

This year, shifts declined for the first time since their rapid rise earlier in the decade. Ten years ago, shifts were being used against left-handed power hitters exclusively. There wasn’t a shift employed against a right-handed hitter, according to the Baseball Info Solutions database, until June 11, 2009, when the Phillies moved three infielders to the left side of second base against Gary Sheffield. At that point, in the late 2000s, the Rays and Brewers were at the vanguard of wholesale shifting. In 2012, league-wide shift usage doubled, though it was still modest in terms of raw numbers. Gradually more teams bought in — teams like the Pirates, who increased their shift usage by 400% from 2012 to 2013. In 2014, usage doubled again, as the 10,000-shift mark was breached for the first time. The practice has since proliferated across the sport.

From 2012 to -16, shift usage grew by at least 34.8% each season.

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If Shohei Ohtani isn’t able to play in the major leagues next season, that would quickly make Yu Darvish the clear No. 1 free agent available this winter — and perhaps the only clear top-of-rotation arm. And even if Ohtani is cleared to migrate across the Pacific to play professional baseball, Darvish is likely to walk away as the highest-paid player from this free-agent class.

Yes, Darvish’s awful World Series performance is still fresh in the collective consciousness, but that shouldn’t negate his late-season work with the Dodgers. After some data-informed tweaks (documented here by Eno and also by Andy McCullough of the L.A. Times), Darvish was excellent. With the Dodgers in the second half, the right-hander struck out 61 and walked 13 in 49 innings.

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While the path to the decision took something of a circuitous route over the last couple of seasons, one of the least surprising developments of the weekend was the Pirates’ announcement that they would exercise Andrew McCutchen’s $14.5 million club option for 2018.

After an inexplicable 0.6 WAR campaign in 2016 and an ice-cold start to 2017, McCutchen finally figured things out and rebounded to finish the season with a .279/.363/.486 slash line and 3.7 WAR. If the status of McCutchen’s option was ever in doubt in May, he rendered it a non-issue with a massive June and July, resembling a legitimate superstar during that and other stretches.

According to Matt Swartz’s research, the cost of a win was $9 million from 2014 to -16. Steamer projects McCutchen to post a 3.1 WAR season. The outfielder could reasonably contribute close to $30 million in production, in other words. That’s considerable surplus value at the end of what has been one of the most club-friendly deals of the 21st century.

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Even though the 2017 season officially ended last week, the preparations for next year have been underway for some time. In a sense, teams have been planning for 2018 for years. After all, it can take a high-school draft pick five-plus seasons to receive the sort of development and polish necessary to survive in the major leagues. Balancing the future and the present is a significant task for a front office. And since the close of the season, teams have been gathering and meeting at their respective operational headquarters to narrow strategies on how to attack this winter and how to best position themselves in 2018 and beyond.

Just over a month ago, after an Alex Gordon home run set the major-league record for total homers in a season, I arrived at the (tentative) conclusion that it would be more challenging to plan for the future in today’s game. Consider: just three years ago, the game was in the midst of a depressed run environment. There was this idea that the future of offense was going to be defined by flat swings and line drives.

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Following one of the most remarkable World Series of all time, in the wake of a matchup defined by historically wild swings in win probability, the Houston Astros engaged in a relatively subdued title celebration on the infield turf of Dodger Stadium. Given that Game 7 was one of the few four-hour stretches in the series that lacked constant tension and drama, it makes sense. As Charlie Morton finished off the Dodgers in the final innings, the conclusion seemed inevitable.

Following the game, the architect of the title, Astros GM Jeffrey Luhnow, briefly took the post-game microphone, addressing an emptying stadium and a national television audience. He did what most winning executives do in such situations: he thanked ownership for their patience and support.

As mundane as Luhnow’s words might have seemed, it’s likely that they transcended mere cliche. Because, where other clubs typically experience ebbs and flows, the Astros took one of the most extreme routes to a title in the game’s history. Ownership had to be open to a lot of losing. Because of the result, however, it’s a path down which other clubs will likely attempt to travel. In a copycat industry such as this one, everyone wants to be like, or at least learn from, the last team standing.

How can your team be like the Astros?

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The Dodgers’ reward for having the best record in the majors this year, for recording three more wins than the Astros during the regular season, is this: they host the final game of the 2017 major-league campaign, Game 7 of the World Series, tonight.

Home-field advantage is a real phenomenon. In the game’s history, World Series Game 7 victors have been split evenly, 19-19, between home and road teams. But that’s a fairly small sample. In baseball, the home team typically wins 54% of regular-season games, and that rate holds up as a constant decade after decade, era after era.

Conventional wisdom suggests that home-field advantage is the result of multiple advantages enjoyed by the home team: the right to bat last, the ability to tailor a roster specifically to the park, a certain comfort with the surroundings, and the absence of travel-related fatigue (such as might be experienced by the visitors). All of those elements, perhaps, play a role. But the salient factor behind home-field advantage is umpire bias, particularly regarding borderline strike-ball calls. University of Chicago behavioral economist Tobias Moskowitz and Sports Illustrated writer L. Jon Wertheim documented convincing evidence in support of that observation in their book Scorecasting.

The authors used pitch-tracking data to quantify this concept.

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A SOUTHWEST FLIGHT HIGH ABOVE THE MIDDLE WEST — While waiting to board my return flight to Cleveland from Houston on Monday morning, I scrolled through the news on my phone, reading about the madness I’d witnessed at Minute Maid Park the night before. In the process, I came across something of interest, a comment made by Brandon Morrow following Game 5.

The Dodger reliever was candid and contrite in the wake of his club’s Game 5 loss. In the clubhouse afterwards, speaking to Yahoo! and other reporters, Morrow shouldered the blame, as some standup athletes will do. While elaborating on the reasons for his guilt, he produced a comment worthy of greater examination.

“We had a plan,” Morrow said. “And we’re very plan-oriented and try to stick to that. I made them deviate away.”

See, Morrow wasn’t supposed to be available Sunday night. Dodgers manager David Roberts had said before the game that he wouldn’t be available, having pitched in every game of the series following his emergence as one of Roberts’ most trusted relievers.

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