Well, this is unexpected.

Source confirms: Carlos Santana in agreement with #Phillies, three years, $60M. First reported: @JonHeyman.

— Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) December 15, 2017

I’ve argued all winter that Santana was going to do a lot better than the 3/$45M the crowd projected for him, and put him at #1 on my Free Agent Bargains post, as I thought the expectations of what he would sign for were just too low. And obviously the Phillies agreed, pushing up to the same deal the Indians gave Edwin Encarnacion last winter. 3/$60M is a perfectly fair price for what Santana is, and might still actually be a good deal.

But there’s no way around this; the fit in Philly is weird and doesn’t really make sense. Santana is a short-term value, a guy who can help a team win right now, but probably won’t age extremely well. We currently have the Phillies projected for 74 wins. Santana doesn’t push them into playoff position.

And given that they already have Rhys Hoskins at first base and a crowded outfield, it’s not actually clear where Santana is going to play, or if the redistribution of talent to get him in their line-up will be a significant improvement. They could stick Santana at third, I guess, but he was horrible there, and Cleveland pulling the plug on that experiment should be a red flag if that’s the plan.

If it’s not the plan, then Hoskins is probably headed back to the outfield, a position they didn’t think he could play last year, which is why he spent four months in Triple-A destroying minor league pitching. And while he might be better than expected out there, he’s probably not going to be good, and he’d displace either Aaron Altherr or Nick Williams, both of whom look somewhat interesting.

So, yeah, I don’t know. Carlos Santana is good. This price is fine, and maybe even a bargain. Every contender with an opening at first base should have been in on this. The Phillies aren’t a contender and didn’t have a need at first base, so now this is going to force other things to happen, and unless those other things are turning one of their OFs into a super valuable pitcher, I’m not sure this actually makes them much better.

It’s impossible to judge this until we know the plan. But that we don’t know the plan makes this a little bit weird right now.

One player whom the baseball industry and vacationing families might not have expected to see this week at Disney’s sprawling Swan and Dolphin Resort, the site of this year’s Winter Meetings, was Melvin Upton Jr. You might have — particularly if you’re a Braves fans — erased Upton from your memory. But Upton was there to sell himself to interested clubs. He was ultimately successful.

More on that in a moment. First: a brief tour of Upton’s career, which has followed an unusual trajectory.

The former No. 2 overall pick and elite prospect was moved to the outfield early in his major-league career by the Rays due to his shortcomings at shortstop. And it was in Tampa’s center field where he emerged as a star-level player, averaging 3.6 WAR per season from 2007 to -12. Upton possessed a rare blend of plate discipline, power, and speed. He then signed a lucrative free-agent deal with the Braves. Things didn’t go well. He posted a -0.6 WAR in 2013 and a 0.3 mark in 2014. To rid themselves of the three years and $57 million remaining on Upton’s contract, the Braves included him with Craig Kimbrel in a package that sent both players to San Diego before the 2015 season.

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Last year, seven former players received at least 45% of the Hall of Fame vote while also earning less than the 75% necessary to actually get elected to the Hall. Seven former players, in other words, possessed sufficiently impressive credentials to merit serious consideration and were then all pushed to this year’s ballot for further review. Notably, this was one year after eight players returned to the ballot having received at least 40% of the previous season’s vote. The consequence of these developments? A very crowded ballot in 2018 — and that’s without even accounting for the newly eligible candidates.

It’s a state of affairs that’s rarely been duplicated in history. Back in the late 40s and early 50s, there was a considerable logjam of deserving candidates. Writers responded by including an average of nine-plus players per ballot, inducting 13 different players between 1951 and -55.

There was a similar issue in 1981, a year in which 10 players received at least 40% of Hall of Fame votes but only Bob Gibson was elected. The writers eventually elected Don Drysdale, Harmon Killebrew, Juan Marichal, and Hoyt Wilhelm, leaving the Veterans’ Committee to decide the rest. Jim Bunning, Nellie Fox, and Red Schoendienst, eventually earned a place in the Hall, while Gil Hodges and Maury Wills remain on the outside looking in.

It was shortly after that 1981 election that writers began to significantly downsize their ballots. Consider: from 1936 to 1986, the average number of players per ballot was at least seven for every season but 1946. From 1987 through 2013, however, the average decreased significantly, never once reaching the seven-per-ballot mark. The trend was particularly pronounced from 2006 to -12, when the average was just 5.7 players per ballot.

The last four cycles have seen an average of roughly eight votes per ballot, but with eight of the 12 Hall of Famers elected coming on the first try, ballots remain congested.

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The St. Louis Cardinals have had a busy couple of days. One outfielder came in, another left. The latter move sent Stephen Piscotty to the Oakland A’s in exchange for two middle-infield prospects, Yairo Munoz and Max Schrock. The trade was made partly to accommodate Piscotty, whose mother has ALS, but the deal does help St. Louis. Likewise, it fills a need for Oakland.

Let’s start with Piscotty. Coming off a 2.8 WAR season in 2016, Piscotty looked to be building a solid profile in St. Louis. Clearly the Cardinals thought so, as they signed him to a six-year, $33.5 million contract that included a $2 million bonus. By the second week of the 2017 season, he was hitting cleanup.

Things didn’t go that smoothly all year though. Piscotty missed 15 days in May due to a strained hamstring. In mid-July, he landed back on the DL with a strained right groin. They recalled him on Aug. 1 from that injury but then optioned him to the minors on Aug. 7, only to reverse course and bring him back to the majors on Aug. 20. In his stint in the minors after he was demoted, he hit .313/.421/.781 in Triple-A, suggesting that he didn’t really need to be demoted in the first place. We’ll chalk that up to a bit of Mike Matheny Logic. Expecting a player fresh off the DL to hit like normal is shortsighted at best. Amusingly, in his last plate appearance before he was demoted, Piscotty hit a pinch-hit double.

Here’s his lines, split around his DL stints.

The biggest takeaway here is that he never really had a big sample to his season. The second takeaway, for me, is that he was doing just fine before he hurt his hamstring. It looks as though injuries more or less ruined his season, with a dash of Matheny Logic costing him two weeks in August.

One thing that we can say for sure is that he was pressing in the middle of his three big stints. Let’s take a look at another table:

As you can see in this table, Piscotty was swinging at a much higher rate when he came back from his hamstring injury, but he wasn’t making contact at a higher rate. When he finally got healthy toward the end of the season, though, he was able to go back to swinging less, and he made slightly more contact. He also swung at far fewer pitches out of the zone. That’s a promising development.

Whether he can repeat the swing improvements is a matter that will play out in Oakland. On the left coast, he’ll switch from right field to left field but become a valuable cog in their outfield no matter the corner in which he plays.

Of the four players we see getting significant time in an Oakland outfield corner, Piscotty projects to be the second-best hitter (by wOBA) and the best player overall. And this projection is probably a little conservative. If healthy, Piscotty could easily it. Given the way his 2017 season unfolded, I’m willing to throw out his replacement-level performance and be a little optimistic.

Over in St. Louis, Munoz and Schrock have their fans. Both were among Eric’s top 24 A’s prospects last spring. Munoz made Chris’s midseason KATOH top-100 list this past year. And Schrock was a fixture on Carson’s Fringe Five list last season. At the time of his last Fringe Five appearance in August, he was the yearly leader, and he would eventually finish the season third on the Fringe Five leaderboard.

All of this is to say that Munoz, a shortstop, and Schrock, a second baseman, weren’t throw-ins. They could potentially be valuable players. That is furthered by the dearth of middle-infield talent in the St. Louis farm system. Eric selected the Cardinals for one of his first top-prospects pieces this offseason. Here’s how the talent broke down:

There are two shortstops but no second basemen, and one of the shortstops is a 40 future value (FV) player who hasn’t yet reached A-ball. Munoz, meanwhile, ascended to Triple-A last season, and Schrock should be ready for Triple-A this season. Schrock actually projects to post a 87 wRC+ in the majors this year, which puts him in league with utility infielder Greg Garcia. Neither Munoz nor Schrock is likely to crack the Opening Day roster, but they should provide good depth for the Cardinals, who always seem to manage to turn average prospects into solid major leaguers. Oakland, meanwhile, still has plenty of middle infielders on the farm and in the Show. Top prospect Franklin Barreto is ready for major-league duty but may not actually get it to start the season, for instance.

This is a win-win deal. The Cardinals had too many good outfielders and too few good middle infielders. The A’s had too many good middle infielders and too few good outfielders. And as an added bonus, Stephen Piscotty — who will probably be fine if he can he avoid last season’s leg injuries — gets to be closer to his ailing mother. It’s hard not to like this trade from all angles.

To say this year’s Winter Meetings were a relatively quiet affair would be accurate. While there were some moments of excitement (the trade of Marcell Ozuna to St. Louis, the Angels’ acquisition of Ian Kinsler), this offseason meetup in Orlando mostly produced rumors and reliever signings.

While the best free-agent reliever, Wade Davis, remains unsigned, he’s one of the few high-leverage arms left standing. Greg Holland, Brandon Kintzler, Jake McGee, Mike Minor, Juan Nicasio, and Joe Smith were all taken off the board in short order.

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The Marlins are having another firesale. Their most recent now-for-future trade sent Marcell Ozuna to St. Louis in return for four players, with hard-thrower Sandy Alcantara and fast-runner Magneuris Sierra as the primary pieces coming back. Eric likes both enough to give them 50 FV grades, as their carrying tools make it likely they’ll be MLB players in some form, and if they make any kind of strides, they could become impact players in Miami.

Up front, I will say that I’m not a huge fan of these kinds of bets. Alcantara is arm strength without performance, which is the basic profile of every guy who got taken in the Rule 5 draft this morning. Sierra is extremely fast but isn’t yet clearly an elite defender, so the questions about his bat are problematic. And while I understand that he was 21 last year, began the year in A-ball, and probably shouldn’t have faced MLB competition at that point in his development, I would like to present some very-small-sample Statcast numbers that are kind of scary.

500 players put at least 40 tracked balls in play last year. 497 of them hit their fly balls and line drives harder than Magneuris Sierra. The two that didn’t were pitchers, and not just any pitchers; two of the worst-hitting pitchers alive. Dickey has a career wRC+ of -4. Gonzalez has a career wRC+ of -36. These are the guys who hit the ball in the air like Magneuris Sierra just hit the ball in the air.

Jeff often talks about how looking at what a player does even once can show that the ability is there, if not the consistency. By looking at max distance, perhaps we can see something about what a hitter is currently capable of offensively, even in limited samples. Magneuris Sierra hit a ball no further than 331 feet. Six of the seven guys below that total were pitchers; the other one is basically out of baseball.

And if you’re wondering if this arbitrary cutoff just excludes a bunch of other big league hitters in the mid-330s, well, nope. After Sierra is Gio Gonzalez again (333 feet), then Marco Hernandez (341), then Kenta Maeda (348), then Travis Jankowski (351). Sierra was 20 feet short of the mark put up by an elite speed/defense guy who couldn’t hit well enough to stay in the big leagues.

Same idea as the max distance, but EV would give him credit for hitting it hard even if he hit it on the ground. Some guys just need launch angle changes, after all, so if he was hitting hard ground balls, that’s worth knowing. But, again, nope.

It’s five pitchers and Ronald Torreyes in Sierra’s territory. Torreyes is a utility infielder who is hanging around because he makes a lot of contact. Sierra doesn’t even really do that.

So, yeah. Magneuris Sierra is 21. These samples are tiny. Guys develop. He’s fast and might turn into an elite defender. There are lots of caveats here.

But if it’s me, and I’m trading a guy like Marcell Ozuna, I want some real stuff in return. Given what he just did in the Majors, I think it’s fair to wonder if he just falls outside the barrier of Major League offensive quality. Running is great, but Terrance Gore isn’t really a big leaguer. And if I’m the Marlins, I’d be pretty worried that I just traded for the next Terrance Gore.

On Wednesday evening, Yahoo’s Jeff Passan revealed the results of a physical conducted by the Angels on new signing Shohei Ohtani. Most notable among the findings in that document: a strain of the ulnar collateral ligament in Ohtani’s pitching arm. Sports Illustrated had previously reported on the receipt by Ohtani of a platelet-rich plasma shot in October.

From Passan’s piece:

“Although partial damage of UCL in deep layer of his right UCL exists,” the report said, “ … he is able to continue full baseball participation with sufficient elbow care program.”

[…]

When reached late Tuesday, Angels general manager Billy Eppler told Yahoo Sports: “Shohei underwent a thorough physical with MRI scans to both his elbow and his shoulder. Those are scans we conduct whenever we sign a pitcher. Based on the readings of those MRIs, there are not signs of acute trauma in the elbow. It looks consistent with players his age. We are pleased with the results of the physical and we are very happy to have the player.”

While it is a Grade 1 strain, the mildest of tears, it’s still a weakness in the finicky ligament that so many pitchers have torn and required Tommy John surgery to repair. While some pitchers with mild strains have been able to pitch through the issue — like Masahiro Tanaka, for example — others have not.

The teams that bid on Ohtani were aware of the elbow issue. I assume that every team besides the Marlins and Orioles would have gladly paid the posting fee and bonus even if Ohtani required a UCL reconstruction. Structurally sound ligament or not, Ohtani is still fascinating, still the top free agent of the offseason.

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With Giancarlo Stanton and Marcell Ozuna having been dealt, the Marlins might as well go all the way and sell everything they can.

Half-measures have no value at this point, in this process. This is an everything-must-go sale. The Marlins are bottoming out with or without Yelich, so they might as well cash in on his considerable value now for younger pieces that could conceivably be part of the next competitive Marlins team. And while the notion of a “competitive Marlins team” seems merely like a hypothetical at the moment, it could become a reality in the wake of a rebuild. That rebuild likely wouldn’t reach its apex until after 2022, though, the club’s last year of control over Yelich.

The Marlins have one of the weakest systems in baseball, and the returns from the Stanton and Ozuna deals are unlikely to elevate the team’s farm into the upper, or even middle, tier of the rankings.

While there are some reports suggesting that Miami intends to keep Yelich, that makes little sense at this point. The Marlins do seem open to fielding offers.

The club’s new ownership group has been criticized for dumping Stanton’s contract and trading Ozuna while failing to receive a single top-100 prospect in the process. Ozuna and Stanton combined for 96 home runs and 12 WAR last season.

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The Miami Marlins received a quartet of prospects – OF Magneuris Sierra, RHP Sandy Alcantara, RHP Zac Gallen, and LHP Daniel Castano — from St. Louis in exchange for All-Star outfielder Marcell Ozuna on Wednesday afternoon. Sierra and Alcantara ranked fourth and fifth, respectively, on our recent Cardinals farm system audit, while Gallen ranked 18th. Castano didn’t make the list, which has full reports regarding everyone I discuss below.

Alcantara reached the majors in 2017 but had a somewhat disappointing season, posting a 4.44 ERA at Double-A and a lower strikeout rate relative to his 2016 numbers. He throws hard, 95-99 as a starter and 98-101 in relief, and had one of the more promising curveballs in the minors entering this season. But Alcantara’s repertoire was tinkered with this year. Though he was throwing the curveball early in the season, it was scrapped in his major-league appearances in deference to a mediocre slider, perhaps because Alcantara was exhibiting a higher arm slot when he threw his curveball. In his 2017 Fall League run, Alcantara was utilizing both a curve and slider, though neither was very good. His changeup, which projects to plus, is now his best secondary pitch.

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Now armed with Shohei Ohtani, things have changed for the Angels. It was clear coming into the offseason that the team could use some help at second base. But with Ohtani in the fold, there’s been some extra urgency, as it’s become much easier to see the Angels making a charge for the playoffs. Earlier on Wednesday, according to our projections and depth charts, the Angels’ second-base situation was tied for the worst in the game. To address that, they’ve traded with the team that was ranked in eighth. The move:

Angels get:

• Ian Kinsler

Tigers get:

• Wilkel Hernandez
• Troy Montgomery

Hernandez is 18; he’s a lottery ticket. Montgomery is 23; he’s also a lottery ticket. Neither is a premium prospect, by any stretch of the word. The Tigers were never going to extract a high price for a guy in his mid-30s entering his walk year. Kinsler did just see his WAR drop by more than three wins. That, though, probably overstates the reality of what happened. And Kinsler seems like a solid upgrade for a team attempting to get a firm grip on one of the wild cards.

Over the past three seasons, Kinsler has seen his wOBA go from .335 to .356 to .313. When you see something like that for a 35-year-old, you get worried that maybe the wheels are coming off. And yet, by expected wOBA, Kinsler has gone from .314 to .328 to .326. There’s no difference at all between 2016 and 2017, and he looks the same by his contact rate. Kinsler didn’t lose his bat-to-ball skills. He didn’t lose any exit velocity. Kinsler, surely, isn’t at his peak, but it doesn’t seem like he’s coming off a major decline. He’s something like a league-average hitter. He does a little bit of everything across the board.

And then, in the field, over the past three seasons, Kinsler has rated as the best defensive second baseman by DRS. He ranks as the fourth-best defensive second baseman by UZR. He was strong again in 2017, and while I’ll concede that the defensive metrics can miss something with defensive alignments no longer so traditional, Kinsler would appear to be a plus in the field. He’ll even still steal the occasional base. Kinsler hasn’t been a sub-2 WAR player since debuting in 2006.

Kinsler isn’t going to last forever, and he’ll never be mistaken for a Jose Altuve, but for a modest cost, the Angels probably just got better by a couple of wins. And they should have the flexibility to do something at third base or in the bullpen, if they can’t address both. Only a month or two ago, the Angels seemed like they were trapped in between. Now they look like the fourth- or fifth-best team in the American League, with an expanding gap between the haves and the have-nots. Sure, it might not have worked without Ohtani. But Ohtani has landed. He’s on the Angels, and he’s made the picture all the more rosy. Thanks in part to Ohtani, a move like adding Kinsler could push the club into a playoff spot. Billy Eppler is rather enjoying this holiday season.