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Zack Greinke looks to be worth what the Diamondbacks will be paying him. We still don’t have a complete idea of the structure of his contract, so it’s not like everything can be nailed down precisely, but he’s one of the most valuable pitchers in baseball, and he’s going to get paid like it. When you factor in everything he does — pitch, hit, defend — Greinke’s projected contract comes out looking a lot like his actual contract. So, based on our usual estimates, this is a totally acceptable free-agent deal. Good for Greinke, good for Arizona.

Here’s where it gets more complicated: those usual estimates don’t do much to account for team context. Let’s say the going rate for a win in free agency is $8 million. The specific number doesn’t matter. That’s what any team should expect to pay. But you can’t pay everyone free-agent money — that would mean, to expect 40 team WAR, you’d need a payroll of $320 million. $8 million might be the cost of a win in free agency, for every team, but not every team has the same total $/WAR target. As always, the biggest-spending teams have an advantage. Teams like the Diamondbacks need to be more careful.

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The next major free agent off the board is almost certainly going to be Zack Greinke. According to a wide number of reports, Greinke has narrowed his choices down to the Dodgers and Giants, and is pitting the two NL West rivals against each other with the goal of landing a six year deal at the highest annual average value of any player in baseball history; reportedly, he’s asking for $35 million per season, so if he gets six years, he’d end up with $210 million guaranteed. Even if he has to settle for five years and some kind of sixth year option, that’s still $175 million guaranteed at the AAV he’s seeking.

That’s a bit higher than the 5/$160M I predicted at the start of the off-season, and blows away the crowd’s expected 6/$156M valuation. On the one hand, when the Dodgers are bidding on someone, you can say that the dollars are irrelevant, because they have so much much money that the difference of a few million per year just doesn’t really matter. But this doesn’t seem like it’s just the Dodgers blowing away the competition to get the guy they want back; the Giants are reportedly being very competitive on price, making Greinke’s decision difficult.

And while Greinke is an excellent pitcher, there isn’t a lot of evidence that he’s a $200 million pitcher. For his career, he’s graded out as about a +4 WAR pitcher, regardless of whether you use ERA or FIP, and he’s headed into his age-32 season. Rationally, he’s going to get worse during his next deal, and even if you start him around his career average of +4 WAR — Steamer projects +4.1 for 2016 — then you’re looking at a pitching performance that projects to be worth about $150 million over the next six years.

Zack Greinke’s Contract Estimate — 6 yr / $151.2 M

Year	Age	WAR	$/WAR	Est. Value
2016	32	4.1	$8.0 M	$32.8 M
2017	33	3.6	$8.4 M	$30.2 M
2018	34	3.1	$8.8 M	$27.3 M
2019	35	2.6	$9.3 M	$24.1 M
2020	36	2.1	$9.7 M	$20.4 M
2021	37	1.6	$10.2 M	$16.3 M
Totals		17.1		$151.2 M

Assumptions
Value: $8M/WAR with 5.0% inflation
Aging Curve: +0.25 WAR/yr (18-27), 0 WAR/yr (28-30),-0.5 WAR/yr (31-37),-0.75 WAR/yr (> 37)

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After having typically appeared in the very hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have been released at FanGraphs the past couple years. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Kansas City Royals. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Other Projections: Atlanta.

Batters
If the depth chart below seems to depict a more dismal situation than one might expect from a club that’s appeared in each of the last two World Series, note that it excludes at least one player (Alex Gordon) who’s been instrumental to the team’s recent success and another (Ben Zobrist) who benefited the 2015 edition of the club after arriving at the July trade deadline.

It’s not surprising, in light of Gordon and Zobrist’s respective departures, that corner outfield and second base are the team’s two weakest positions according to ZiPS. One assumes that the front office regards these as priorities for the offseason.

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What the Orioles lack in sure-thing big-league prospects, they make up for with an impressive collection of back-end starters, relievers and fringe regular/bench guys. At the top of the list are the same guys as last year, with Dylan Bundy and Hunter Harvey headlining the future hopes of a cost-controlled stable of young players. Unfortunately, both are dealing with time missed due to injuries, and the O’s will have to determine how to deal with Bundy’s conundrum of not being quite ready to stick in the majors but being out of options.

Jomar Reyes and Chance Sisco are the greatest hope for the Orioles to develop a cornerstone position player, though not without risk. Sisco has defensive shortcomings and questionable power projection, and Reyes just finished up playing in A-ball as an 18-year-old. Still, what has made their Major League roster fun to watch with Dan Duquette at the helm has been their propensity for putting bench players and fringy starters into positions where they are able to thrive. Though the overall picture may leave this farm system looking grim, there probably isn’t a better team than the Orioles at getting the most out of what they have to stay competitive.

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The Red Sox just paid an enormous amount of money for the baseball-throwing services of David Price. The deal makes sense, as Boston struggled last year in that department, and now they’ve basically ensured, barring injury or anomalous performance, that they’ll struggle less in that department next season. Price is a an exceptional pitcher. That was a well-established fact before he was handed $30 million a year — dating back to his breakout 2010 campaign with the Rays, in fact. However, this past season provided glimpses at a repertoire that might facilitate the next stage of David Price, Pitcher, and it was centered around the use of his cutter and the improvement of his changeup.

Jeff went over the changes in Price’s cutter usage in late September, but the main premise is this: Price started throwing more cutters, throwing them harder, and locating them further inside to right-handed hitters toward the end of last season. As we’ll see, that impacted how successful his changeup was in different parts of the zone.

Now, the changeup: we often hear about how difficult they’re to learn. They’re a “feel” pitch, and we’re told that, because of that, they need a lot of work — work that usually comes from experience. It takes confidence to throw any type of pitch well, and when confidence is lacking in a particular offering, the pitcher is reluctant to throw it very often. This is a little different for left-handed pitchers: as Eno pointed out in this piece, left-handed starters throw changeups 65% more often than right-handers do. Lefties inherently have a difficult job because the majority of hitters are right-handed; to combat this, they throw more changeups, the pitch with the best reverse platoon split.

Price has always thrown a changeup, going back to his debut in the league. And, fitting the narrative that changeups are found with more experience, he’s thrown them with increased usage every season of his career. Take a look at his pitch usage every season since 2010:

In 2015, he cracked the 20% mark with his changeup usage, and he’s now transitioned firmly away from using his curveball as his main secondary pitch. In truth, he had already transitioned away from that approach beginning in 2013, but this year marked not only another increase in usage, but a few other adjustments that merit attention from us.

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After having typically appeared in the very hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have been released at FanGraphs in recent years. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Atlanta Braves. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Batters
While it’s possible that Atlanta might extract two or more wins from other positions around the field this next year by means of platooning, the algorithm inside Dan Szymborski’s computer indicates that there’s only one player likely to surpass that threshold by his own self — namely, Freddie Freeman. The first baseman has recorded declining batting figures over the last three seasons (150 wRC+ in 2013, 141 wRC+ in 2014, 133 wC+ in 2015), but almost all that is a product of fluctuating BABIPs — and even the low end of that range is sufficient to render him a solidly above-average player.

Unfortunately for the 2016 edition of the club, Freeman is the only above-average — and perhaps even just average-average — player on the team. Newly acquired shortstop Erick Aybar is a candidate to provide adequacy — and, given sufficient playing time, young catcher Christian Bethancourt could possibly do that, as well — but the roster offers little else in the way of a reliable source of wins.

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So David Price and the Red Sox have agreed to a seven-year deal worth $217 million, pending a physical that Price will presumably clear with some ease. As part of the terms, Price can opt out after year three, and sometimes pitchers do that, and sometimes they don’t. We’re in a weird place, where this was entirely predictable, for any number of reasons, and at the same time, we’re talking about the biggest pitcher contract in the history of the sport. That shouldn’t be something you just calmly nod at, but though this wasn’t a foregone conclusion, it was at least a popular guess. Price reunited with Dave Dombrowski on a team in need of an ace. Word is Boston blew the competition out of the water, which is what they figured to do.

Writing about these giant free-agent contracts is always a challenge. People want to know, “is it worth it?” and the bigger the contract, and the longer the contract, the more assumptions there are being made. You have to guess a player’s skill, and decline. You have to guess what a win is worth, now, and many years down the road. You have to guess at inflation, and around everything, you have to guess at a team’s success or failure. In the end, you’re left guessing. The teams themselves are left guessing. It’s not like they know the future much better than we do. It’s not like they understand injury risk much better than we do. Numbers are put on paper, and players sign on lines, and, subsequently, life happens. Each contract might turn out to be good, bad, or anywhere in between.

People want answers. There aren’t answers. Not that we know. Years down the road, we’ll all have opinions of the David Price contract with the Red Sox, but we can’t know what those opinions will be. I’m sorry to have to put it like that, but let’s leave this uncertainty behind, shall we? Let’s just focus on what we do know. That’s as much as can be done.

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“I don’t care about the money,” (Mike Ilitch) said. “I want the best players.”

The Tigers owner made that comment at yesterday’s press conference introducing Jordan Zimmermann as the newest member of Detroit’s rotation. For sure, Ilitch has indeed backed up that comment with significant spending over the years, giving out big money deals to acquire guys like Prince Fielder and Anibal Sanchez while still retaining players like Miguel Cabrera, Justin Verlander, and Victor Martinez. The Tigers have consistently run some of the highest payrolls in baseball over the last decade, and Ilitch clearly isn’t looking to rebuild, given his own age and that of most of the team’s players.

But while adding Zimmermann should help stabilize the rotation, the Tigers should not yet be done spending. If Ilitch is serious about not caring about his budget — he stated he’d even be willing to go over the luxury tax if need be — he has a real chance to back up those words this winter, because the Tigers were not one Jordan Zimmermann away from being the best team in the AL Central. Even with Zimmermann, they don’t currently look like one of the five best teams in the American League.

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Let’s begin by acknowledging the obvious: the entire premise of this piece is probably absurd. Considering that the Major League Baseball Players Association’s top priority over the last several decades has been to resist the implementation of a salary cap, it is highly unlikely that the players will reverse course and seriously consider agreeing to a cap on team payroll anytime soon. Opposition to the very notion of a salary cap is simply too deeply ingrained in the union’s culture.

But even if the players are unlikely to agree to a salary cap in the foreseeable future, there is a legitimate case to be made that they should at least consider the possibility during their upcoming collective bargaining negotiations with Major League Baseball.

Indeed, in many respects, the players have been subject to a de facto salary cap for quite some time without receiving any of the accompanying benefits.

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With the signing of J.A. Happ to a three year, $36 million contract, the Blue Jays seem to have turned the corner on their 2015 ace, David Price. So in that sense, for Blue Jays fans, the Happ signing is not a Happ-y occurrence… Has everybody left? Okay! Time to get down to business. While we are all focused on the big-name free agents, like Price, picking their new and surely happy homes, the almost-AL Champs north of the border have been somewhat quietly going about the business of doing lots of business, and that business has been assembling a rotation that can take advantage of their offense.

Happ is the third starting pitcher the Jays have brought in or back since the season ended. Recall that they re-signed Marco Estrada to a two year deal, and then traded Liam Hendriks to Oakland for Jesse Chavez. Now they bring back Happ, a member of the Jays as recently as 2014. With R.A. Dickey and Marcus Stroman, that’s five starting pitchers under team control for next season. While Happ represents likely the last and largest free agent outlay by the Blue Jays organization for a starting pitcher this offseason, that doesn’t mean the team is completely done. With Happ, the team has $92 million committed to seven players in 2016 and none of those seven are Josh Donaldson, meaning adding an eighth player will make that figure meaningfully larger. Last season Toronto spent $137 million, their highest payroll ever, and though reports are a bit conflicting, they don’t seem likely to go much beyond that if at all for 2016. Assuming that’s all true, fitting David Price’s salary in would have meant cutting some muscle from the payroll, and doing that likely would have meant cutting muscle from Toronto’s greatest strength, their offense.

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