Scott Boras has done it again. After months of what appeared to be mild interest from the clubs one would assume would be in the bidding for the best free agent on the market, Boras found an unexpected bidder with $200 million burning a hole in their pockets. Or, more precisely, $210 million in this case, as the Nationals joined the club of teams paying $30 million per year for premium talent.

Or, at least, they did on paper. Scherzer signed a seven year contract, and in exchange for pitching for them for those seven years, the Nationals have agreed to pay him $210 million in salary. Divide $210 million by seven years and you get $30 million in AAV, which is how this deal will be reported. But because of how this deal was structured, it’s not really $30 million per year.

Instead, the Nationals will pay Scherzer $15 million per season, but do so for 14 years; essentially, they’ve deferred half of each season’s salary seven years into the future. Effectively, they signed Scherzer for $105 million over the seven years that he’ll pitch for them, and then they’ll pay him the next $105 million after the contract ends, making this the most deferred money contract in baseball history.

Teams have been deferring money in contracts forever — the most famous case is Bobby Bonilla’s deal with the Mets that has them paying him through the 2035 season — but never before have we seen this size of a deferral, and so this deal serves as a nice reminder that the payment terms of a deal can have an impact on the actual value of contract. And in this case, the significant deferral has a pretty big impact.

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Here’s maybe the simplest way to put this: a season ago, by his peripherals, Tanner Roark was about a three-win pitcher. By his actual runs allowed, he was about a five-win pitcher. He actually finished with a higher RA9-WAR than Jordan Zimmermann and Doug Fister and a lot of other guys too. At present, the Nationals will have to pitch Roark out of the bullpen, because the rotation doesn’t have space.

We knew the Max Scherzer negotiations were going to go on for a while. We knew that, eventually, Scherzer would sign somewhere, for a whole lot of years and something vaguely in the neighborhood of $200 million. He wasn’t going to wait until after the start of spring training, so it stood to reason Scherzer was nearing a decision even several days ago. The only question, really, was where he’d end up. People talked about the Tigers. People talked about the Cardinals. The actual team is the Nationals. And from the looks of things, that Nationals team might be a super-team.

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Earlier today, Kiley McDaniel published his consummately researched and demonstrably authoritative prospect list for the Washington Nationals. What follows is a different exercise than that, one much smaller in scope and designed to identify not Washington’s top overall prospects but rather the rookie-eligible players in the Nationals system who are most ready to produce wins at the major-league level in 2015 (regardless of whether they’re likely to receive the opportunity to do so). No attempt has been made, in other words, to account for future value.

Below are the top-five prospects in the Nationals system by projected WAR. To assemble this brief list, what I’ve done is to locate the Steamer 600 projections for all the prospects to whom McDaniel assessed a Future Value grade of 40 or greater. Hitters’ numbers are normalized to 550 plate appearances; starting pitchers’, to 150 innings — i.e. the playing-time thresholds at which a league-average player would produce a 2.0 WAR. Catcher projections are prorated to 415 plate appearances to account for their reduced playing time.

Note that, in many cases, defensive value has been calculated entirely by positional adjustment based on the relevant player’s minor-league defensive starts — which is to say, there has been no attempt to account for the runs a player is likely to save in the field. As a result, players with an impressive offensive profile relative to their position are sometimes perhaps overvalued — that is, in such cases where their actual defensive skills are sub-par.

5. Austin Voth, RHP (Profile)

Even though he features just a fringe-average fastball, Voth has had considerable success in his two seasons of affiliated baseball, producing strikeout and walk rates of 27.9% and 6.5% over 173.0 innings. And while he pitched in college, he’s also generally skewed towards the young side of average relative to his levels, so it’s not as though he’s merely preying on less experiences competition. He ended the 2014 season with Double-A Harrisburg and profiles as something better than a replacement-level starter entering 2015.

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I’m going to let you in on a little secret that might not actually really be much of a secret. The most difficult part of this job isn’t the writing or the analysis. At least, as far as I’m concerned, the most difficult part of this job is finding ideas, and finding them consistently. Once you have an idea, everything else can follow, but the thing about ideas is you’d like them to be original and, if you’re lucky, good. And interesting! Interesting is a big one. Maybe interesting and good ought to be categorized together.

For a while, I’ve personally been interested in Tyler Clippard. I’ve considered on several occasions writing about him, and about him specifically, but on every one of those occasions, I’ve talked myself out of it, because it just never seemed relevant enough. Generally, people haven’t woken up and thought, today I’d like to read in depth about Tyler Clippard. So I’ve had this idea on the back-burner for ages. But now? Now is the time to strike, since Clippard just got dealt from the Nationals to the A’s for Yunel Escobar. Tyler Clippard, to me, has always been interesting, but now he’s both interesting and topical, so, here goes nothing. Let me try to explain to you why Clippard is such a weird reliever.

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Evaluating the Prospects: Rangers, Rockies, D’Backs, Twins, Astros, Cubs, Reds, Phillies, Rays, Mets, Padres, Marlins, Nationals, Red Sox, White Sox & Orioles

Scouting Explained: Introduction, Hitting Pt 1 Pt 2 Pt 3 Pt 4 Pt 5 Pt 6

Amateur Coverage: 2015 Draft Rankings, 2015 July 2 Top Prospects & Latest on Yoan Moncada

I liked the Nationals’ deal to move Steven Souza for Trea Turner and Joe Ross and they’re doing a nice job finding prospects despite lower draft position and international bonus pool. Being aggressive with injured pitchers in the draft (Giolito) has already paid off big and may soon pay off again (Fedde).

Stacking this system up with the other 14 I’ve done so far, I realize the reason I don’t have a ton to say is the Nationals system is very average, which is an accomplishment given that they are perennial contenders focused on their big league team: they haven’t busted their international pool, gone after high profile international free agents or had the extra picks to spend as much as some other big market clubs with better systems.

Washington made the most of their time in the cellar (and were fortunate that it coincided with Bryce Harper‘s and Stephen Strasburg’s draft years), will make a deal for prospects when they like the value, have a couple high end prospects (which some teams with higher draft positions still don’t have), a solid middle class with okay depth, along with some longer shot upside bets to watch. I’d bet they end up in the 13-17 area when I rank the systems at the end of this process, which shows a large net positive contribution from the scouting and player development staffs.

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On the face of it, trading a shortstop for a reliever seems like a bad idea. Especially when the shortstop is under team control for a year longer. But teams aren’t vacuums, and you can’t cram all of your players into one depth chart without scraping some elbows. In other words, Yunel Escobar can’t pitch, and Tyler Clippard can. And so maybe this trade between the Athletics and Nationals works for both teams.

It seems from both projections, as well as general approximations of value, that Yunel Escobar can potentially give more value to a team than Tyler Clippard could. Escobar is projected to be just worse than the average major league baseball player by Steamer (1.8 WAR), while Clippard is more likely to be replacement than average (0.3 WAR). One pitches every other day for an inning, the other plays most innings at a premium defensive position.

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The MASN dispute between the Orioles and Nationals continues to wage on in New York state court. As a review, the fight involves an arbitration decision issued last year by MLB’s Revenue Sharing Definitions Committee (the “RSDC”), awarding the Nationals roughly $60 million dollars per year in broadcast rights fees from the Mid-Atlantic Sports Network. This award was nearly $30 million more per year than the team had previously been receiving, but far less than the roughly $120 million it had requested.

The Orioles, who own a majority share of the MASN network, have contested the arbitration outcome, contending that the arbitrators – the owners of the New York Mets, Pittsburgh Pirates, and Tampa Bay Rays – were biased in favor of the Nationals. MASN and the Orioles filed suit back in August, asking the court to overturn the arbitration decision. Last month, the court ordered MLB to produce documents in the case relating to commissioner-elect Rob Manfred’s involvement in the arbitration proceedings.

This week both MASN and the Orioles filed new papers with the court, further describing the alleged bias of MLB and its arbitrators.

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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 Washington Nationals. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Other Projections: Atlanta / Chicago AL / Colorado / Los Angeles AL / Miami / Milwaukee / Oakland / Tampa Bay.

Batters
The Nationals featured eight field players who produced a 1.2 WAR or better in 2014. All eight of them, with the exception of Adam LaRoche, appear in the depth-chart image below. All eight of them — again, with the exception of Adam LaRoche — are projected to produce a 1.8 WAR or better in 2014.

The weak point for the club remains the second-base position. Danny Espinosa is a defensive asset there and has above-average power (especially relative to the position), but his plate discipline has eroded almost entirely. According to ZiPS, middle infielder Wilmer Difo (1.6 WAR in 507 PA) is probably the club’s best option at second in terms of wins — although, insofar as he’s just barely played at High-A, that he’d play an important role at the major-league level appears unlikely.

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International baseball has been in the news often lately with the ongoing saga of Yoan Moncada (he’s in America now), the signing of Yasmany Tomas and yesterday’s news that Cuba-U.S. relations could be getting much better.  In recent news, at the yearly international scouting directors’ meeting at the Winter Meetings last week, sources tell me there was no talk about the recent controversial rule change and no talk about an international draft, as expected.

So much has been happening lately that you may have temporarily forgotten about last summer, when the Yankees obliterated the international amateur spending record (and recently added another prospect). If the early rumors and innuendo are any indication, the rest of baseball isn’t going to let the Yankees have the last word.

I already mentioned the Cubs as one of multiple teams expected to spend well past their bonus pool starting on July 2nd, 2015.  I had heard rumors of other clubs planning to get in the act when I wrote that, but the group keeps growing with each call I make, so I decided to survey the industry and see where we stand.  After surveying about a dozen international sources, here are the dozen clubs that scouts either are sure, pretty sure or at least very suspicious will be spending past their bonus pool, ranked in order of likelihood:

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The Winter Meetings revelry has passed. We’re still waiting on a few big trades to finally ‘consummate,’ but the list of free agents is less attractive by day. Before you turn down a chance at glory with the guys left waiting for a team, it’s probably a good idea to look at how badly you need them. This is not dating advice, but it sort of feels like it.

To that end, I’ve taking our depth charts and calculated a quick stat for ‘neediness.’ By averaging team WAR over 13 roster spots — the portion of the 25-man roster usually used for offense — and then looking at the difference between that average WAR and each position WAR, I’ve found a way to show where the biggest remaining lineup holes are.

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