Last week, we heard the official word that the New York Yankees had acquired negotiation rights to Japanese infielder Hiroyuki Nakajima. In order for teams to win rights to negotiate with players leaving Japan’s Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB) league, they must participate in a silent auction called the posting system. The winning bid goes to the NPB team currently in control of the player’s rights, unless the team cannot sign a major or minor league contract in 30 days.

The Nakajima posting seemed to go by with little fanfare. The Yankees won the rights to negotiate with Nakajima, bidding a paltry $2.5M, and promptly announced their intentions to make him their second utility infielder.

To me, it seems pretty clear the Yankees had no expectations of actually winning the bid. Not only do they lack a position for Nakajima, they have already been rumored to be seeking a trade partner. On top of that, their bid was low. I mean: Seriously low:

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Well that didn’t take long. Mere hours after signing Aramis Ramirez to man the hot corner for the next three seasons, the Milwaukee Brewers traded former third baseman Casey McGehee to the Pittsburgh Pirates for Jose Veras. While McGehee exceeded expectations with the Brewers initially — he slumped badly last season — and was eventually replaced by Jerry Hairston Jr. Will a change of scenery resurrect the bat of “Mighty Casey?”

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Episode 113
While the Winter Meetings produced a number of high-profile deals — including, for example, the Albert Pujols signing by the Los Angeles Angels — some other notable transactions have occurred in the four or so days since then. In fact, Monday afternoon saw reports of third baseman Aramis Ramirez signing a three-year deal with the Milwaukee Brewers. Managing Editor Dave Cameron discusses that, Matt Moore’s long-term extension with the Tampa Bay Rays, Rafael Furcal, and more.

Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @cistulli on Twitter.

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Audio after the jump. (Approximately 24 min. play time.)

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Last season, it was a common point of view that Yuniesky Betancourt and the Brewers’ massive weakness at shortstop would be the doom for Milwaukee’s bid at competitiveness. As bad as Betancourt was, the real reason the Brewers needed a 22-3 stretch in August to overtake the St. Louis Cardinals for the National League Central crown was the struggles of Casey McGehee at third. McGehee put up an atrocious .223/.280/.346 line — a 68 wRC+ — and was eventually replaced by Jerry Hairston Jr. come the playoffs.

The Brewers moved earlier to fill their need at shortstop, signing Alex Gonzalez to a one-year deal with a vesting option. Today, the Brewers completed the left side of their 2012 infield, adding Aramis Ramirez on a three-year deal worth somewhere between $34 million and $37 million — that is, you the readers were pretty dang close.

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Former Chicago Cubs third baseman Aramis Ramirez will sign a three-year contract with the Milwaukee Brewers, reports Bruce Levine of ESPN Chicago.

No terms have been released. Let’s try and guess.

FanGraphs readers projected something in the vicinity of a three-year, $36 million deal for Ramirez in the beginning of November.

FanGraphs readers have projected Ramirez to be a 2.8-win player in 2012. Assuming a 0.5 WAR decline each season and 5% inflation each season on $5 million per win, we’d expect this:

Year	WAR	$/Win	Salary
2012	2.8	5.00	$14.0
2013	2.3	5.25	$12.1	
2014	1.8	5.52	$9.9
Total	6.9	----	$36.0

So, in both caes, three years and $36 million — or an average annual value of $12 million — would appear to make sense.

UPDATE: Ken Rosenthal reports that the deal is in the $34M to $37M range.

The weekend produced one of the most surprising and most controversial stories of the past decade in baseball. Ryan Braun tested positive for increased testosterone levels in a random drug test during the 2011 Postseason, which violates the new steroid policy implemented by Major League Baseball.

Sources have suggested that Braun did not test positive for performance-enhancing drugs or steroids, but for a “prohibited substance” that caused his testosterone levels to jump significantly. Sources have also stated that the MLB has never seen results such as this and that there were “highly unusual circumstances” surrounding the test and the results — not limited to reported chain-of-custody issues within the testing and results that produced twice as much testosterone than has ever been seen in a previous test.

The saga began with the entire baseball world lamenting what can only be called a loss of innocence. One of the poster boys for the new, clean MLB tested positive for PEDs. This wasn’t supposed to happen anymore. Immediately, many folks even started to call for Braun’s MVP to be revoked.

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Doug Melvin and the Milwaukee Brewers took a calculated gamble by offering Francisco Rodriguez arbitration earlier this offseason. They expected the right-hander to decline arbitration in pursuit of a closer’s role and a multi-year deal elsewhere, and Milwaukee would garner two draft picks in the process.

Teams started snapping up available closers, however, and Rodriguez sat on the sidelines without many available options. The Padres were rumored to be interested at one point, but instead opted to trade for Huston Street. The Mets internally discussed a reunion with their former closer, but settled on Frank Francisco to likely handle the ninth inning.

In the end, too few viable landing spots were available to entice K-Rod to forgo arbitration and gamble on the open market. He accepted the Brewers’ offer of arbitration and will receive a salary somewhere just south of $13.5M — the amount he made in 2011 with the Mets and Brewers — and serve as the set-up man for John Axford.

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With Prince Fielder and Albert Pujols hitting the free-agent market this offseason, there have been many discussions on how the two of them will age. Lots of work has been done on how an average player ages, but Pujols and Fielder aren’t your average players. Which begs the question: How do stars age, compared to the rest of the league?

One of the hardest aspects when looking at elite players’ aging curves is knowing when to consider them elite. Several hitters who are playing right now appear to be sure-fire hall-of-famers — just as long as their careers don’t do an Andruw Jones nose-dive toward uselessness. To generate a list of players who seem headed toward stardom, I selected players since 1980 who had a total of 20-plus WAR during a three-year span. Also, I took the players who generated WAR of 9.5 or more in a single season.

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Some idle Holiday Internetting has compelled the author of this piece to point his web browser in the direction of National League MVP Ryan Braun’s player profile, which in turn has compelled the author to discover something about Braun’s plate-discipline numbers — namely, that they have improved in a decidedly regular fashion since his rookie season of 2007.

Here we can see that improvement in graph form:

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The race between Ryan Braun and Matt Kemp for National League MVP is so very close. Most analysts lean toward Kemp: he played 11 more games, hit six more home runs, stole seven more bases and ended the season with a higher WAR (8.7 vs. 7.8 for Braun).

Let me tell you why Ryan Braun should be the MVP.

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