I spend a lot of time thinking about who could be the next Mike Trout. There’s not a good answer yet. Nobody is the next Mike Trout. Francisco Lindor is not yet as good as Mike Trout. Do not under-appreciate Mike Trout! He’s amazing. Everybody take a moment to remember how Mike Trout is the very best that there is. Okay, good, thank you for doing that.

When I think about other potential 9-WAR players, though, my default is to consider elite defenders who might suddenly add some power. Because, of course, they’d be starting from a high baseline, and how many players have we seen add considerable pop over the past few seasons? I’ve had my eye on certain guys, and it’s Lindor who’s presently catching my attention. Lindor is an elite defender. Check. He occupies a premium defensive position. Check. We know he has a steady and disciplined approach. Check. Now we could be seeing the emergence of power. Lindor is 23 years old.

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Thomas Pannone was almost an outfielder in the Cubs system. Instead, he’s baffling batters and racking up zeroes for the Lynchburg Hillcats. The 22-year-old left-hander has made four starts for Cleveland’s High-A affiliate and has yet to be charged with an earned run. Stingy to a fault, he’s fanned 31 batters and allowed just seven hits in 20.2 innings.

His scoreless streak — save for one unearned marker on April 12 — is even more impressive when you go back to last year. Counting his final three appearances in 2016, Pannone has now gone 38 consecutive innings without blemishing his ERA.

The Indians drafted Pannone out of the College of Southern Nevada in the ninth round of the 2013 draft. A year earlier, he’d bypassed an opportunity to sign with a team which liked him more for his bat than for his arm.

“I was going to be an outfielder,” explained Pannone, who was selected by Chicago’s NL club in the 33rd round out of a Rhode Island high school. “But between how late in the draft it was, and not being sure I was fully ready to start a pro career, I went to a junior college instead. One thing led to another, and I was drafted as a pitcher the following summer.”

That wasn’t what Pannone had in mind when he went west.

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Yandy Diaz was already interesting before the 2017 season began. His combination of offensive and defensive skills compelled Carson Cistulli to include him often as a member of the Fringe Five, a group that’s building quite a track record.

He became more interesting early this season, however, when he made the Indians’ 25-man roster and filled in at third base (while Jose Ramirez shifted to second base) in the absence of an injured Jason Kipnis. While with the major-league club, Diaz had an Eric Thames-like out-of-zone swing rate (16.1%), demonstrated a discerning eye, and recorded a swinging-strike rate of just 8.0%. Of the first 42 major-league pitches he saw, he swung and missed only twice.

Now that Kipnis has been activated from the disabled list, Diaz is back in Triple-A. But Diaz continues to offer some interest and remains worthy of attention even as a member of the Columbus Clippers — not just because he has a Jose Ramirez starter kit (contact and on-base skills plus defensive versatility), but because perhaps no professional player could benefit more from adding lift to his swing.

Despite a career minor-league slash line of .307/.406/.411 and the ability to play on the left side of the infield, Diaz was an overlooked prospect — partly because he was a relatively older and lower-budget signing out of Cuba in 2011, but also because of his lack of power.

Diaz is a strong man. Here’s a photo to prove it:

And here’s the Statcast data to prove it: Diaz’s average exit velocity as a major leaguer was 95.2 mph over a sample of 42 batted balls. That’s elite, ranking ninth in the sport.

But despite those guns and that exit velo, Diaz has never reached double-digit home-run totals at any minor-league stop. Last season, he hit seven home runs over 416 Triple-A plate appearances.

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Cleveland’s got a good pitching staff. It’s part of what got them to the World Series last year, and it’s what they’re hoping to ride to another playoff berth. They’re blessed with excellent arms like Corey Kluber, Andrew Miller, Carlos Carrasco, Cody Allen and Danny Salazar.

Michael Martinez is not, by trade, a pitcher. He’s technically a hitter, but his career 33 wRC+ doesn’t exactly support that claim very well. The best way to describe Martinez from a job description standpoint would be to say that he’s a fielder, a utilityman, perhaps. He’s a survivor, who’s managed to stick on big league rosters in some capacity since 2011 despite being a nearly nonexistent asset at the plate. Martinez is the ultimate 25th man, who will be forever emblazoned in the visuals of history by making the out that won the Cubs their first World Series in more than a century. One of the jobs of a 25th man is to do anything that is required of him. And that means that in certain situations he’s a pitcher, too.

Cleveland was losing 10-4 to Chicago in the ninth inning last night, following a disastrous outing from Josh Tomlin. Rather than burn another reliever, Terry Francona turned to Martinez, his trusty 25th man. For the first time in his big league career, he took the mound. Martinez had somehow avoided the task until now, despite being the last man on the bench for some bad Phillies teams. The only other time he’d pitched was all the way back in A-ball in 2007, when he’d gotten into two games and totaled 1.2 innings of work. He did not allow a hit in either outing, because A-ball is a magical place.

The big leagues are not A-ball. The big leagues are full of hitters who sneeze at A-ball pitching, and one or two who hit like Michael Martinez. Everyone on the White Sox is technically a big league hitter. Yet we can all agree that there are more difficult assignments than innings composed of Carlos Sanchez, Omar Narvaez, Leury Garcia, and Tim Anderson.

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After having produced one of the best overall lines on Cleveland’s World Series club and subsequently received a $26 million extension, Jose Ramirez enters the 2017 campaign as a core member of the Indians’ major-league club. For as obvious as that sounds, it represents a departure from his status at this same point last year.

Known as a useful defender with good contact skills, Ramirez also began the 2016 campaign having produced just a 78 wRC+ over his first 635 major-league plate appearances (a number of which he’d compiled while holding Francisco Lindor‘s place before the latter’s promotion). Nevertheless, he exhibited sufficient promise and present-day skill to make the Opening Day club and was used in a multi-positional role over the first four months of Cleveland’s season, recording starts at second base, third base, shortstop, and left field — the majority coming at that last position. When teammate Juan Uribe’s season ended at the end of July, Ramirez assumed third-base duties on a regular basis. Supplementing his contact ability with unprecedented power, Ramirez ultimately produced a nearly five-win season.

Officially speaking, Ramirez is now Cleveland’s starting third baseman. He also retains positional flexibility, however. So when it became clear that Jason Kipnis would have to begin the season on the disabled list, Ramirez represented an obvious choice to slide across the infield. The less obvious choice was who should fill the spot vacated by Ramirez.

One of the solutions to that quandary is utilityman Michael Martinez. Martinez has the benefit and drawback, from Cleveland’s perspective, of being a known commodity. One knows that Martinez can field almost any position. One also knows, however, that he can’t hit sufficiently to support any of them. He’s the Platonic ideal of a replacement player.

The other solution is Yandy Diaz. Signed out of Cuba in 2013 for $300,000, Diaz has been a fixture within the author’s Fringe Five columm, appearing among the top-10 finishers on the arbitrarily calculated leaderboards for that column both in 2015 and 2016. In many ways, Diaz is a clone of Ramirez.

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Over the weekend, Cleveland made a point of locking up another one of their young core players, signing Jose Ramirez to a five-year, $26 million contract that gives him significant guaranteed income in exchange for control over his first three free-agent years. Ramirez joins Corey Kluber, Jason Kipnis, Michael Brantley, Yan Gomes, Carlos Carrasco, and Carlos Santana as members of the team’s core who have signed long-term deals with the club before reaching free agency, and Cleveland’s ability to get these guys signed before they get expensive is one of the reasons they were able to sign Edwin Encarnacion to be a $20 million DH this winter.

Cleveland isn’t a traditional big spender in free agency, but with so many players signed to early-career contracts, they had the flexibility to be a buyer this winter, and they took advantage of it. While they’ve done a lot of things right, this is one of the primary reasons Cleveland has built a contender out of a modest payroll and a farm system that hasn’t generally been ranked among the game’s best. The thing they’ve done very well is develop good players from guys who weren’t considered great prospects, and then get them signed long-term as soon as possible.

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Previous editions: AL East / NL East.

Opening Day is just over the horizon, though we have to navigate the remainder of the World Baseball Classic and the entirety of March Madness first. In the meantime, let’s continue our look at the upcoming season, with the third of our six divisional previews.

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Three years ago, seven major-league position players who had yet to reach salary arbitration agreed to contracts with their teams, conceding multiple free-agent seasons in the process. Most of those deals have turned into bargains: Matt Carpenter, Jason Kipnis, Starling Marte, and Mike Trout have all played at a high level since then. This came one year after Paul Goldschmidt and Anthony Rizzo signed contracts that have proved to be incredibly valuable, as well.

In the last two years, however, just four players have signed similar extensions. There are quite a few potential reasons, the most likely being that players are more reluctant to sign deals that give away free agency so easily. It’s also possible that teams haven’t found as many potential candidates who are worthy of a long-term investment.

When I looked at potential extension candidates last year, I noted that there weren’t a great many players who were ideally suited for extensions. Only Gregory Polanco and Kolten Wong ultimately signed extensions, so my hypothesis seems to have been accurate. Teams have made up somewhat for lost time this winter, though, as players like Ender Inciarte, Carlos Martinez, and Wil Myers — all of whom were mentioned as candidates last year — reached extensions this offseason. The guarantees doled out by the teams — in particular, the $83 million to Wil Myers and the $51 million to Carlos Martinez — illustrate why signing players to extensions before they reach free agency is much more advantageous for the teams. While the deals for Myers and Martinez could still prove to be bargains, compare the figures they received to the deals signed by position players in the three previous offseasons.

All of these players signed away two — or, in some cases, three — years of free agency in exchange for a decent guaranteed contract. While a couple years might seem like just a small delay to free agency, teams generally received a 60% surplus on every dollar invested in contracts like these, and the recent extensions seem unlikely to break that pattern.

Most of these guarantees are around $30 million or so, which is significantly less than the deals for Myers and Martinez that were signed one year along in service time. Players take a significant risk by turning down money between their second year and third year in the league, as they have to play that season on a near-minimum salary. Once they hit arbitration and benefit from the security that comes along with a million-dollar contract, there’s less incentive to take a guarantee, especially with free agency just a few years away.

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The Indians have had a successful offseason, as noted by Craig Edwards last week and they kept winning the offseason on Thursday, agreeing with left-handed reliever Boone Logan on a one-year deal with an option, as first reported by Ken Rosenthal.

Entering Thursday, Cleveland had only one lefty in its bullpen, albeit perhaps the game’s best left-handed reliever in Andrew Miller. Now they have two who can miss bats, and presumably Logan can fit a matchup role that will free Miller to be used in a more versatile manner by Cleveland manager Terry Francona.

Last season with the Rockies, Logan held left-handed hitters to a .139/.222/225 slash line and since 2014 he’s limited lefties to a .236/.330/.392 slash line.

Francona said earlier this winter he didn’t just want any lefty added to the bullpen, he wanted an effective one. And according to T.J. Zuppe, Logan was on the Indians’ radar last trade deadline.

Logan didn’t make the cut of FanGraphs’ top-50 free agents this offseason, but he did come in at No. 50 on at CBSSports and ranked 37th according to MLB Trade Rumors. So for Cleveland to sign Logan in February to a one-year deal with an option seems like a winning transaction for a club, which is projected to win the AL Central and return to the postseason.

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Sit ’round the fire, children, and let me tell you a tale. Once there was a man named Wily Mo Peña. He did things like this.

Wily Mo could hit the ball just about as far as anyone. He didn’t make contact very often, but when he did, the ball flew as if someone had set off a brick of C-4 behind it. Wily Mo Peña was a human launching pad, but a flawed one. In 1,845 big-league games between 2002 and 2011, he accumulated just 0.4 WAR. That’s because Peña generally can’t play defense, and he doesn’t walk very much either. He’s a one-trick pony of the highest order, a poor man’s Dave Kingman. It is not surprising that he took his talents to Japan. There he thrived. Now, he has returned.

After taking 2016 off, Peña has signed a minor-league deal with Cleveland, and there’s a clause in his contract that stipulates that he can make $700,000 if he makes the big-league team. He’ll serve as an insurance policy for Edwin Encarnacion and Carlos Santana, given that both sluggers are over 30, though he’ll need to contend with Chris Colabello. Peña should be adequate as a stopgap DH should the big club need him. Ken Rosenthal reports that he and Encarnacion are close and that Cleveland signed him after watching him work out with Encarnacion.

This is a move of little to no significance. It’s hard to imagine a scenario in which Wily Mo Peña plays a crucial role for Cleveland during the playoff push, to say nothing of imagining a Wily Mo Peña home run winning a World Series game. Peña is a dinosaur sort of player from a bygone era. He is a 90s’ kind of slugger in a younger more athletic game, a game in which the man who led the National League in homers in 2016 may have to retrace Peña’s steps to Japan.

Sports are entertainment, though, and we should celebrate that we may once again be entertained by Wily Mo Peña. Goodness knows the fans in Japan did.

It would be surprising if Peña got more than 150-200 plate appearances with the big club, if any at all. We can only hope that we’re blessed with even just one more massive home run. He may be capable of peppering the massive scoreboard at Progressive Field. All that remains to be seen if he’s given the chance to do so.