The Mystery Team strikes again. After months of rumors that had Prince Fielder going to Washington, Texas, Baltimore, Seattle, and everywhere in between except Detroit, the Tigers decided to respond to Victor Martinez’s knee injury in the most extreme way possible – giving Prince Fielder an enormous amount of money.

As first reported by Tim Brown of Yahoo Sports, with the details added by Jon Heyman, Fielder is set to receive $214 million over the next nine years, or just under $24 million per season. Essentially, he got the same deal as Albert Pujols, just minus one year in length. This deal ranks behind only that deal and the two Alex Rodriguez contracts as the largest investment in the history of the sport, so Fielder has essentially been paid at a level that puts him in the same company as two inner-circle Hall of Famers. No pressure or anything.

Let’s start with this deal from the Tigers perspective. As I wrote yesterday, the Tigers couldn’t afford to settle for an inferior DH replacement after losing Victor Martinez for the season with an ACL tear. With Miguel Cabrera and Justin Verlander in their primes, the team was essentially committed to contending, but they didn’t have a championship roster around them. The Tigers were absolutely in the sweet spot of the win curve where improving the roster could have the most impact. Adding Fielder pushes them from a solid team that would be in the mix to win a bad division up to being able to plan on playing in October and potentially challenging for a World Series title. After Martinez went down, there was probably no team in baseball that needed Fielder more than Detroit.

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When it was announced last week that Victor Martinez suffered a torn ACL during off-season workouts, I advised on Twitter that we not “overreact” to the news. While Martinez was a good player in his first year for the Tigers, his value on the field was likely overstated through having a high average and getting to bat behind Miguel Cabrera. That combination led to 103 RBIs and a 16th place finish on the AL MVP balloting, but his 130 wRC+ as a guy who spent most of his time at DH led to just +2.9 WAR. He was essentially the Tigers version of Michael Young – a nice player, but not one who couldn’t be replaced with a little bit of effort.

The most obvious candidate to step into Martinez’s vacated role was Carlos Pena, who posted a similar-ish 126 wRC+ last year, even if he got there in a very different way. However, he settled up with Tampa Bay last week, and now the team is kicking the tires on the likes of Johnny Damon, Raul Ibanez, Hideki Matsui, and yes, even Juan Pierre. Those four players combined for +0.1 WAR last year, and Damon was the only one who even resembled a guy who a contender should be willing to give regular playing time to. If the team does decide to pick a replacement out of that crop, then Martinez’s loss will represent a pretty significant downgrade.

And, honestly, I’m not sure the Tigers are in a position to be accepting that kind of loss right now. While the AL Central is neck-and-neck with the NL West for the title of weakest division in baseball, both the Indians and Royals have enough interesting young talent on hand to win 90+ games if things break right. And, given all the regression that Detroit needs to be expecting from the talent they are retaining from last year’s division winning roster, winning 90+ looks like it could be a challenge.

This isn’t to say that Detroit has a bad team, but they do need to prepare for a number of their most important players from 2011 to perform significantly worse in 2012.

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Catching is supposed to be the activity that slowly robs young men of their athleticism, but it was training that felled Victor Martinez. After keeping his legs fresh while being a primary catcher for seven years, the 33-year-old tore his ACL while ramping up his regimen for the coming season. Injuries can come at any time, and now the Tigers have a hole in their lineup that they need to fill.

How might they fill that hole?

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Hall of Fame ballots are due at the end of the week, so this time of year, a lot of attention turns to which players belong in Cooperstown. The expectation this year is that Barry Larkin is going to get in, making him the 22nd shortstop (minimum 50% games played at the position) to get enshrined. I’m in full support of Larkin’s induction, and think he’s an excellent candidate who should have gotten in a year ago. But he’s not the only shortstop on the ballot who deserves legitimate consideration.

This year will be Alan Trammell’s 11th year on the ballot, and given how little momentum he’s garnered since debuting in 2002 (going from 15.7% to just 24.3% last year), he likely has no real chance of getting elected by the BBWAA. Unfortunately for Trammell, he didn’t hit any of the big milestone numbers that make voters take notice, and he excelled in the areas that aren’t generally valued all that highly by the voters. With just 2,315 hits and secondary numbers that aren’t overly exciting, Trammell is generally seen as a Hall of Very Good guy, a quality player who just wasn’t quite great enough to get a plaque in upstate New York.

However, I think Trammell has a better case than is generally accepted, and his candidacy points out why looking at career totals is not the best way to evaluate a player’s Hall of Fame worthiness.

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Fan Projection Target season is upon us, a time for FanGraphs readers to show those computers what’s what and out-project them using only intuitive genius. In past seasons, relievers have sometimes suffered from a relative lack of ballots, and while I am not sure this is true of all the relievers mentioned below, it might be a good place to start getting into projecting bullpens. How will some notable 2011 rookie relievers fare in 2011?

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Tyler Greene is literally behind Rafael Furcal in St. Louis.

Table of Contents
Here’s the table of contents for today’s edition of Offseason Notes.

1. Assorted Headlines
2. Projecting: ZiPS for St. Louis
3. Crowdsourcing Broadcasters: Detroit Television

Assorted Headlines
Baltimore Signs Outfielder Chavez
The Baltimore Orioles have signed outfielder Endy Chavez to a one-year, $1.5 million deal, reports Dan Connolly of the Baltimore Sun. Chavez, who turns 34 in February, had a bounceback season in 2011, posting a 1.5 WAR in 274 plate appearances without the aid of a particularly inflated BABIP (.321) or UZR (2.1).

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In a move sure to send major shock waves through the free agent market, the Detroit Tigers have reportedly re-signed Ramon Santiago to a two-year, $4.2 million contract. The city of Detroit has declared a municipal holiday to celebrate the return of their long-time utility infielder…. But seriously, folks, while this looks (and in some way is) like a contending team making a sound-if-unexceptional decision to bring back a helpful utility player, this is a pretty interesting signing. It is not just that Santiago is better than he’s being paid to be. Bringing back Santiago also opens up possibilities for the Tigers this off-season if they are willing to explore them.

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Major League Baseball will announce the winner of the 2011 American League Most Valuable Player this afternoon. While sabermetric tools such as Wins Above Replacement are very helpful, and perhaps even necessary for sorting out which players have been the most valuable, they are not necessarily sufficient by themselves for deciding such issues. As I discussed in an earlier (no-longer-so-“official”) post on using WAR to help determine the MVP, WAR and its cousins should start conversations about the MVP, not end them. However, this post is less about the general framework and more about why I think, despite the presence of other viable candidates just as Jacoby Ellsbury and maybe Justin Verlander, Jose Bautista is my choice for the American League’s Most Valuable Player of 2011.

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The American League Most Valuable Player Award is going to be announced at 2:00 pm today, and there’s a pretty good chance that Justin Verlander is going to become just the 10th player to win both the Cy Young and MVP in the same year. Unfortunately, the reasons that Verlander is probably the favorite to win the award aren’t great – the two best position players both played for teams who failed to make the playoffs, and voters are historically preferential to players who came from teams who played in October. He’s also a stronger candidate to actually win the award because of his 24 victories, and it is too bad that pitcher wins are still hanging on to some influence.

However, you don’t have to buy into the traditional criteria for MVP voting to cast a ballot in favor of Justin Verlander. Even without some tortured logic about rewarding a player for the performance of his teammates, a strong case can be made for Verlander as the most valuable player in the American League in 2011.

Let’s start off with the elephant in the room: with how we calculate WAR here on FanGraphs, Verlander’s +7.0 season is pretty far behind both Jacoby Ellsbury (+9.4) and Jose Bautista (+8.3), so an argument for Verlander seems to require a rejection of FanGraphs WAR, right? I would suggest that it does not. We think WAR is a great tool that has helped push forward the understanding of the relative value of players with very different skills, but we’ve never suggested that it’s perfect or entirely comprehensive.

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On Tuesday, we took a quick look at the competitive balance in the MLB, and I made the claim that baseball may have more parity than most leagues, but it also has want of greater balance. During the course of the piece, I made this statement:

The NFL has decided it wants payroll to have essentially no impact on winning, so teams basically trot out the same amount of money every Sunday and hope their money was better-spent. Is that what the MLB wants?

Aft’wards, Paul Swydan pointed out to me that indeed NFL salaries are not flat. Despite their hard cap, their hefty revenue sharing, and their tight spandex pants, the NFL still exhibits nearly a $77M gap between the biggest and lowest payroll — impressive, but still nothing compared to the MLB:

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