The Mets are giving Jason Vargas a two-year contract worth $16 million. The Orioles are giving Andrew Cashner a two-year contract worth $16 million. The Blue Jays are giving Jaime Garcia a one-year contract worth $10 million, and what’s funny about that is Garcia is probably better than Vargas and Cashner, but, reasonable people may disagree. Clearly, reasonable people do disagree. And, I don’t know, maybe Garcia badly wanted to play for Toronto. Everyone operates under different circumstances, and of the three pitchers, only Vargas was a 2017 All-Star.

Vargas, I guess, was an All-Star in the classic sense, in that he was literally on the All-Star roster. But Vargas isn’t an All-Star in any other sense. He doesn’t have a track record of being an All-Star performer, and very few people would recognize him were he just walking down the street. The Mets aren’t signing Vargas because they think they can put him between Noah Syndergaard and Jacob deGrom. They know what he is. Everyone knows what he is. Vargas himself would understand he belongs at the back of a big-league rotation. That’s his talent level, and it always has been.

That’s not a criticism. The league needs back-of-the-rotation starters. The Mets in particular need reliable back-of-the-rotation starters, given their health problems, although it’s curious that Vargas is considered so safe even though he recently had Tommy John surgery on his elbow. All forms of pitching are dangerous. But anyway, Vargas is being installed to be a provider of half-decent innings. Let us now recall the season he had.

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Around the same time the Orioles were finalizing a two-year deal for Andrew Cashner, the Toronto Blue Jays signed a better pitcher at about half the cost. After multiple arm and shoulder surgeries, Jaime Garcia isn’t what he once was, but the 31-year-old was an average starter last year and should repeat that level of production in the coming season. For $8 million over one year plus a $2 million buyout on a $10 million option for 2019, the Blue Jays are paying for less than average.

Garcia fits the mold of many of the Blue Jays’ moves this offseason. In addition to other formers Cardinals Aledmys Diaz and Randal Grichuk, the Blue Jays have also acquired multiple low-cost, quality players like Curtis Granderson and Yangervis Solarte, allowing for the possibility of catching lightning in a bottle to make a run for the playoffs. On the other hand, if the season goes south, the team has plenty of flexibility to take the franchise in a different direction and try to reload as Bo Bichette and Vladimir Guerrero Jr. get closer to the majors.

Injuries took away the bulk of Jaime Garcia’s prime. He barely pitched in 2013 and 2014, and wasn’t ready at the start of 2015, either. He had a resurgence in 2015, though, making 20 starts and pitching like a top-of-the-rotation starter, with a 3.00 FIP and 2.43 ERA. Garcia was more good than ace for the first part of 2016, but still showed some flashes of greatness before falling apart at the end of the season. The Cardinals traded him to the Braves, and he had a roughly average season, putting up a 4.25 FIP, 4.41 ERA, and 2.1 WAR over 157 innings for a combination of the Braves, Twins, and the Yankees.

The lefty pitched better for the Braves than he did with the Yankees. In New York, struggled to throw strikes, pitching in the zone just 40% of the time — well below his career average of 48% — and experiencing a similar dip in first-strike percentage. Even with those issues, he was only slightly below average as a starter for the Yankees. Assuming his 21% HR/FB rate was more a reflection on the small 37.1-inning sample and not his true talent level, he didn’t pitch too poorly. 

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There is growing sentiment this offseason that the MLBPA and players didn’t do so well in the last CBA negotiation. Some have argued the owners have won the last several rounds of negotiations.

Instead of focusing on deep structural issues related to the devaluation of most free agents — the elite free agents, the Bryce Harpers and Yu Darvishes are always going to be paid — the players took home much smaller victories in the last CBA talks, such as improving dining options in the clubhouse.

The union’s primary focus during the last round of CBA negotiations seemed to be eliminating the qualifying offer or at least reducing the punitive nature of it. The Scarlet QO had compromised the markets for a number of players in past winters. And in the current CBA, the players did get a weakened qualifying offer.

It seemed like a small victory at the time, but it is looking less and less like a kind of victory and more like another factor in the historically slow offseason.

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Editor’s Note: as Ben Lindbergh’s recent piece at The Ringer illustrates, reasonable people can disagree on the proper methodology and calculus for determining the players’ share of baseball revenue. What follows is a view based on one such interpretation.

Before he was commissioner of baseball, before he was even in baseball, Rob Manfred was a lawyer. A Harvard-trained labor lawyer, to be precise, who had a successful stint at the elite law firm of Morgan, Lewis & Bockius. In fact, he’s still a registered lawyer, with an active New York law license.

Yesterday, Commissioner Manfred held a press conference that might have made Labor Lawyer Manfred cringe.

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The Los Angeles Angels struck gold this offseason. The addition of Zack Cozart and Ian Kinsler to a core that already included Justin Upton (re-signed to a five-year deal in November), Andrelton Simmons, and the incomparable Mike Trout has created a collection of position players few other clubs can rival. Nor does this even acknowledge the club’s greatest stroke of fortune this winter — namely, the signing of coveted two-way player Shohei Ohtani.

Understandably, the team wants to protect its new 23-year-old star. Ohtani joins a rotation composed mostly of damaged limbs. Because of the fragility present here, the Angels are going to try something novel — namely, to employ a six-man rotation. Unfortunately, it probably won’t work.

There are good reasons for a six-man rotation, and Angels’ starters meet several of the relevant criteria for experimenting with one. First of all, the club lacks a true ace. Despite having never faced a major-league batter, Ohtani is probably the club’s best pitcher. Given his unique position, however, it makes sense that the Angels wouldn’t expect him to carry the load of a No. 1 starter.

Beyond Ohtani, the Angels don’t possess a pitcher who needs to start every fifth day. Allocating five of Clayton Kershaw‘s or Corey Kluber‘s or Max Scherzer’s to another pitcher would be bad for a team trying to win baseball games. The Angels don’t have a pitcher of that class, though. That makes a six-man rotation more feasible from a competitive standpoint.

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So much talk of tanking. So much talk about teams allegedly not trying to win. I don’t really buy into the narrative so much — I think front offices, at least, are more urgently competitive than ever. But I will say there are a few teams in position to think about blowing it up. The Marlins? The Marlins have mostly already blown it up. Their rebuild is underway. I don’t really know exactly where the Tigers are. I know they’re not good. And then there are the Orioles. If there’s a trend, the Orioles have defied it. There’s a strong case to be made that the Orioles should have started selling already. But, dang it, they’re sticking together. And now they’re even adding Andrew Cashner.

The terms: two years, and $16 million guaranteed. There’s a third-year option, and incentives, and some of the money is deferred. We know that, if Cashner passes his Orioles physical, he’s going to start, because before now, the Orioles’ rotation depth chart read as such:

1. Dylan Bundy
2. Kevin Gausman

You can plug Cashner in, then. Holes still remain. The Orioles don’t look that good, in particular in a division that already has the Red Sox and Yankees. But if you’re not going to sell, you might as well do something else. Call it optimism or call it stubbornness, but the Orioles are going to give this a try.

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There is no strict definition of what a super-team is. There’s no cutoff at a certain number of wins, no cutoff at a certain number of standard deviations above the mean. We’re objective people with an analytical bent, so we should probably consider working on this, but for the time being, consider it a “feel” thing. Somewhere, there’s a difference between a super-team, and a team that just plain looks good. We mostly know it when we see it.

And it’s been suggested that we’ve entered a super-team era. An era in which there are a number of very clear favorites. This would all be cyclical, and not a permanent state of being, but it’s hard for me to argue with. There are seemingly a number of clear favorites. You know exactly who they are. It’s impressive what they’ve all managed to build, but you could make the case it’s taken some of the thrill out of the offseason, with so many other teams deciding they just can’t keep up. Super-teams have accumulated much of the power.

You’ve seen the various preseason projections. They’re all based on prior data, and projections inform the odds. We already know which teams are going to have strong World Series odds in 2018. In the interest of shining the light on uncertainty, though, I thought it could be instructive to examine a few super-team failures. As a reminder of how baseball could surprise, we can look at a few prior surprises. These are teams that looked extremely good. These are teams that fell short.

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In 2009, the City of Miami and County of Miami-Dade agreed to pay for 75% of a new stadium for Jeffrey Loria’s Miami Marlins. The projected stadium cost was $645 million, so Miami and Miami-Dade — or, more technically, Miami and Miami-Dade taxpayers — agreed to cover up to $480 million of stadium-building costs, largely from from hotel taxes. (According to some reports, Miami and Miami-Dade ended up paying about $347 million.) Miami and Miami-Dade also agreed not to receive any of the money from the stadium at all. No money from ticket sales, no money for concessions or naming rights. All Miami and Miami-Dade got in return was a guarantee that, if Jeffrey Loria sold the team, they would get a percentage of the net sale proceeds.

In October 2017, Jeffrey Loria did sell the Miami Marlins — for $1.2 billion. Under the terms of that stadium deal, Miami and Miami-Dade are entitled to 5% of the net sale proceeds. So good news for Miami and Miami-Dade, right? Well, not this time: Loria has told them he actually lost money on the sale of the team. So despite that gaudy list price, Miami and Miami-Dade stand to get nothing at all.

On the surface, Loria’s claim seems pretty implausible. After all, he bought the then-Florida Marlins in 2002 for $158 million, $38 million of which was a loan from Major League Baseball. Even after accounting for paying back the loan, that’s still a difference of over a billion dollars. Remember, though, that according to the stadium deal, Miami and Miami Dade agreed to receive 5% of the net proceeds (i.e. profits), not gross proceeds (i.e. the sale price), in the event of a sale.

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