Last week, I released my top-50 list for the free agents available this offseason, including both my own and our community’s forecasts for the contracts those players will receive this winter. Over the next couple of days, I’ll provide a few names that I think look like particularly good or bad bets based on our contract expectations.

Today, we’ll do the expected bargains. I think that, last year, my picks turned out okay. I had Justin Turner and Rich Hill as the two best bets for the price, with Neil Walker, Brett Cecil, and Matt Holliday rounding out my top five. Walker was pretty good when healthy, but health is part of why he took the Mets qualifying offer. Cecil was lousy early in the year but ended up being fine overall, while Holliday was the opposite, posting a good first half until injuries caused him to collapse in the second.

Of course, my track record isn’t always that good, and several of the players I identify as potential bargains below will probably be terrible next year. So it goes when signing free agents. But if I had some money to spend this winter and were looking to make my team better in the short-term, here’s where I would be looking to spend it.

As always, more credit is given for higher-impact players; getting a bargain on a role player isn’t as useful as finding a good everyday guy. On to the list!

Outside of the top few arms available, this starting pitching class is mostly filled with pitch-to-contact starters who a contender should slot in at the back of their rotation. There are some solid innings-eaters around who will get paid for their ability to produce solid results in bulk, but if a team wants to shop in these waters, I’d suggest Fister as a lower cost option than most of his peers.

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Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about a Shohei Otani “deadline” and Braves prospect Ronald Acuna, then bring on FanGraphs managing editor Dave Cameron to discuss a dispute about WAR and valuing players between Bill James and sabermetric stat sites, the evolution of awards (and Hall of Fame) voting, why Dave expects certain teams to dictate the way the winter unfolds, and the free agents he sees as notable bargains or busts.

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If the Giants weren’t 2017’s biggest disappointment, it’s only because the Mets lived their own waking nightmare. The Giants remain a popular product, but with popularity comes expectations, and the Giants have been garbage for a year and a half, in large part because the home-run spike seems to have passed them right by. Fast-forward to the present day, and the Giants find themselves in a situation of some urgency. They want to maintain their market share in the region, and they could stand to add some dingers. The Giants haven’t hit many dingers. They don’t want to spend another year in the basement.

It seems like the stars are aligning almost perfectly. When the Giants have needed help the most, there has become available a certain player, a certain dinger-hitter and league MVP, a lineup-changing colossus who’s rumored to want to play out west, around where he grew up. It’s no secret the Marlins are looking to trade Giancarlo Stanton, and it’s no surprise the Giants are deeply involved in the mix. Nothing has yet actually happened, but the two current favorites would have to be the Giants and the Cardinals. They’re the suitors who’ve been most aggressive.

And yet I’m not sold the Giants make such great sense. One can speculate only so much about a move that would be undoubtedly complicated, but the Giants don’t find themselves in an enviable position. Acquiring Stanton could be an awfully dangerous commitment.

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“I know all teams have plenty of money.”

—Giancarlo Stanton

This season’s National League MVP, Giancarlo Stanton, recently addressed rumors that Miami might trade him, noting that the club could immediately become a postseason contender with the addition of pitching. His suggestion that all teams have plenty of money certainly appears to be a response to speculation that the Marlins intend to slash payroll a few months after having been purchased for more than a billion dollars.

It also stands to reason that he was commenting upon the fact any club could theoretically afford to acquire Stanton and the $295 million remaining on his contract. In one sense, he’s probably right. Revenues in baseball are at an all-time high. For a number of reasons, however, there’s not a direct correlation in baseball between revenues and spending.

One main reason is the competitive-balance tax, formerly known as the luxury tax. The cap for the tax has increased at only about half the rate of MLB payrolls. Accordingly, more teams find themselves up against a tax that was made more painful in the last CBA. Those taxes have pretty drastic effects on the trade market for Giancarlo Stanton, putting some teams out of the bidding and making the cost for others high enough that a competitive offer might be unreasonable.

Two years ago, Nathaniel Grow wrote an excellent piece about the implications of the luxury tax this century, showing how many teams used the tax as a cap, which has driven down spending relative to revenue over the last decade. In the last few years, the tax threshold has grown at a very slow rate, such that, by the end of the current CBA, teams with an average payroll will find themselves just a single major free-agent signing away from transcending it. The graph below depicts both average team payrolls and the tax threshold since 2003.

Over the last 15 years, payroll has grown at a pace 50% faster than that of the competitive-balance tax amount. However, the chart above actually overstates the rate at which the competitive-balance threshold has grown. From 2003 until the beginning of the previous CBA in 2011, the luxury tax grew at a rate pretty close to MLB payrolls, even if it did depress salaries compared to revenue. Beginning with the CBA that started in 2011 and the new CBA, which goes through 2021, the competitive-balance tax has seen barely any growth, especially when it comes to payroll.

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The Tampa Bay Rays are a fascinating case study this offseason. They’re not bad, but it’s been a while since they were contenders. They haven’t finished with a winning record in any of the past four seasons, and as things stand right now, they aren’t projected as a 2018 playoff team either. Our depth charts currently peg them for having the 16th-best WAR in the majors, and the ninth-best in the American League. There isn’t a lot of separation between the Rays at 16th and the Diamondbacks at 10th, but by that same token, they’re not that far from the Orioles at 18th overall, either.

With some upgrades, the Rays could conceivably push a little closer to the top of the list and put themselves more firmly into the Wild Card mix. But as Craig noted on Friday, the Rays have already committed to a more expensive roster in 2018 than they did in 2017. As such, they may not have any money to spend in free agency. In fact, they may have to jettison some salaries. Who would they jettison, exactly? Let’s take a look:

So the Rays have eight players who are expected to make $5 million or more next season, either as part of their current contract or through arbitration (estimates of which have been provided by Matt Swartz). Brad Miller is projected to make $4.4 million in arbitration, which is also noteworthy.

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Nine years ago next month, we introduced a new stat to the pages of FanGraphs. We called it Win Values, and on the player pages and leaderboards, it went by the acronym WAR. We wouldn’t actually start calling it that, or use the words for which the acronym stood (Wins Above Replacement) for a little while, since we thought Win Values sounded cooler. And as the people who bring you WPA/LI and RE24, we’re clearly the experts on statistical naming coolness.

Over the last nine years, WAR has become something of a flagship metric, not just for us, but for the analytical community at large. Baseball-Reference introduced their own version, while Baseball Prospectus modernized their version of WARP — their version adds the word player to the name, thus the P — to provide something that scaled a bit more like what was presented here and at B-R. Because WAR is a framework for combining a number of different metrics into a single-value stat, there are also quite a few other versions of WAR out there, each with their own calculations.

But while everyone uses different inputs — and therefore arrives at slightly different results — almost all of the regularly updated WAR metrics are built on some version of linear weights, which assigns an average run value to each event in which a player is involved, regardless of what actually happened on the play. If you hit a single, you get credit for hitting a single. It’s worth some fraction of a run, regardless of whether you hit it with two outs and the bases empty in a the first inning of an eventual blowout, or whether it was a walk-off two-run single to give your team the lead. In most versions of WAR, the value of a player’s contribution is calculated independent of the situation in which it occurred.

Bill James is not a fan of that decision.

We come, then, to the present moment, at which some of my friends and colleagues wish to argue that Aaron Judge is basically even with Jose Altuve, and might reasonably have been the Most Valuable Player. It’s nonsense. Aaron Judge was nowhere near as valuable as Jose Altuve. Why? Because he didn’t do nearly as much to win games for his team as Altuve did. It is NOT close. The belief that it is close is fueled by bad statistical analysis—not as bad as the 1974 statistical analysis, I grant, but flawed nonetheless. It is based essentially on a misleading statistic, which is WAR. Baseball-Reference WAR shows the little guy at 8.3, and the big guy at 8.1. But in reality, they are nowhere near that close. I am not saying that WAR is a bad statistic or a useless statistic, but it is not a perfect statistic, and in this particular case it is just dead wrong. It is dead wrong because the creators of that statistic have severed the connection between performance statistics and wins, thus undermining their analysis.

James strongly believes that the metric falls apart by building up from runs, rather than working backwards from wins, since the context-neutral nature of the metric means that what WAR estimates a group of players are worth won’t add up to how many wins their team actually won. In his mind, the decision to make WAR context-neutral isn’t a point on which reasonable people can disagree; it’s just a mistake.

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Episode 785
Dayn Perry is a contributor to CBS Sports’ Eye on Baseball and the author of three books — one of them not very miserable. He’s also the lone Mississippi native on this edition of FanGraphs Audio.

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

You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or other feeder things.

Audio after the jump. (Approximately 1 hr 8 min play time.)

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