While the J.D. Martinez signing was certainly baseball’s headline news item from Monday, the announcement of Jarrod Dyson’s two-year deal with the Diamondbacks represents an intriguing undercard.

Dyson is a versatile piece for Arizona. He’ll be able to spell A.J. Pollock in center field while also possibly playing a platoon role with the right-handed and defensively challenged Yasmany Tomas in left.

Left field projects to be the Diamondbacks’ weakest position, and Dyson’s glove-first game should play up in a Chase Field that is expected to better suppress run scoring with the news that it is adding a humidor to reduce the impact of baseballs batted into the desert air.

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The only thing that could’ve stopped this would’ve been a mystery team, and such a team never came out of the woodwork. From day one, the Red Sox were the favorites to sign J.D. Martinez as a free agent. The Sox just struggled to hit home runs in the absence of David Ortiz, and Martinez went deep a career-high 45 times. Boston had the desire, the money, and the roster space. Oh, sure, the Diamondbacks were in there somewhere, having fallen in love with what Martinez brought to them down the stretch, but they just had the desire and the space, and not so much the funds. They couldn’t have been considered a legitimate threat. And so there was no legitimate threat. Martinez and the Red Sox just needed to accept the circumstances.

Martinez wasn’t going to hold out much longer. But some late give by Boston compelled an actual agreement. The terms: five years, and $110 million. It’s more complicated than that, however, because Martinez can opt out after two years and $50 million, or after three years and $72 million. As such, what we’re seeing is a front-loaded deal that essentially has consecutive multi-year player options. This is more valuable than $110 million, in other words. Given the market, it’s a good deal for Martinez and it’s a good deal for Scott Boras. The final few years are like a safety net.

The Red Sox being a Dave Dombrowski operation, the future can figure itself out when it gets here. We can talk about Martinez’s contract deeper down. For now, for right now, the Red Sox have one of the best hitters in baseball. They’re not going to give the division to the Yankees without a fight.

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Rob Manfred wants the game to move faster. Funny thing is, he’s not alone. The players also want the game to move faster. Who would ever want to spend more time at work? Everyone’s aware that baseball games now are taking longer than ever. Everyone knows that’s far from ideal. As possible fixes go, there have simply been differences of opinion. The conversation about the slow free-agent market bled into the conversation about making the game speed up, so for some time it seemed like Manfred might unilaterally introduce his own pace-of-game directives. But now we have news that the league and the union have gotten along. There will be new rules for 2018.

A pitch clock isn’t among them. For months, it felt like a 2018 inevitability, because Manfred is so clearly in favor. It’s no coincidence the pitch clock has been implemented at various other levels of competition — Major League Baseball is slowly getting surrounded. The idea of the big-league pitch clock isn’t going to go away. But it has been set aside for now, as players collectively didn’t like it. They didn’t want to agree to such a fundamental change to the game. What we’re going to have are limits on mound visits, as well as shorter breaks between innings and pitcher substitutions. For the most part, for now, baseball is leaving the pace to the players. And the players get to celebrate a victory.

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Both Kiley and I will be posting in-person scouting reports on draft prospects we see throughout the spring. Well, summer and fall, too. Here is my first dispatch from Arizona.

Grand Canyon RHP Jake Wong was on the periphery of our preseason top 30, as scouts pegged him as a second- or third-round prospect entering the year. He dominated top-10-ranked TCU on Friday night, allowing two hits and two walks over six inning, striking out nine.

Wong was 94-96 in the first inning before settling into the 92-94 range, touching 95 here and there throughout the rest of his start. The fastball missed bats up above, and within, the strike zone and induced weak ground-ball contact when located down. It’s a plus fastball and easily Wong’s best pitch.

His secondaries were pretty generic. He has an upper-70s curveball that has some depth to it when located beneath the strike zone, but it lacks bite and he babies it into the zone when he wants to throw it for a strike. His changeup ranged from 84 to 89 mph. He has feel for locating it in competitive locales, and it occasionally has bat-missing movement, but it isn’t consistent right now.

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The Chicago White Sox are projected to win 65 games in 2018 and lose 97. That’s fewer projected wins, and more losses, than are forecast for any other team in the league — including the majors’ new go-to bogeyman, the Miami Derek Jeters Marlins. The 2018 White Sox are projected to be the worst team in baseball.

But pretty soon, the White Sox are going to be pretty good. That’s not just me saying so; you believe it, too. A few weeks ago, when Jeff Sullivan asked readers to project out each team’s next five years, you collectively gave the Sox a little over 81 wins a year for each of the next five years — and that includes 2018, during which you presumably expect the Sox to be terrible.

It’s not that 81 wins is a tremendously impressive total on its own. It does, however, represent the 14th-highest figure readers gave to any of the 30 teams. For the next five years, you expect the Sox to be just above average. And, more than that, you expect the White Sox to trail only the Astros and the Phillies in terms of their performance over the next five years relative to their performance over the last five.

And I agree with you. Since kicking off their rebuild last winter with the Chris Sale trade, the Sox have managed to turn their star pieces of yesterday into a tremendous collection of young talent for tomorrow, sufficient to give them (according to Baseball America) the fifth-best farm system in the game and (according to Kiley and Eric) six of the top-100 prospects in all of baseball. So far, so good.

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Last March, I approached Jake Odorizzi in the Tampa Bay Rays’ spring-training clubhouse to learn more about the cult of the high fastball he was leading among the club’s pitchers.

The Rays led baseball in 2016 by the volume of four-seamers thrown up in the zone. The reason: to negate the effect of swing planes more and more designed to damage pitches lower in the zone. The Rays were again one of the dominant high-fastball teams last season, ranking second in the sport by volume and percentage of fastballs located in the upper third and above the zone according to Statcast data via Baseball Savant. (They ranked 14th in spin rate.)

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