As we head into the off-season, there are a lot of different plans being made. Some teams are preparing to spend big on free agents, looking to upgrade their roster for 2018 without surrendering any talent. Others are looking to make win-now trades, eyeing upgrades currently on other teams. And a few teams are planning on being sellers, turning some big leaguers into players who might be more helpful when the team is ready to win.

But regardless of where a team is on the success cycle, every team is going to have answer the same question this winter. This question hangs over the evaluation of nearly every player in the big leagues, and will impact both what kinds of players a team will acquire, how they value them, or whether they feel their internal options are as good as what they can bring in from the outside. And this question has little to do with each player’s own abilities, yet might have a big impact on their expected performance.

In all 30 front offices, the off-season plan will be significantly impacted by one big variable: what kind of baseball should they expect to play with in 2018 and beyond?

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Heading into the 2017 campaign, a lot was expected of Jackie Bradley Jr. In 2016, he’d shown that his late-season breakout the previous year was no fluke. He recorded five wins, bashed a career-best 26 homers, and earned a place on the All-Star team for the first time. He was excellent on the defensive side of the ball, as well. There was sufficient reason to think he’d reach a new level.

Unfortunately, though, this season didn’t quite go as planned. If his career seemed to be trending up, the 2017 campaign changed that impression. It was an unexpected chapter in what has become a pretty strange career up to this point.

Let’s start with Bradley’s power output. In 2015, when then-interim manager Torey Lovullo finally gave Bradley a shot at regular playing time, he started pounding the ball with authority. For the 2015 season as a whole, he posted a .249 ISO. From his July 29 call-up to the end of the season, his ISO was .272. No one expected him to carry that over for a full season in 2016 — only 24 players have ever posted a .270 ISO for a whole season while manning center field, and the list of players who have done it more than one season is perilously short, including only Carlos Beltran, Joe DiMaggio, Jim Edmonds, Ken Griffey Jr., Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays, Duke Snider, Gorman Thomas, Mike Trout, and Hack Wilson. Ten guys.

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While the path to the decision took something of a circuitous route over the last couple of seasons, one of the least surprising developments of the weekend was the Pirates’ announcement that they would exercise Andrew McCutchen’s $14.5 million club option for 2018.

After an inexplicable 0.6 WAR campaign in 2016 and an ice-cold start to 2017, McCutchen finally figured things out and rebounded to finish the season with a .279/.363/.486 slash line and 3.7 WAR. If the status of McCutchen’s option was ever in doubt in May, he rendered it a non-issue with a massive June and July, resembling a legitimate superstar during that and other stretches.

According to Matt Swartz’s research, the cost of a win was $9 million from 2014 to -16. Steamer projects McCutchen to post a 3.1 WAR season. The outfielder could reasonably contribute close to $30 million in production, in other words. That’s considerable surplus value at the end of what has been one of the most club-friendly deals of the 21st century.

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I’ve become atypically interested in Clayton Kershaw’s second arm slot. You know, the one where he drops from being so over the top. It is, apparently, Kershaw’s natural arm angle, but it’s not the one he took to the majors. It’s not something he ever used as a Dodger until he felt sufficiently inspired by teammate Rich Hill. Hill also drops down from time to time, and although Kershaw doesn’t drop down by so much, it’s interesting to see him messing around in the first place. Clayton Kershaw is, after all, the best starting pitcher in the world.

Players are always attempting some kind of tweak. They’re forever in search of some kind of leg up. Chris Taylor made the tweak he needed to make in order to become a quality major-league hitter. What interests me about someone like Kershaw is — a player like Taylor is strongly incentivized to improve. His career literally depended on it. Kershaw hasn’t needed to improve. Kershaw has only ever struggled relative to himself. Kershaw didn’t need to start changing up his arm angle. He wanted to try it anyway. Kershaw experimented for the sake of taking his opponent by surprise.

I love that drive that he has. It’s probably suggestive of how Kershaw got so good at all. He doesn’t want anyone to get too comfortable. To bring this all home: Kershaw has unveiled a couple surprises. Late last year, he suddenly started dropping down. And this year, one month ago, Kershaw threw a curveball. It was a special curveball.

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Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about Shohei Otani, the Players Association, and a trio of opt-ins, then discuss whether tanking is bad for baseball and which conclusions can and can’t be drawn from the rebuilds, roster constructions, and in-game tactics of this season’s successful playoff teams.

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In a sense, we’ve all been able to see this coming. For the Royals, it’s long been a race against time, trying to win as much as possible before the simultaneous free agencies of Eric Hosmer, Lorenzo Cain, and Mike Moustakas. This past season was pretty clearly going to be a last ride, and now the organization will have some tough decisions to make. They’ve already denied the Braves permission to interview Dayton Moore for a job in baseball ops. It might even stay that way. Moore might remain in Kansas City to try and see this through.

But let me share with you a fun fact. Maybe it’s more a collection of three related fun facts. You already knew that next year’s Royals were going to feel pretty different. You already knew they were likely to take a step back. It’s a good thing the core managed to win a World Series. Obviously, it’s always good to win a World Series. But the recent championship might take some of the edge off. What the Royals have left, as of today — theirs isn’t the best roster picture.

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Because most of the posts I publish at FanGraphs are based on my KATOH projection system, you might think my interests lie in stark contrast to the typical scout’s. My work is often presented against the backdrop of traditional prospect lists in an effort to identify players who may by underrated by the scouting consensus. However, I do attempt to see prospects in person from time to time in order to put faces and bodies to the stat lines I spend so much time analyzing.

As noted previously in these pages, my in-person looks are defined by one constraint — namely, my general reluctance to leave the five boroughs of New York. As such, I confine my interest in pro prospects to those players in the New York-Penn League (NYPL), seeing as many games over the summer as my schedule will permit.

What follows is specific sort of document, then, based on a combination of in-person looks, statistical performance, and geography. It is, in short, the pref list of someone who refused to stray far from New York City while compiling it. The mediocre scouting video is my own. KATOH numbers represent projected WAR over first six major-league seasons.

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Who were the best players in the Midwest League this year? I posed that question to some of the circuit’s broadcasters late in the season, with an important qualifier: I wanted them to mostly base their selections on what they saw with their own eyes and not on reputations.

Because the Midwest League is comprised of two divisions, with an unbalanced schedule, a certain amount of sample-size bias was inevitable. I felt that was preferable to having the broadcasters put much too weight on second-hand information. Their expertise is what I was after.

I asked each of the participants for a list of seven players, ranked in order, plus any honorable mentions they cared to include. Bo Bichette and Vladimir Guerrero, Jr. are partially responsible for the list size. I originally planned on five, but as Lansing’s dynamic duo dominated my initial inquiries, I decided to bump up the number two notches.

Seven broadcasters participated, five from the Eastern Division and two from the Western Division. A pair of them, Alex Cohen and Chris Vosters, augmented their lists with snapshot scouting reports.

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Alex Cohen, Bowling Green Hot Rods (Rays)

1. Bo Bichette (Lansing Lugnuts, Blue Jays): Not sure what position he’ll play in the long run, and Vlad Jr. may have a better/longer career, but he was by far the best player in the league this year and it’s not really even close.

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Today, the off-season begins in earnest, as free agents become eligible to sign with new teams at 5 pm eastern. And given the number of interesting players on the market and which teams look like buyers, it should be a more active free agent atmosphere than we’ve seen in past years. Toss in a number of high-profile trade targets, and we could be in for a pretty interesting winter.

But every year, it seems, a few teams end up driving the off-season action. Last year, White Sox GM Rick Hahn became the most popular guy in town, as he shopped Chris Sale and Adam Eaton around at the winter meetings, eventually making blockbuster trades for both. The Dodgers were the big spenders, bringing back their trio of top-tier free agents, though at rates that proved to be bargains in every case.

Of course, in prior years, teams like the Diamondbacks, Padres, and Tigers have dominated the off-seasons with their aggressive attempts to get better, only to see those moves push the franchise in the wrong direction. So being the hot stove kingpin isn’t always a good thing, and with a particularly risky set of premium free agents, there’s a decent chance that whoever makes the most big moves this winter will also end up wishing they had been a bit more cautious. But as we head into the time when a few teams are looking to remake their franchises in significant ways, let’s take a look at which teams might end up being the ones who have the most impact — one way or the other — on their clubs this winter.

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