I detected a real sense of impatience as far as the Dodgers were concerned. Not impatience on the part of the Dodgers — rather, impatience on the part of people observing the Dodgers. Not that they’d been totally quiet, but they had been inactive. Now, Wednesday, the Dodgers have gotten themselves involved in a doozy. It’s a three-way trade, with the best player neither leaving the Dodgers, nor joining them. Instead, the Dodgers helped facilitate the Reds sending a quality third baseman to the White Sox. The full player breakdown:

White Sox get:

• Todd Frazier

White Sox lose:

• Francelis Montas
• Trayce Thompson
• Micah Johnson

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Reds get:

• Jose Peraza
• Scott Schebler
• Brandon Dixon

Reds lose:

• Todd Frazier

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Dodgers get:

• Francelis Montas
• Trayce Thompson
• Micah Johnson

Dodgers lose:

• Jose Peraza
• Scott Schebler
• Brandon Dixon

Frazier to Chicago, three Chicago prospects to Los Angeles, three Los Angeles prospects to Cincinnati. It stands to reason the Dodgers had to get involved because the Reds and White Sox couldn’t find an easy match straight up. Implying the Reds are higher on, say, the Peraza centerpiece than they would’ve been on a Montas centerpiece. These things can be kind of complicated to analyze, but let’s go team by team.

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Talking to Mets pitching coach Dan Warthen last year, he mentioned something about the strategy of his brand of slider that has stuck with me. We normally think of sliders as hard curveballs, maybe. Loopy but hard pitches. Try figuring out if Craig Kimbrel throws a hard curve or a slider, and you’re down that normal path.

But Warthen said something a little different about the slider: “We don’t want to make it break, we want to think about getting our fingers to the front of the ball and spinning the baseball. Then you take another breaking ball and you separate the speeds, and it doesn’t have to be a great breaking ball, it just has to be a different speed.”

So, in effect, Warthen was talking about changing speeds with the slider. Normally that’s something you talk about with the changeup, which is obvious because of the way the pitch is named. But now we can talk about it with respect to the slider.

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After Jerry Dipoto was hired as the general manager of the Mariners late in the 2015 season, his early tenure with club became one of the most anticipated programs of the fall season. How would he remake one of the most disappointing teams in the major leagues? Would he tear it down, or would he attempt to reload on the fly and stay relevant in 2016? One thing is for certain: it didn’t take very long to find out.

The champagne was barely dry in the road locker room in Citi Field when Dipoto began his handiwork. Much like an accident scene on the highway, the Mariners’ 2015 season and roster was briefly cordoned off, the gruesome but necessary cleanup work performed, and the road re-opened as good as new. Now that the first 13-week installment of “The Jerry Dipoto Show” is in the books, let’s look back at the highs and lows, and try to make sense of what it all means for the near- to intermediate-term future of the Seattle Mariners.

Episode 1 – The Pilot
Traded SS Brad Miller, 1B Logan Morrison and RHP Danny Farquhar to Rays for RHP Nate Karns, OF Boog Powell, LHP C.J. Riefenhauser.

Dipoto hit the ground running, just a few days after the end of the World Series, with one of the two largest and perhaps most controversial deals of his first offseason. Outfield and starting depth were two prime Mariner concerns for 2016, and middle infield one of their few areas of depth. Exit Miller, who was supplanted late last season by Ketel Marte at shortstop, only to struggle in a multi-positional role afterward.

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The San Francisco Giants have made a decent amount of noise this offseason, signing two of the five biggest starting-pitching contracts in free agency this year. Bringing in Johnny Cueto and Jeff Samardzija certainly solidifies a rotation that needed help. Last season, Madison Bumgarner, Chris Heston, and Jake Peavy made just over half (82) of the Giants’ starts and were worth about eight wins above replacement, most of that from Bumgarner. The other 80 starts came primarily from Ryan Vogelsong, Tim Hudson, Matt Cain, and Tim Lincecum, and that group was below replacement level. Bolstering the rotation makes a lot of sense for the Giants, but the team now appears unlikely to pursue a major signing for the outfield, leaving it as the team’s primary weakness.

Having just one weakness instead of two is a positive development for the Giants, but perhaps the brightest spot for the club heading into next season is not their newfound rotation depth, but the return of an emergent infield after some breakout seasons last year from Brandon Crawford, Matt Duffy, and Joe Panik. Add in Brandon Belt, and that quartet in the field more than tripled their production, going from 5.7 WAR in 2014 to 18.1 WAR this past season. The lack of pitching depth and the issues in the outfield kept the Giants out of the playoffs, along with an unusually high bar for entry — if they had won 84 games in 2014, they still would have qualified for the postseason — but their infield was amazing and should be again next year.

The graph below shows the FanGraphs Depth Chart projections for every infield in Major League Baseball (catchers included). As we might expect, the Giants rate very highly.

The Chicago Cubs, with Kris Bryant, Anthony Rizzo, Addison Russell, and newly signed Ben Zobrist, look to be the class of MLB when it comes to the infield, but the Giants are not that far behind. There is a decent gap between the Giants and the Josh Donaldson-led Blue Jays. Unfortunately, the outfield is not quite as promising.

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On Monday, the San Francisco Giants reportedly agreed to terms with free agent starter Johnny Cueto on a six-year contract that will guarantee him $130 million, a pretty nice haul for a pitcher who struggled significantly in the second half of the year. And when you factor in that Cueto also obtained an opt-out after the second year, which could allow him to re-enter the market after the 2017 season and land a significant raise if he pitches well over his next 400 innings, this deal offers a lot of reasons for Cueto and his representatives to be happy with how the market has developed.

However, it’s interesting to see Cueto sign with the Giants for $130 million, when just a few weeks prior, his agent had publicly stated that a reported six year, $120 million offer from the Diamondbacks was a “low offer for the market”. In fact, his agent made it sound like they were going to be aiming quite a bit higher.

“It was a low offer for the market,” Dixon said. “We didn’t have to think hard to reject that offer. Arizona wanted to do something fast, but we didn’t want to take something below market value for a No. 1 starter, and with the recent events, I think that time gave us the reason.”

Agents are known for public comments that may not be reflective of reality, since their job is to get as much money for their clients as possible, not be objective sources of information. But in light of Dixon’s comments, it’s worth noting that Cueto actually took a smaller guaranteed income by accepting the Giants’ offer than he would have received if he had taken the Diamondbacks’ offer, due to the very different tax climates in California and Arizona.

For high-earners like Cueto, California has the highest marginal tax rate of any state in the country, coming in at 13.3% of all income over $1 million. Meanwhile, Arizona has one of the lowest tax rates in the country, with their highest marginal rate topping out at 4.5%. Of course, the tax code is complex, and it’s never just as simple as looking at the top marginal rate to figure out equivalent offers between teams in different states.

Read the rest on Fox Sports.

It’s my belief that, right now, the Cubs are the best team in baseball. Don’t worry, you’ll have a chance to express your own belief at the end. I know that we’ve been a little heavy on Cubs posts. It’s not entirely our fault — they’ve been active. I also know it’s not super important who looks like the best team in baseball in the middle of December. There’s offseason left, and there’s spring training to go, and countless things could change. It also happens to be my belief the Cubs will remain the best team in baseball as we reach Opening Day, but this is about things as they are. Right now, literally as you read this, provided you read this somewhere close to the publishing date.

I’m going to lay out why I think the Cubs are the best. I’m also going to try to lay out why they might not be, despite all the stuff in the first part. It’s not about being contradictory — it’s about trying to cover everything. At the bottom of the post, you’ll respond to a very simple question. We’ll see which argument you find most convincing.

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After having typically appeared in the very hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have been released at FanGraphs the past couple years. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Texas Rangers. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Other Projections: Atlanta / Cincinnati / Kansas City / Philadelphia / Pittsburgh / Toronto.

Batters
The Texas Rangers outperformed their Base Runs record by seven wins this past season, resembling on the peripheral level more a league-average club than a division-winning one. That’s not to discredit their accomplishment, at all. It does, however, begin to explain how a team that won 88 games and returns literally all its positional starters — how such a team could look so ordinary by way of computer algorithms.

It certainly isn’t an advantage for Texas that they have a considerable portion of their payroll allocated to four merely decent players. Elvis Andrus, Shin-Soo Choo, Prince Fielder, and Josh Hamilton are expected to earn roughly $88 million collectively this year and yet to produce fewer than six wins as a group. That’s approximately $15 million per win — or nearly double the current estimated win valuation of the market.*

None of this, of course, is to impugn Adrian Beltre, who famously once played both Daedalus and Icarus in a community theater production of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

*Note: I’ve neglected to mention here that a portion of Fielder’s and nearly all of Hamilton’s contracts are being subsidized by other clubs. Naturally, that changes the dollars-per-win calculus. What it doesn’t change is the projections themselves.

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