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Post by psuhistory on Dec 3, 2014 20:58:37 GMT -5
Hochevar resigned with Royals: 2 years, $10m...
Pretty good deal straight off TJ, still has to pass the physical...
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Post by kinsm on Dec 4, 2014 3:45:59 GMT -5
I've added all of the outrighted/non-tendered arbitration eligible players to the original post. And added the few who signed to the "signed thus far" post.
I predict they all make under 4M with 2 exceptions Beckham and Axford who I put in as 4M AAV on 1 year deals (though Beckham may get 2 or even 3 years).
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Post by psuhistory on Dec 4, 2014 12:21:45 GMT -5
Markakis to Braves: four years, reportedly $45m... You are impatient. "Reportedly" means not having to say you're sorry. No one sues over $1m anymore...
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Post by kinsm on Dec 9, 2014 6:39:37 GMT -5
Today was the deadline for teams to open a 40 man roster spot to be able to draft in Thursday's rule 5 draft.
BAL (Scott Barnes, Pat McCoy, Steve Lombardozzi), HOU (Marc Krauss), MIN (Chris Colabello), MIA (Rob Brantly), OAK (Josh Lindblom & Brandon Moss), and BOS (Jemile Weeks) opened spots by outrighting or designating for assignment players today.
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Post by psuhistory on Dec 9, 2014 12:22:07 GMT -5
White Sox already picked up Brantly, a lot of clubs could do worse than dropping him in their catching mix...
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Post by cbassxu on Dec 15, 2014 15:37:22 GMT -5
Jed Lowrie off the board to the Astros.
Evan Drellich @evandrellich
Source: $23 million over three years for Jed Lowrie, with a team option that could bring it to $28 million.
Hitter market as a whole is really starting to slim down. Rasmus, Aoki, Morse, Rios, Drew and Asdrubal really the only decent ones left.
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Post by Lark11 on Dec 15, 2014 15:58:54 GMT -5
Jed Lowrie off the board to the Astros. Evan Drellich @evandrellich Source: $23 million over three years for Jed Lowrie, with a team option that could bring it to $28 million.Hitter market as a whole is really starting to slim down. Rasmus, Aoki, Morse, Rios, Drew and Asdrubal really the only decent ones left. I'm a bit surprised we didn't give Lowrie a sniff for shortstop or third base.
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Post by crashdavissports on Dec 17, 2014 17:54:05 GMT -5
Really nice job on your analysis. You are so close with most that you could be a GM dude. Nice job indeed.
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Post by kinsm on Dec 25, 2014 5:29:56 GMT -5
---Associated Press bigstory.ap.org/article/43488100794f4c86ad70079739b203f1/mlb-average-salary-exceeds-38-millionNEW YORK (AP) — Major League Baseball's average salary shot up to more than $3.8 million this year following the steepest rise in more than a decade, putting big leaguers on track to top the $4 million barrier for the first time in 2015. The Major League Baseball Players Association said Tuesday the average salary was $3,818,923, up from $3,386,212 last year. The 12.78 percent hike was the biggest since a 12.83 percent rise from 2000 to 2001. Player salaries are spurting after several years of more modest gains. The increase is fueled by record revenue in the $9 billion range, much of it from national television contracts and club deals with regional sports networks. The average topped $1 million for the first time in 1992, crossed the $2 million barrier in 2001 and the $3 million mark in 2010. MLB's wages are a stark contrast to the economy at large. The average U.S. wage rose 1.3 percent in 2013 to $43,041, according to the Social Security Administration. Figures are based on 910 players. The union has based its annual studies on rosters and disabled lists as of Aug. 31 — the last day before active rosters expand from 25 per team to 40. The commissioner's office, which uses slightly different methods, put its average at $3,726,243, an increase of 12 percent from last year's $3,326,645. MLB revised its figure Tuesday from an initial average of $3,692,123 it calculated last week. The union did not release its annual averages for teams and positions.
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Post by kinsm on Dec 26, 2014 2:31:51 GMT -5
www.beyondtheboxscore.com/2013/10/15/4818740/how-much-does-a-win-really-costThree distinct periods can be identified from the data. The first, from 1996 to 1999, is characterized by fairly steady growth in the free agent market. Then, in 2000, the supply of available wins plummeted — but the sum of money spent on wins continued to rise. The result was a paradigmatic shift in the market for wins, with the cost soaring from $2.2 million to $3.6 million. The price of a win continued to fluctuate within $750,000 of the 2000 level until 2007, when the growth in dollars invested continued unabated through another talent drought and the cost of a win shot up from $4.5 million to $6.3 million. It has remained within $1 million of that level ever since. I do not know what caused these sudden shifts to occur — the increases in teams’ free agent expenditures and growing frequency of signing players to contract extensions rather than letting them hit the free market explain the general trends, but not these isolated spikes — but their existence challenges popular notions of how the free agent market has developed. The typical conception of approximately linear growth in the cost of a win (or exponential growth that has manifested itself as quasi-linear in recent years) may hold in the long run, but the assumption of homogeneity in how the market changes from year to year is wrong. Even the assumption of constant inflation does not hold up —we observe the cost of a win actually falling four times already this millennium. Another somewhat surprising phenomenon is how unresponsive teams’ collective willingness to pay for talent is to changes in the amount of talent available. The year-to-year percentage change in wins purchased via free agency explained less than four percent of the variation in the year-to-year percentage change in money spent on free agents. (I use relative changes to eliminate the non-causal negative correlation between talent available, which has decreased over time as teams are signing core players to extensions more frequently, and salary inflation.) Even after adjusting for general league inflation by dividing free agent dollars by the average MLB salary (this ratio is hereafter implied by the use of the term "adjusted" for free agent expenditures), the explanatory power of the year-to-year percentage changes is under five percent. To put it in simpler terms, in the five recorded seasons in which available wins decreased, the average drop was 19 percent; in those five years, free agent expenditures actually rose by an average of four percent (adjusted free agent expenditures averaged only a one-percent fall). And of the six seasons in which adjusted free agent expenditures fell, three coincided with increases in the number of wins for sale. Looking at leaguewide aggregate expenditures, that means the quality of a given year’s purchasable talent has very little to do with how much teams are willing to spend on it. About That $7 Million… But I digress. Interesting as these macro-level trends may be, the most important result for day-to-day baseball analysis is that, this year, the expected cost of a free agent win cost $7 million. (Or $7,032,099, to be precise.) Barring another market spike, that figure is unlikely to change much in 2014. So $7 million it is. So if you’re the owner of an MLB franchise and you want to make your team one win better, you should expect to have to pay $7 million. Planning to bring in a league-average player? That’ll be $14 million. And if you’re willing to splurge to move up 10 games in the standings, you’d better be prepared to open your wallet to the tune of $70 million. (This assumes that there is no significant difference between any given teams’ or general managers’ expected returns on player investments — a notion I plan to challenge in my thesis.) The most obvious implication of this finding is that wins are much more expensive than the conventional wisdom says (though they’re actually cheaper than they were in 2009 and 2011). Increasing the market value of a win makes some apparent overpays look more reasonable and previously fair-seeming deals look team-friendly. At $5 million per win, paying $60 million for 10 wins is a waste; at $7 million per win, that’s a bargain. As a perfect recent illustration, according to Cameron’s own calculations, pegging a win as worth $7 million instead of $5 million turns the extension Hunter Pence signed with the Giants last month from an overpay into a market-rate deal. This number also has some interesting implications for another side of free agency: qualifying offers. A team losing a core player to free agency this winter must offer him at least a one-year deal worth around $14 million in order to receive draft pick compensation for his departure — but that means risking spending $14 million on him if he accepts. Under the $5 million win cost estimate, a team would be foolish to make such an offer to anyone short of a solidly above-average player, as spending $14 million would imply an expected return of around three wins. But at $7 million per win, $14 million becomes the market value for two wins — i.e., a league-average player. Thus, the pool of players to whom it is worth making qualifying offers is probably a lot bigger than many fans would think. Another consequence of the higher-than-perceived cost of a win is that cost-controlled players become more valuable assets. If a pre-arbitration player making $500,000 is worth one win, raising the market value of a win from $5 million to $7 million increases his net value for the year from $4.5 million to $6.5 million. A two-win cost-controlled player would see his value rise from $9.5 million to $13.5 million. And a hypothetical 10-win player making close to the league minimum (let’s call him Mike Oncorhynchus), who had been worth $49.5 million to his team at $5 million per win, sees his stock rise to $69.5 million at $7 million per win. Conclusions With the help of these numbers, I hope to have established the following facts about the market for free agent wins: The win value figures hosted on FanGraphs (and thus adopted by a majority of analytically oriented writers and fans) are unreliable estimates of how much teams actually paid per win because they are based on incomplete data. The price of free agent wins is not growing at a consistent rate; rather, the historical year-to-year trends are characterized by minor fluctuations punctuated with occasional dramatic spikes. This year, a win cost about $7 million on the free agent market. This figure is significantly higher than the popularly accepted $5 million estimate, and that has significant implications for how players should be valued and transactions should be evaluated across the game.
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Post by kinsm on Dec 31, 2014 20:30:14 GMT -5
The Dodgers showed today what it feels like to be a big money club - they DFA'd Erisbel Arruebarrena to clear a roster spot for Brett Anderson (who they've agreed to pay a guaranteed 10M$ this year though he's failed to pitch more than 44 innings in each of the past 3 seasons).
They signed Erisbel 9 months ago and still owe him 22 million $.
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Post by kinsm on Jan 21, 2015 5:00:07 GMT -5
www.fangraphs.com/blogs/a-brief-history-of-late-winter-signees/A Brief History of Late-Winter Signeesby Miles Wray - January 20, 2015 This offseason has been so full of thrills and spills it’s been easy to forget that two of the FanGraphs Crowd’s four most-valued free agents went unsigned well into 2015, with Max Scherzer waiting to become a Washington National until January 19. We don’t yet know why Scherzer waited so long to sign, or why the almost-as-valuable James Shields has waited even longer. Perhaps they have been sitting with fingers crossed in hopes that they would receive a substantial offer from a team other than the Houston Astros. Maybe they just want to take their time making such a big life decision. Regardless of their reasons for remaining on the free agent market for so long, we’re just about reaching that point in the offseason when Pitchers & Catchers Reporting is visible on the horizon’s crest. One of the perks of being a phenomenal major league player on the level of Scherzer and Shields is that you are afforded comparatively ironclad job security, especially compared to their journeymen peers, many of whom have to annually shuttle their families to new locales across the nation. I would think that, given the presumed long-term nature of the contracts that Scherzer signed and Shields is presumably about to, players of this caliber would want as much time as possible now, in the winter, to move in and acclimate to their new city before it’s off to Spring Training and then, boom, the 6-month whirlwind of the 2015 season. Maybe a period of acclimation time doesn’t matter to them at all. But one could see how, depending on a given ballplayer’s personality, time to adjust to a new city could matter as much or more as a few extra million dollars paid due in some distant year. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- So I wanted to know who received the largest free agent contracts (in terms of cumulative dollars) that were signed on or after January 15 in each of the recent offseasons, because January 15 is the day I thought of doing this exercise, and it’s a pretty nice, round number towards the end of winter. I used a combination of Spotrac, Pro Sports Transactions, Baseball-Reference, and FanGraphs’ own contract information to put this brief and amusing list together. It would appear that the marquee free agent signing after New Years’ is a pretty darn new phenomenon. And, yes, Scott Boras is quite intimately involved: 2014 Masahiro Tanaka – NYY – Signed on 1/22 – 7 years, $155MSo, okay, not your conventional negotiation scenario here. Looking at the recent history of bigger-name Japanese players, it would appear that Tanaka simply fell in line with the tendency for NPB veterans/MLB rookies to sign later and later in the winter. A sampling of marquee Japanese free agents: -Ichiro Suzuki signed November 30, 2000 -Hideki Matsui signed December 19, 2002 -Daisuke Matsuzaka signed December 14, 2006 -Kosuke Fukudome signed December 12, 2007 -Hiroki Kuroda signed December 16, 2007 -Koji Uehara signed January 13, 2009 -Hisashi Iwakuma signed January 5, 2012 -Nori Aoki signed January 17, 2012 -Yu Darvish signed January 18, 2012 Despite the enormity of pressure and expectations that Tanaka faced in big-market New York, he had — when healthy — a sterling rookie season. If you want to stick with players already in the MLB, Matt Garza (1/26) and Ubaldo Jimenez (2/19) both signed 4-year/$50M contracts near the dawn of Spring Training.2013 Michael Bourn – CLE – 2/11 – 4 years, $48M A Boras client, Bourn was not able to cash in on his tremendous 6-WAR season, nor was he able to allow the Indians to feel as if they had engineered a coup. The size and timing of this deal was perhaps a function of Boras & Co. flailing in battle against teams’ hype-immune internal projection systems. Earlier in this same winter, mega-bucks free agents B.J. Upton, Hyun-Jin Ryu, Zack Greinke, Josh Hamilton, and Anibal Sanchez all signed before Christmas. 2012 Prince Fielder – DET – 1/24 – 9 years, $214M Here’s another Boras client, and it would appear that the flashy agent indeed did a whole lot of good by his client for waiting so long into the winter. Three seasons and one trade later, and Fielder has so far earned $70M American dollars, while contributing a comparatively slight $31.8M in value over the same time span. It should be noted that the Tigers, under the leadership of notably elderly owner Mike Illitch, just love to bust out that checkbook as late in the offseason as possible. Justin Verlander signed his now-questionable contract extension on 2/4/10, and Miguel Cabrera signed his then-and-now-questionable contract extension on 3/28 last year. Perhaps Detroit has finally found the bottom of Illitch’s cavernous pockets — or perhaps this is all just set-up for bringing Shields aboard. 2011 Carl Pavano – MIN – 1/19 – 2 years, $16.5M Fielder’s contract, it turns out, was something of a genre-creating deal. In the years immediately preceding Fielder, the largest contracts signed after 1/15 could only be called minor deals. Here, Pavano returns back to the Twins after a few months of free agency, and posts consecutive seasons that are remarkable for their similarities to one another. 2010 Joel Pineiro – LAA – 1/20 – 2 years, $16M As it turns out, Pavano’s contract followed the exact same format as the previous year’s largest post-1/15 contract. Maybe the Angels weren’t too pleased with the efficiency of this contract at the time, but boy would $8M for a league-average starting pitcher be a bargain in this era. 2009 Manny Ramirez – LAD – 3/4 – 2 years, $42.4M Manny is just going to be Manny. This contract might be messing up our attempt to look at late-offseason contracts because, in all likelihood, the dude just didn’t want to deal with the early, drab parts of Spring Training. This would be the last time Manny would earn non-near-minimum dollars (…so far?!). --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I think the increased number of large free agent contracts signed later into the winter is a function of MLB teams being more proactive about extending their young stars. More extensions means fewer marquee players on the free agent market, and fewer marquee players on the free agent market means that agents feel newly empowered to drum up bidding for their clients deep into the winter. Even last year’s deals to Jimenez and Garza were significantly larger than your largest post-1/15 deal even five years ago. Or: in baseball’s previous generation (like, 2011 and earlier), teams had a bounty of options on the free agent market, and could be more particular about which free agents they wanted to pursue. But now, the rare star who does sneak out into free agency is more empowered to dictate the terms: they know that they just cost a team money (and not prospects) to acquire. If Shields don’t sign this week, though, we will be blazing an even deeper trail into the wild wilderness of the hot stove season.
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Post by kinsm on Jan 22, 2015 21:44:48 GMT -5
Jonny Gomes continues to get overpaid. 4M$ + a vesting option (4 weeks from camp opening) for a team that is going to suck
EDIT: On the bright side the 34 year old only needs 3 months of major league service this year to qualify for a future HOF vote.
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Post by Lark11 on Jan 26, 2015 9:52:48 GMT -5
Crazy. I hear James Shields' agent, after Mad Max signed, was telling teams that the price tag on Shields had gone up from it's already ridiculous starting point. Unless some team gets truly desperate or the price tag comes down, I'm not sure how well this ends for Shields, as there don't seem to be any teams willing to offer $100M or more for his services. Maybe his agent can pull a Scott Boras type rabbit out of the hat, but as of now there seems to be a real disconnect between Shields' demands and the market.
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Post by psuhistory on Feb 17, 2015 13:01:13 GMT -5
ESPN survey of the offseason moves, mostly involving free agency. Of course, they like the Ludwick signing. Needless to say, we're down among the "least improved" teams...
Best and Worst of an Active Offseason Jayson Stark, ESPN.com
CLEARWATER, Fla. -- Whew. What an offseason. Give us a second while we catch our breath and try to digest what just happened.
Did the San Diego Padres trade for every available outfielder except Dave Winfield? ... Was the most humongous contract in professional sports history really handed out by (gasp) the Miami Marlins? ... Did the Baltimore Orioles nearly trade their general manager? ... Did it seem as if James Shields took longer to find a home than the Beverly Hills Chihuahua?
(But first this word from your trusty pollsters: We'd never pretend we conducted this survey precisely the way George Gallup would. Not everybody voted on every category. Not everybody voted for the same number of teams or players in every category. If you plugged these numbers into your trusty MacBook Pro, it would probably explode within 30 seconds. In other words, all tweets and emails from scientists and mathematicians questioning our methodology will go overlooked and unanswered. Got that? Cool. Now on with the show.)
MOST IMPROVED TEAMS (NL) San Diego Padres -- 29 Chicago Cubs -- 11 Miami Marlins -- 11 Washington Nationals -- 4
We're getting a little worried about new Padres GM A.J. Preller. He hasn't made a deal in the past half-hour. After a winter in which he pulled off seven trades (three of which brought him a whole new outfield -- in the same week), signed four free agents (including Shields) and reeled in a bunch of other free agents on minor-league deals (including the long-lost Jose Valverde), that's a shocker. That said, as, say, Larry Beinfest and Frank Wren could tell him, there's a slight difference between winning the winter and winning the World Series, and there are still questions about whether the Padres have the sort of outfield defense, infield star power and lineup balance to win the NL West. But Preller's peers were amazed by the breadth of this astonishing overhaul by a first-year GM. One AL executive voted in exactly one category in this poll (this one) just so he could say of this club: "In my baseball life, I've never seen a team make such a monumental improvement as the Padres did this offseason."
MOST IMPROVED TEAMS (AL) Chicago White Sox -- 26 Boston Red Sox -- 14 Toronto Blue Jays -- 9 Seattle Mariners -- 4
If you watched White Sox GM Rick Hahn at work this winter, you could almost see him checking off boxes on his offseason wish list: Top-of-the-rotation starter -- Jeff Samardzija (check). Closer -- David Robertson (check). Left fielder -- Melky Cabrera (check). First baseman/DH to ease the load on Jose Abreu -- Adam LaRoche (check). Left-handed reliever -- Zach Duke (check). Super utility men -- Emilio Bonifacio and Gordon Beckham (check). Now the transaction dust has settled, this team is way better than the 89-loss outfit of 2014. But how much better? It was incredible, on one hand, to see a team get this many most-improved votes and still, on the other hand, hear so many concerns expressed by the people voting for it -- over depth in general, pitching depth in particular and the challenge of making all these pieces mesh. "So they're certainly better," one AL exec said. "I just don't know what to expect."
MOST UNIMPROVED TEAMS (NL) Philadelphia Phillies -- 20 Atlanta Braves -- 12 Colorado Rockies -- 7 San Francisco Giants -- 6 Milwaukee Brewers -- 5 Cincinnati Reds -- 4
As you can see, there was no shortage of teams to vote for in this prestigious category. But it tells you all you need to know about the state of the once-mighty Phillies that they were still a runaway winner. Of course, as one NL exec observed, they're "intentionally" not improving because they've finally admitted it's time to join the cast of "Extreme Makeover." But there was also a wave of sentiment that they didn't accomplish nearly as much as they could have and should have this winter. They'd be a lot better off by now, one AL exec said, if they'd moved virtually all their veterans just to get that page turned. Instead, he said, "they treaded water."
MOST UNIMPROVED TEAMS (AL) Tampa Bay Rays -- 12 Baltimore Orioles -- 10 Oakland A's -- 7 Detroit Tigers -- 7 Texas Rangers -- 5 Kansas City Royals -- 4
What a free-for-all this category was. The Rays retooled, waved adios to manager Joe Maddon and GM Andrew Friedman, and took what many of our voters viewed as mostly a temporary step backward in the name of long-term success. The Oakland reboot was so confusing the A's got multiple votes in both the most-improved and most-unimproved portions of the poll. The Orioles got a bunch of these votes and are still seen as a team that could win the AL East if Manny Machado and Matt Wieters are pictures of health. The Tigers are on this list even though nobody would be shocked if they won the World Series -- yeah, without Max Scherzer. Given that 10 of the 15 teams in the league got at least one vote, we get the impression nobody has any division in the AL figured out yet.
BEST FREE-AGENT SIGNINGS Russell Martin (Blue Jays) -- 11 James Shields (Padres) -- 11 Jon Lester (Cubs) -- 8 Adam LaRoche (White Sox) -- 7 Pablo Sandoval (Red Sox) -- 6 Andrew Miller (Yankees) -- 5
The votes in this sector of the survey zigzagged in all directions, with 33 different players collecting at least one vote -- including two Cubans (Yoan Moncada and Hector Olivera) who haven't even signed yet. Oh, and one fellow who isn't a player at all -- Joe Maddon -- got two votes. So what pushed Martin and Shields to the top of this list? Well, there weren't a lot of fans of Martin's five-year, $82-million contract, per se. But "he impacts winning," one voter said. Shields' votes were reflections of both his contract (because the Padres were able to keep it to four years) and the way he fits both his new ballpark and the aggressive winter of his new club. They "had to sign him," an AL exec said, "to finish off the project."
WORST FREE-AGENT SIGNINGS Max Scherzer (Nationals) -- 15 Brett Anderson (Dodgers) -- 10 Hanley Ramirez (Red Sox) -- 9 Michael Cuddyer (Mets) -- 8 Nick Markakis (Braves) -- 6 Billy Butler (A's) -- 5 Brandon McCarthy (Dodgers) -- 5
When we asked one NL executive for his selections in the best free-agent competition, his instant quip was: "That's an oxymoron." No wonder the votes piled up for all sorts of candidates on this side of the poll. We counted 14 free agents who got at least three votes for worst signing and another nine who got two votes. But the most fun fact of all is 17 different players got votes in both the worst-signing and best-signing categories. The reason for that isn't actually confusing. We'd sum it up this way: Love the player, hate the contract. There's no better example of that than Scherzer. "It's ridiculous that they'll be paying him forever," one voter said. "But he's a great pitcher."
BEST TRADES Jeff Samardzija to White Sox -- 11 Josh Donaldson to Blue Jays -- 10 Ben Zobrist to A's -- 6 Joe Ross/Trea Turner* to Nationals -- 6 Jason Heyward to Cardinals -- 5 Tyler Clippard to A's -- 5 Rick Porcello to Red Sox -- 5 Justin Upton to Padres -- 4 (* - Turner will be the player to be named later going from San Diego to Washington, multiple sources say)
We knew going in this was the kind of "Let's Make A Deal" winter only Wayne Brady could truly love and appreciate. But then, along came this survey to bludgeon that point home by getting votes cast for 42 different trade outcomes. Yep, 42! Voters loved those Oakland trades for Zobrist and Clippard but seemed largely baffled by the Donaldson and Samardzija deals. The Nationals got rave reviews for their Ross/Turner prospect return in the big three-team trade with Tampa Bay and San Diego, in which Wil Myers was the headliner. But some voters liked how that one turned out for all three teams. There were votes for both ends of the Matt Kemp, Porcello, Upton, Dee Gordon, Brandon Moss and Evan Gattis deals too. But our favorite vote in this category went like this: Rob Manfred for Bud Selig. (Rim shot, please!)
MOST OUTRAGEOUS CONTRACTS Max Scherzer (Nationals) -- 22 Giancarlo Stanton (Marlins) -- 19 Brandon McCarthy (Dodgers) -- 7 Jon Lester (Cubs) -- 6 Russell Martin (Blue Jays) -- 4 Yasmany Tomas (Diamondbacks) -- 4
Let's take the top three one contract at a time because our voters had lots to say about them!
• SCHERZER (seven years, $210 million, with $105 million deferred through 2028) -- As we'd agreed upon earlier, Max Scherzer is a great pitcher. No dispute there. But this contract has fired up the industry like no deal (non-ARod division) since possibly the Kevin Brown contract. One of the execs quoted earlier called this one "a Bobby Bonilla joke waiting to happen." With all due respect to Bonilla, who will be raking in nearly $1.2 million a year from the Mets until he's 72 years old, Scherzer still has him beat. He'll get $15 million a year - seriously, $15 million -- through the year 2028. "And no matter how you look at how that devalues the present-day value of the deal," the same exec said, "that's just amazing. Even if he's great for four years and then declines, that's 10 more years you're still paying him $15 million. That's incredible." It's hard to disagree.
• STANTON (13-year, $325 million extension with an opt-out after 2020) -- To be honest, we weren't sure quite how to calculate the vote totals for Stanton's epic megadeal. For one thing, the very first vote we got in this category read like this: "Stanton, Stanton, Stanton, Stanton." Was that four votes or one? Also, many voters forgot about Stanton entirely -- because he signed so early in the offseason and wasn't a free agent -- that we actually doubled back to remind that he did, in fact, ink that deal this winter. That prompted many voters (but far from all of them) to cast retroactive votes. We're guessing the Gallup Poll people would disqualify every one of those votes. But not us, even though we've defended this contract from the beginning and still do. One retroactive voter on why he left it off his original list: "It completely escaped my memory. It's like I didn't want to remember it happened."
• MCCARTHY (4 years, $48 million) -- It sure was fun monitoring the vote totals McCarthy racked up: Three votes for best signing of the winter, 10 votes for worst and seven votes for the most outrageous contract. OK, so what the heck do we make of that? Clearly, he got paid because he was so good in his 14 starts as a Yankee (2.89 ERA, 1.15 WHIP, 134 ERA-Plus). If Andrew Friedman and that think-tank front office in L.A. thought he was worth $48 million over four years, it's hard for some folks to quibble. But others look at McCarthy and see a 31-year-old guy who has only had one season of more than 25 starts in his whole career. They say stuff like: "A lot of people like that deal just because Andrew signed him. But let me ask you this: If Kansas City had signed him to that same contract, wouldn't those same people be going bananas?" Hmm. You've got us. We'll definitely be contemplating that question for the next four years. That's for sure.
BEST FREE AGENTS SIGNED TO ONE-YEAR DEALS Justin Masterson (Red Sox) -- 9 Nori Aoki (Giants) -- 9 A.J. Burnett (Pirates) -- 6 Casey Janssen (Nationals) -- 5
FIVE BEST FREE AGENTS, $3 MILLION-AND-UNDER DIVISION Brandon Morrow (Padres) -- 8 Alexi Ogando (Red Sox) -- 7 Burke Badenhop (Reds) -- 7 Corey Hart (Pirates) -- 7 Alberto Callaspo (Braves) -- 5 Jason Frasor (Royals) -- 5
FIVE BEST FREE AGENTS SIGNED TO MINOR LEAGUE DEALS Geovany Soto (White Sox) -- 7 Paul Maholm (Reds) -- 5 Ryan Ludwick (Rangers)-- 4 Carlos Villanueva (Cardinals) -- 4 Juan Francisco (Rays) -- 4
Hey, who says there are no bargains in free agency anymore? An amazing 71 players got votes in at least one of these categories -- including a pitcher who had a 1.95 WHIP last year (Jim Johnson), another who gave up 11 home runs in 41.2 innings (Ernesto Frieri) and a third (Sugar Ray Marimon) who is heading into his ninth professional season without every throwing a big-league pitch (but deserves a vote just for having maybe the coolest name in baseball). You know what? Based on how some of these past surveys have turned out, it wouldn't shock us if all three of those guys have better years than David Robertson and Andrew Miller because, well, that's how baseball go.
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