Bertz

Also, I LOVE LOVE LOVE Contreras, but he's a catcher we already have locked up through his age 30 season. I'd wait until closer to crunch time before giving him guaranteed money.

Like others, I don't think it's collusion, I think it's just a perfect storm of factors coming together to make a slow market. There was a trade deadline two or three years ago that was similar, it just happens sometimes. I think the big one is a lack of parity in the league is the big one. 5 of the 6 divisions were pretty much already locked up the second the off season started. Horsefeathers will happen and one or two of those teams will fall short, but second-tier teams like the Twins aren't going to go balls to the wall just on the off chance that everyone in the Indians' rotation contracts lupus. Especially since with the Angels being gifted Ohtani and resigning Upton, both AL wildcards look pretty much locked up already as well. Teams like the Twins and Rangers aren't going to just fold it in, but they're probably going to be more opportunistic than aggressive. I think an underrated secondary factor is Scott Boras. He represents most of the major players left, and he's always been willing to wait teams out. Normally, a top player signs and that reverbs both further down at that guy's position and also across to the other top guys on the market (there's only so many teams willing to throw $20+ million at a single player in a given off season). It sets off a game of musical chairs both vertically and horizontally. But right now Boras has JD Martinez, Eric Hosmer, Mike Moustakas, Jake Arrieta, and Greg Holland. That's 5 of the 7 best FA's remaining, with Darvish and Lorenzo Cain being the exceptions. If teams want to play chicken, he can play chicken. I honestly wouldn't be surprised if nothing else big happens until Darvish signs. That'll thaw out the Boras guys a bit, and also let teams move on to Cobb and Lynn. Beyond that I think it's the other factors that have been cited. The luxury tax, next year's FA class, and the offseason effectively starting late because of the Ohtani/Stanton situations.

Whoops. I got mixed up with the mention of the other names. I don't really like Cobb at all as his AAV creeps toward Darvish's. If he's as cheap as we were talking before, then whatever. Personally, I don't think their AAV's wind up THAT close. My guess at this point is 4/70 on Cobb and 5/140 for Yu. I'd still take Yu in that scenario myself. If Cobb costs that much I'd rather just grab Jaime Garcia or someone similarly mediocre on a 1 or 2 year deal. Cobb's not actually all that good. I agree big picture though. On the pitching front we've probably got two moves left, and on the position player front we're probably done but we'll look to be opportunistic. Darvish and a super cheap reliever in February looks like the smart money right now, but I could just as easily see something like Cobb and Reed.

I wanted zero to do with Wade again so I'm fine with this. I like the idea of what the Rockies are doing in building a super pen. I'm not sure how well Davis fits in Coors, but I think the general idea works with their young starters and the fact that they can get offense from anywhere.

Grant is easily the best person on baseball twitter and this is great even for him.

The Giants were in kind of a no win spot. Like Grant said, aside from Bumgarner all their guys are the types where you could get prospects or salary relief, but not both. That means they're not in a position to do what the White Sox did. The team is also not that far away from being good. Their outfield is a travesty, and they're light on depth, but they've generally got the frontline talent to compete. Theyre something like Lorenzo Cain and lucking into finding this year's Logan Morrison away from being a legit playoff team. It's not an enviable position, but close enough to warrant taking a shot.

I really doubt he settles for 4 years. The whole reason teams are soft on him is cap implications, so I'd guess he still gets six but maybe he settles for a lower AAV. Coming into the winter he was expected to get Jon Lester money. He's probably still gonna get it, but if he doesnt his deal will probably look more like Cueto's deal, six years at lower AAV with an opt out, than a shorter high aav deal like Cespedes.

[tweet] [/tweet] Yu's twitter, which according to Google translate says that he met with the Cubs for three and a half hours (!!!) today.

There's a bunch at varying levels of believability. Next year is not too tough to make everything work, while 2020 gets dicey. My guess would be in order of likelihood 1. Once the tv money kicks in Theo and Jed give zero horsefeathers about going $40+ million over the cap. Our handwringing right now will look funny when we look back. 2. The fact that we did everything via FA this year means our farm should be awesome again by 2020, and we'll use trades to fill any holes at that point. 3. Darvish gets an opt out after year 2, and unlike with Heyward he pitches well enough to use it. 4. One of Hendricks/Quintana/Chatwood is traded in the next two years and their spot is filled with a guy making league minimum, freeing money to use on the pen. 5. Heyward leaves either via opt out or a trade where we dump ~half his salary. I was very dismissive of the Darvish idea a few days ago, but I would say it's reasonable to think at least one of these will end up being viable. I still would rather trade for Archer, but this could work.

Yeah, assuming he's typical Kershaw and gets to 200 innings, I think the over/under is probably $300 million. Obviously a year out things will change a lot, but I'm expecting something like this Harper - $500 million Machado - $400 million Kershaw - $300 million Josh Donaldson and Charlie Blackmon - $150 million And then Andrew McCutchen, AJ Pollock, Dallas Keuchel, Yasmani Grandal, Garret Richards and maybe even one of the relievers all have a chance at $100 million with good walk years.

Correct, though you do get a discount based on the present value of the money. Like let's say you sign a 5 year, $100 million contract. That's obviously $20 mil in AAV. Now let's say a bunch of that money is deferred, so the contact is really worth 5/90 in NPV. The luxury tax hit would then be $18 mil per year.

I assume the plan is to grab Cobb after his salary demands to come back down to reality, sign a backup catcher, and grab a reliever, probably a lefty, for cheap shortly before the start of Spring Training. I do wonder if we're still after Britton or some other higher end reliever in his walk year though. I'd be shocked if we signed another reliever to a multi-year deal, but we've got plenty of spending power left for this year.

Sharma's latest for the Athletic backs this up, says he's looking for 4/80.

Let's say Chili Davis pixie dust magically turns Heyward into a .290/.390/.500 guy next year (lmao) with still beyond elite defense in RF resulting in like a 7 win season (that's a pulled out of my ass guess at what that would be) Do you hope for opt out or no opt out? (I hope for opt out still) Probably? It might not be fair but I think at this point it would take years of consistent strong production from him for me to not think "here we go again" during any little slump.

Yeah there's no real way to make Darvish and Harper work unless we're cool with all the penalties that come from being 40+ million over the cap or Heyward rebounds enough to opt out.

I like Cishek a good bit. I was hoping for a little more here though if we're being honest.

If they traded a bunch of good prospects for one-year of Machado and signed Davis to a 4-year contract, I'd be okay with that. They'd be a much better team for one year (and definitely give the Cubs a run for their money for the NL Central) while giving up many of their best prospects and potentially hamstringing their payroll a bit by paying big for a closer. IMO, the Cubs would still be the envy of the division (with Milwaukee gaining) because their line-up is so young they are likely to get better over the next 2-3 years offensively without "improving" the roster with outside acquisitions. Absolutely, they'd be pushing all their chips in to be comparable to us for one year (and that's assuming we don't pivot by grabbing Archer or something). It would suck, but even that unpleasant scenario ends with them crying about losing their MVP candidate while we will be cheerfully debate whether we still want Harper or if we'd rather go get Machado for spite. The Cards are a sinking ship, it's just that they haven't sunk enough yet where adding an MVP candidate can't keep them afloat for another year.

I think this is good news generally. The Cards were always going to make a big move this winter, and in my opinion Ozuna is the least scary of the names they've been linked to. They took a big bite out of their depth to be 5 games back of us rather than 7. The obvious downside is if they're not done. If they were to say "horsefeathers it" they could go grab Manny Machado and Wade Davis, and at that point I'm not entirely sure we're still better than them.

I would guess we shop in the tier above him, but Tony Watson is a guy that Statcast thought was pretty great last year but he got middling results. If we end up going for two relievers instead of just one, I'd love for him to be the second.

Speaking of luxury tax and all of that. I put together a spreadsheet to track our payroll and here's where I've got us at the moment. This should be pretty accurate for 2018, with the only discrepancies being with arbitration settlements (highlighted in blue). 2019 and 2020 obviously come with bigger much error bars, because of arbitration raises and contract options. For guys already in arb or whom we already have an estimate, I assumed a raise of 1.5x each year. For guys who hit arb for the first time, I tried to ballpark what they'd get by looking at comparable guys on this year's list, but honestly ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Using this as a guidepost though, there's practically nothing we can do at this point to go over the cap for this year, short of Darvish AND Davis. Next year's what's interesting. Harper's probably going to be a cap hit of 35-40 million, so the question is how far above the cap can we go. I think what we do for the last spot in the rotation will probably give us our answer.

I don't actually like Smyly that much because of all the fly balls, but it's hard to argue with these type of deals. Lots of upside with little downside.

I was cool trading Montgomery and backfillimg his swingman role coming into the winter (I even did it in my mock!), but IMO the Chatwood signing closes that door. He's too brittle, we need to have a guy you'd be comfortable making 20 starts on hand.

Sorry I might have missed the discussions, my bad. Just seems inconceivable but I guess with pre-arb players making up a lot of their offensive WAR they can move some money around and afford him. The Yankees and Dodgers are trying to get under the tax, but just for this year. The Tax gets harsher each consecutive year ar you cross it, so most of the big market teams are trying to get under this year and 'reset' their penalties, knowing that starting in 2019 it will be quite a while before they can get back under again.

For Russell I absolutely don't do it, for Baez I most likely don't do it but I'd be willing to listen.

Plus more for one of Báez or Russell. For sure. But they've got enough prospect power to make something work. Their system is killer.