Kuzul

It may not be as big or impactful of a trade as Prince Fielder for Ian Kinsler was from earlier in the week, but the swap between the St. Louis Cardinals and Los Angeles Angels does leave plenty to dissect and discuss.

All in all, the four-player deal involves third baseman David Freese and reliever Fernando Salas going to the Angels, and outfielder Peter Bourjos and prospect Randal Grichuk headed to the Cardinals.

Here’s a rundown of the biggest winners and losers of this move, starting with the most accomplished big leaguer of the batch.

Begin Slideshow

Hey, you can’t blame Robinson Cano for dreaming big.

The up-until-now New York Yankees second baseman is a free agent, after all. Dreaming big is what free agents are supposed to do. To dream small is to low-ball oneself, and one should never do that.

But Cano and his people aren’t going to get what they want. You know that. I know that. The Yankees know that.

And if Cano doesn’t know that, time will inevitably make him know it.

What is it that Cano and his people want? Well, Jon Heyman of CBS Sports floated the idea of a $300 million contract—which would be the first of its kind in Major League Baseball—back in September, and Andrew Marchand of ESPN New York reported on Monday that this is still what Cano wants.

To be exact, he wants 10 years and $310 million. Not even $30 million per year, because why demand that when you can demand $31 million per year?

“We want Robbie back; we think Robbie is terrific,” said Yankees president Randy Levine to Wallace Matthews of ESPN New York on Tuesday. “But we have no interest in doing any 10-year deals and no interest in paying $300 million to any player. Until he gets a little more realistic, we have nothing to talk about.”

Just as superstar players are supposed to dream big during free agency, this is what their incumbent teams are supposed to do: draw a line in the sand and initiate a blinking contest.

Maybe the Yankees won’t be the beneficiaries in the end, but Cano is bound to be the one to blink first. It’s just a matter of time before he does indeed get “more realistic.”

Let’s consider the two things Cano is looking to sell himself as. First up is the notion that he’s a great player worthy of a considerable sum of money.

To this end, well, yeah. He’s a career .300 hitter with a 125 OPS+ and 204 career home runs. That’s outstanding stuff for a second baseman, and he’s better at this stage than he was earlier. His 141 OPS+ over the last four seasons trumps the 111 OPS+ he had from 2005 to 2009.

But the latest word is that Cano’s people aren’t just trying to sell him as a great baseball player. They apparently fancy him as a cultural icon as well.

“They’re selling him as Michael Jordan, not as a baseball player,” a major league official told Mark Feinsand of the New York Daily News. “As a guy that’s going to be a big rock star and bring all these fans in. Last year, that wasn’t the case.” 

Let the record show that I say this with no malice whatsoever, but this, obviously, is laughable.

The baseball world is at a point in its history where it really doesn’t have any players who are that much bigger than the game.

It’s not that Major League Baseball is hurting for superstars. It has more to do with how hard it is for any one superstar to get so tremendously popular, and that’s partially because of the nature of baseball’s fanbase.

Baseball rooting interests are local, not national. What the heck do fans in San Francisco need Cano for? They have Buster Posey. Fans in Detroit have Miguel Cabrera. Even elsewhere in New York, plenty of fans go for David Wright rather than Cano.

Sure, some superstars have appeal that reaches beyond local borders. Mariano Rivera and Derek Jeter, two of Cano’s longtime teammates, come to mind as examples. Albert Pujols was in that camp during his heyday. I’ll wager there’s something about Bryce Harper that strikes a national chord.

But Cano? It’s not like he’s ever been a leading All-Star vote-getter. Heck, he barely even cracked the top 20 for jersey sales this year. In fact, according to MLB.com, he was eight spots behind the top second baseman on the list: Boston’s Dustin Pedroia.

Perhaps Jay Z, Cano’s high-profile and boastful new business partner, was hoping that his own personal brand would somehow inflate Cano’s personal brand. Instead, you get the sense that most baseball fans have rolled their eyes and are now waiting for Cano to get a contract that former agent Scott Boras could have gotten him without all the added hype.

Therein lies the other quandary Cano is facing: Even Boras would be hard-pressed to do well in the market for Cano’s services.

There was a time when it seemed like a foregone conclusion that the Los Angeles Dodgers would be in on Cano this winter. But Magic Johnson said in early October that it wasn‘t going to happen, and then the Dodgers signed somebody else to play second base: Cuban defector Alex Guerrero.

With the Dodgers seemingly out of the equation, there is no obvious alternative for Cano outside The Bronx.

The Tigers have been big spenders recently and have a vacancy at second base with Omar Infante hitting free agency. But they already have Prince Fielder, Justin Verlander and Anibal Sanchez signed to big-money contracts, and they will soon have to worry about Miguel Cabrera. Since they might sign Max Scherzer to a big extension before they get to him, now’s not a great time for them to get involved with Cano.

The Los Angeles Angels have also been big spenders recently. But given what they’ve gotten out of Pujols and Hamilton so far, it’s fair to wonder if Angels owner Arte Moreno has cold feet when it comes to big-money contracts.

Plus, there will eventually have to be money for Mike Trout.

The Washington Nationals are an interesting option. But they have a talented youngster in Anthony Rendon ready to man second base, and a long-term contract for Cano could ultimately complicate hammering out long-term deals for Harper and Stephen Strasburg, among others.

The Texas Rangers? They could probably make it happen, but their middle infield is crowded enough with Elvis Andrus and Ian Kinsler blocking top prospect Jurickson Profar. 

The New York Mets? Well, they did meet with Jay Z this week, as Ken Davidoff and Dan Martin of the New York Post were first to report. But they’ve swung and missed on the last few big-money deals they’ve tried, and general manager Sandy Alderson has said it’s unlikely the club will even so much as sign a $100 million player. 

Will a mystery team come calling? That’s always possible, especially given that the new national TV deals going into effect in 2014 mean extra money for all 30 clubs.

But as Wendy Thurm of FanGraphs and others have pointed out, those only mean an extra $25 million per year. Nobody suddenly has enough extra money lying around to give in to Cano’s apparent desire for $31 million per year.

Could the Yankees swing it? Sure they could. The extra TV money may not be an extra $31 million per year, but it’s in addition to all the other money they get from a huge local TV contract and consistently excellent attendance figures.

But they obviously don’t want to, and they have their reasons.

They have the luxury tax to worry about, for starters, and the last thing they need is a contract that has the potential to be an even bigger debacle than the 10-year, $275 million contract they gave Alex Rodriguez back in 2007.

Cano and his people are presumably keeping how that contract came to be at the forefront of their minds. After A-Rod opted out of his contract following the 2007 season, there was all sorts of talk coming from the Yankees about how they wouldn’t cave. But sure enough, they caved.

Whatever hope Cano and his people may be drawing from that incident, however, is misplaced. Things are different now.

Hank Steinbrenner was one of the driving forces, if not the driving force, in getting A-Rod’s mega-contract done. He’s since been pushed into the shadows, with the much more measured and calculating Hal Steinbrenner taking charge.

It will be a huge shocker if Hal authorizes a deal bigger than the A-Rod contract. He knows what an albatross that deal is now and how difficult it’s made life in regard to the organization’s bottom line. He also knows that there’s no reason to even come close to A-Rod numbers until Cano starts making some real music with another team.

And that’s highly unlikely to happen at Cano’s asking price. Even in a market that’s flush with extra cash, his asking price is too high. He’ll have to come down sooner or later.

Maybe it will be sooner. Maybe it will be later. But it will happen. Nobody’s going to rush to meet Cano at $310 million. He’ll have to meet everyone else at a much smaller number and then work his way as close to $310 million as he can.

It’s just a matter of when he’s going to realize that his big dream is nothing but a fantasy.

If you want to talk baseball, hit me up on Twitter.

Read more MLB news on BleacherReport.com

A few weeks into the offseason, the open market isn’t quite yet, well, open for business.

The biggest name to sign a deal with a new team is…Tim Hudson? The former Atlanta Braves pitcher, who agreed to a two-year, $23 million deal with the San Francisco Giants on Monday, is a perfectly fine get for a team that’s been on the lookout for pitching.

But with all apologies to Hudson, who has had himself a great career to this point, he’s also a 38-year-old coming off a broken ankle that cost him the second half of 2013.

That profile doesn’t exactly scream “big-name signing.”

It’s not uncommon for it to take time before the hot stove starts cooking. The moving and shaking and wheeling and dealing usually gets going around the time of the winter meetings, which are coming up in early December, a little less than three weeks from now.

But aside from the timing and what seems to be a consensus opinion that this free-agent class is lacking, it’s also possible that there’s another dynamic to blame for this offseason’s slow start.

Here’s a hint: His initials are Alex Rodriguez.

It may seem a tad trite to bang the A-Rod drum as reason behind why more of the top-tier names, like Robinson Cano, Jacoby Ellsbury, Shin-Soo Choo and Ervin Santana haven’t signed, but there just may be something to that stance.

You’re well aware by now that Rodriguez, who played last season even after being suspended by Major League Baseball for 211 games last August for his alleged involvement in the Biogenesis scandal, is appealing the ban.

The arbitration process, though, which didn’t begin until after the playoffs, remains in a holding pattern, as the two sides are continuing with their no-love-lost “courtship,” which was yet again delayed last week when Rodriguez fell ill.

At least the hearings have advanced to the stage where witnesses are being called, with the latest expected to be Yankees president Randy Levine, according to the New York Daily News.

When might all this actually come to an end with a ruling? For an update, here’s Andrew Marchand of ESPN New York:

The 211-game suspension should be upheld, reduced or eliminated by Christmas, probably a bit sooner. After the appeal hearing’s conclusion, arbitrator Fredric Horowitz will have 25 days to decide. He can come to a decision at any point.

So what does this have to do with the free-agent market exactly? As is always the case this time of year, it comes down to money, cash, dough, the green stuff.

Whatever you want to call it, the Yankees may or may not have a lot more lying around, depending on the outcome of Rodriguez’s appeal. That’s because next year, the Yankees third baseman is due at least $25 million—and in all likelihood upward of $31 mill, if he hits merely six more home runs to tie Willie Mays for fourth all-time.

That’s quite a chunk of change that the Yankees could be throwing at another prime free agent or three this winter.

Part of the reason this is so important is that the club is attempting to stay under the $189 million payroll for 2014 to avoid once again having to pay the ever-increasing luxury-tax penalty.

One imagines that, in such a scenario, not knowing whether a potential $31 million will fall on the debit or credit side of the ledger could be the sort of thing that pushes pause on a potential spending spree.

And not just for the Yankees. So much of free agency is about agents and reps determining and defining the market for their players, which becomes especially challenging when one of the deepest-pocketed teams in the sport can’t say for sure whether they can even open up their wallet, let alone flash the cash.

Cano, in particular, is in a tricky spot. As the Yankees’ longtime star second baseman and top name on the market, he’s looking to land a massive contract. Because his maybe-former teammate is holding things up, though, Cano already has indicated that he’s willing to wait until the new year—if it takes that long—according to John Harper of the Daily News.

To be sure, Rodriguez’s appeal process is far from the only obstacle that’s standing in the way of the inevitable domino effect that comes when a big name or two finally does sign.

As mentioned above, getting the general managers together in one place—that would be the winter meetings in Orlando, Fla., from Dec. 9-12—often proves to be baseball’s version of an aphrodisiac for trading.

Plus, there’s that whole hold-up surrounding the as-yet unresolved agreement between Major League Baseball and Nippon Professional Baseball with regards to the posting process for Japanese players. Caught in the middle of that is star pitcher Masahiro Tanaka, who arguably would be the top available arm on the market—if made available.

But in the end, it’s hard to ignore or argue that Rodriguez’s ongoing (never-ending?) appeal isn’t hijacking, or at least stalling, this year’s free agency.

Plus, it’s fun to pull a page out of the league’s book and blame A-Rod.

Read more MLB news on BleacherReport.com

The Boston Red Sox were a fizzing, bubbling chemistry experiment that produced outstanding results in 2013: 97 wins, an AL East crown and, ultimately, a World Series championship.

But back at the drawing board is where you’ll find Red Sox general manager Ben Cherington these days. One of the tasks at hand is for him to somehow maintain the chemistry that helped make the Red Sox’s 2013 such a roaring success.

It’s likely he’ll be forced to do so without some key variables that fit into the 2013 formula. Six Red Sox are free agents: Jacoby Ellsbury, Mike Napoli, Stephen Drew, Jarrod Saltalamacchia, John McDonald and Joel Hanrahan.

There’s at least one Red Sox player who wants the band to stay together so it can keep on rocking.

“I’d like to see them keep everyone around. It works,” Clay Buchholz told ESPNBoston.com. “Everybody’s good with each other, we all get along. Like to be around each other, and obviously we’ve got a good team too. I’d like to see it stay the same.” 

But what if Buchholz doesn’t get his wish? What if Boston’s free agents find new homes this winter? Would the chemistry that the Red Sox enjoyed in 2013 be damaged beyond repair?

My honest answer: Meh, I doubt it.

This is, however, definitely a case where at least asking the question is justified. In light of how it came to be and how the club’s key free agents contributed to it, what will become of the 2013 Red Sox’s chemistry this winter is a legit talking point.

Former Mets, Braves, Cardinals, Yankees and Dodgers manager Joe Torre shared an interesting take on the origin of clubhouse chemistry to ESPN.com a couple years ago.

“Winning creates chemistry more than the other way around,” he said.

Most will probably agree with that sentiment. Members of the 2013 Red Sox, however, would probably say otherwise. They had good clubhouse chemistry before they won a single game.

Which, of course, was the whole idea.

We all remember The Great Nick Punto Trade of 2012, yes? In sending Josh Beckett, Carl Crawford, Adrian Gonzalez, Punto and about $250 million in salaries to the Los Angeles Dodgers, the Red Sox were signing up for lots and lots of payroll leeway and, well, something else. 

Leigh Montville of Sports on Earth referred to the trade as “an exorcism, a cleansing, a purge” of “perceived villains.” It was meant to give the Red Sox a clean slate on which to build a new clubhouse culture, and Cherington didn’t cut any corners in doing so.

He fired poisonous manager Bobby Valentine the day after the 2012 season ended, replacing him with former Red Sox pitching coach John Farrell soon after. When he was introduced, Farrell expressed that he wanted Boston’s clubhouse to be a “positive place” where players truly wanted to play.

Cherington did his part. Rather than going after super-duper-stars like Josh Hamilton or Zack Greinke, Cherington targeted guys like Jonny Gomes, David Ross, Shane Victorino, Ryan Dempster and Napoli; good, solid players with reputations as quality clubhouse guys.

“They’ve really solidified their team on the field, and all the toxins should be removed from the clubhouse because you’re adding some really top-of-the-line human beings,” one front office exec told John Perrotto of Baseball Prospectus.

It was obvious as soon as spring training that the efforts weren’t going to be for naught. John Tomase of the Boston Herald via Hardball Talk wrote that the vibes were “eleventy-billion times better” than they had been in either of the two prior seasons.

This feeling never did go away in 2013.

Boston’s 8-2 thumping of the Yankees on Opening Day was the most tone-setting of tone-setting victories. If the tragedy of the Boston Marathon bombings in April didn’t bring the Red Sox closer together, it certainly made them more determined to make the 2013 season a special one.

Eventually, the beards came. Silly as they were, they came to characterize a run to the World Series that launched a thousand columns and TV segments about the guys they belonged to.

“I think we all motivated each other,” Victorino told the Boston Herald. “I can go on and on about this whole team. I can name every single guy, and every single guy stepped up all year long.”

Had Victorino actually named every single guy, he would have gotten around to Boston’s free agents eventually, and likely put a special emphasis on the key four: Ellsbury, Napoli, Drew and Saltalamacchia. In addition to being highly valuable players—Baseball-Reference.com says they combined for 15.9 WAR in 2013—they each fit into the fabric of the team’s culture in their own way.

Napoli arrived in Boston with a built-in reputation as a good teammate, and can be credited as a co-founder (along with Gomes) of the Red Sox’s bonding-through-beards movement.

As for Salty, Nick Cafardo of the Boston Globe noted that there were “few complaints” from Red Sox pitchers about throwing to him. In addition, he contributed a “winning attitude” to the clubhouse.

Once singled out by the Boston Globe’s Bob Hohler as a guy who “contributed little to the clubhouse culture” of the 2011 Red Sox, Ellsbury was “all in” with the 2013 team, according to Jackie MacMullan of ESPNBoston.com. Rather than a loner, he was one of the guys.

And while you wouldn’t think that such a mild-mannered player like Drew would be one of the guys as well, Peter Abraham of the Boston Globe says otherwise:

Stephen is not as demonstrative as some, but is clearly part of the clubhouse gang this season, growing a beard and shaving lines into the back of his head. He even enjoys trash-talking with Dustin Pedroia.

Boston’s chemistry could withstand the losses of Hanrahan and McDonald. Hanrahan was lost for the season in early May when he had to go in for Tommy John surgery. According to Rob Bradford of WEEI.com, he was rarely around the team after that. McDonald, meanwhile, was acquired in late August and only played in six games with the Red Sox.

But Napoli, Salty, Ellsbury and Drew? They were part of the chemistry experiment from beginning to end, and they each had a part in keeping it churning. Losing them to free agency would absolutely leave cracks in the clubhouse culture that defined the 2013 Red Sox. And cracks, of course, can spread.

So why say “Meh, I doubt it” at the prospect of Boston’s 2013 chemistry being damaged beyond repair if these guys walk?

Well, how about we start with a head count of the players who aren’t going anywhere?

There’s David Ortiz. He’s the longest-tenured player on the team, and he knows how and when to present himself as the face of the franchise and as an authoritative voice among his teammates.

There’s Dustin Pedroia. He’s the other face of the franchise, as well as the Red Sox’s resident leader-by-example.

There’s Shane Victorino. He’s another guy who came to Boston as a reputation as a good clubhouse guy, and proceeded to establish himself as a central part of the Red Sox’s chemistry mix from day one.

There’s Jonny Gomes. All he does is bring clubhouses together, and it’s a talent his teammates appreciate.

There’s David Ross. Seemingly everybody he’s ever come across raves about his intangibles, and he quickly became one of the most respected players in the Red Sox’s clubhouse.

And let’s not forget Koji Uehara. Three words: High Five City. 

Boston’s manager isn’t going anywhere either. Farrell made realizing his goal of creating a positive atmosphere in the Red Sox’s clubhouse look easy, and Brian MacPherson of the Providence Journal made a good point in highlighting how it shouldn’t have been so easy. With such a deep roster at his disposal, Farrell was ever at the risk of alienating talented players who felt they deserved more playing time. He never did.

Another guy who’s not going anywhere: Cherington. And from the sound of things, his appreciation for the value of clubhouse chemistry isn’t going anywhere either. He told ESPNBoston.com after the World Series:

When you’re around it and feel it, it’s hard to say it’s not valuable. I don’t know if any of us know how to engineer it, but when you’re around it and feel it, you feel the group coming together as it did. I don’t have any doubt it’s valuable, I just don’t know how to predict it.

Changes are going to happen this winter. And if you believe Gordon Edes of ESPNBoston.com, those changes will very likely involve Ellsbury and Drew departing for greener pastures. And if the aging Carlos Ruiz can get three years and $26 million on this year’s market, Salty could well be priced beyond where the Red Sox are willing to go. The same could happen with Napoli, who stands to benefit from having one thing that’s not so easily found: right-handed power.

But even if these guys leave, it will be parts of Boston’s 2013 chemistry that will be lost. Not the core.

In the key players the Red Sox have signed for 2014 and beyond, that will still be there. So will the guy who oversaw it. Meanwhile at the upper levels, the guy charged with replacing what’s lost has every reason to stick to the same good-guy-seeking model that worked so well last winter.

The 2014 Red Sox are going to be a different team. But given the list of people who are still firmly tied to the organization, there’s bound to be a lot about the 2014 team that will feel the same.

If you want to talk baseball, hit me up on Twitter.

Read more MLB news on BleacherReport.com

The San Francisco Giants aren’t wasting any time this offseason, already filling two of three potential holes in a starting rotation that has been amongst the best in baseball for years.

Tim Lincecum was re-signed to a two-year, $35 million deal last month, while three-time All-Star Tim Hudson agreed to a two-year, $23 million deal on Monday. Two down, one to go?  

Despite having a handful of in-house options to compete for the No. 5 spot in the rotation, including Yusmeiro Petit, who pitched well in seven late-season starts in 2013 (3.59 ERA, 42.2 IP, 40 H, 11 BB, 40 K), and Eric Surkamp (2.80 ERA in 16 starts between Triple-A and Double-A), the Giants might not be done adding starting pitching. 

And if Josh Johnson has his way, he could be the last piece to the rotation puzzle. According to Hank Schulman of the San Francisco Chronicle, the 29-year-old has let the Giants and the San Diego Padres know that they are his first choices to be his next team. 

Not only are the two teams a short plane ride away from his Las Vegas home, Johnson’s need to rebuild his value after a disappointing 2013 season makes each team an ideal fit because of their respective pitcher-friendly ballparks. 

After establishing himself as one of the best starting pitchers in the game while with the Marlins, posting a 39-13 record with a 2.80 ERA, 2.5 BB/9 and 8.5 K/9 in an 84-start span from 2008 until early-2011, Johnson suffered a shoulder injury that cut his 2011 season short.

When he returned in 2012, he wasn’t as dominant as in years past, although he did manage to post a 3.81 ERA with 3.1 BB/9 and 7.8 K/9 in 31 starts. Traded to Toronto last offseason, he showed signs of his old self but never fully got back on track as he spent two separate stints on the disabled list and finished the season with a 6.20 ERA in only 16 starts, including six with at least five earned runs allowed. 

Now three seasons removed from his shoulder troubles, teams could see Johnson as a great “buy low” candidate with tremendous upside, especially a team like the Giants, who have already committed close to $53 million in salary to their top four starting pitchers in 2014, according to MLBDepthCharts, and might not want to add too much more. 

Adding a former ace in the prime of his career at a price anywhere south of $10 million for a season in which he’s motivated by the potential of a huge payday the following offseason could be a terrific investment. When a big market team like the Giants can pencil that former ace into the No. 5 spot of their rotation, where his potential inability to rebound wouldn’t have a major impact on the team, it’s also a pretty safe investment. 

Johnson’s lone start at AT&T Park in 2013 was one of his best of the season as he tossed seven strong innings, allowing just one earned run on six hits with no walks and six strikeouts. In five career starts against San Francisco at their home ballpark, Johnson has a 2.65 ERA with eight walks and 26 strikeouts in 34 innings pitched. 

The ballpark he was pitching in wasn’t the reason that he could no longer get batters out. But a home park that he feels comfortable in—mostly because balls don’t fly out of AT&T Park and pitches thrown out over the heart of the plate are less likely to be hit over the right field wall—could do wonders for his confidence level. 

In his potential rotation-mates in San Francisco, Johnson could find much in common and, maybe more importantly, much to learn from one of the most successful groups of starters currently assembled.

Staff ace Matt Cain will also be trying to rebound from a poor season, at least by his standards, while Lincecum will be able to share his knowledge on how he finally got back on track after a year-and-a-half of struggles. Hudson, who is also returning from a season-ending injury in 2013, has been one of the most consistent pitchers in baseball since entering the league in 1999.

If Johnson can at least pitch as well as he did over a nine-start span from April 16 through July 9 (3.74 ERA, 53 IP, 53 H, 18 BB, 53 K; four starts with at least 7 IP and no more than 2 ER allowed), he’d be a great value. If it all comes together again for the 6-foot-7 right-hander, though, and he regains the form of his days with the Florida Marlins, whichever team signs him could have the free agent bargain of the offseason. 

Read more MLB news on BleacherReport.com

Baseball isn’t played on spreadsheets, but to an extent, it can be evaluated on them.

Free agency is just one aspect in which knowing the numbers can be a way for teams to make better decisions and even find the occasional value signing.

As the sport has grown statistics-savvy over the past decade or so, finding said values has become challenging. It can—and does—happen, though. And in free agency, while getting great value (that is, better-than-expected production per dollar) is important, so is simply getting a quality return on investment (that is, not whiffing on a big-money deal).

That’s where it pays for teams to know some alternative numbers, statistics and metrics that are being used in evaluations.

Otherwise, teams are just, well, paying.

To be sure, because of the many, many ways to splice and parse statistics, there are more complex metrics than the ones that follow. But in the interest of time, space and decision-making, here are six stats that should be among the most prioritized when evaluating free agents.

For each, we’ll point out the 2013 leaders among players on the open market. And because this is also about the money, we’ll highlight which of them might be the best value.

For Position Players

ISO (Isolated Power)

Power is at a premium. You might’ve noticed over the past two or three seasons that the balance in baseball has shifted from offense to pitching. Gone are the days of players bashing 50 and even 60 home runs. Now, just 30 homers is an acceptably attractive number.

As a measure of a hitter’s raw power or ability to smack extra-base hits, ISO is a good number to look at for a team in search of a little more oomph.

wOBA (Weighted On-Base Average)

It was all the rage about a decade ago, but on-base percentage is old hat by now. (It’s still a very suitable, sturdy hat, though.)

The new-age OBP is wOBA, because it’s scaled to look like OBP except it’s a much more all-inclusive offensive metric.

In short, wOBA accounts for all the various forms of a player’s production at the plate, from hit type (single, double, triple, home run) to walk to hit by pitch.

wRC+ (Weighted Runs Created Plus)

This one puts all aspects of a player’s offensive contributions into the context of runs created compared to league average, which is 100. As an example, if a player’s wRC+ was 112 this past season, that means he created 12 percent more runs than league average.

Better yet, this stat is park- and league-adjusted, meaning players can be compared across teams, leagues, parks and eras.

For Pitchers

FIP-/xFIP- (Fielding Independent Pitching Minus)

OK, so I may be cheating a bit by lumping two stats into one, but there’s a reason for it.

If you’re unfamiliar with plain old FIP, here’s the quick rundown: It indicates how well a hurler fares in the traditional outcomes of the pitcher-hitter duel that the pitcher has the most control over—strikeouts, walks and home runs. FIP is scaled to look like ERA.

So FIP– and xFIP-, then, are an easy way to tell how well a pitcher performed compared to league average, which is scaled to 100, and lower is better. As an example, if a pitcher has an FIP– of 78, that means his FIP was 22 percent better than average.

The other good thing about these two? They factor in league and park adjustments, so comparisons are free and easy. That’s handy dandy for trying to figure out how a starter in a pitcher’s park might fit in a hitter’s park.

The one difference between FIP– and xFIP– is that the latter is based off xFIP, which normalizes home run rate.

The key takeaway is that while ERA alone is descriptive, FIP– and xFIP– are much more predictive. That’s extremely useful in the case of free agency, because any team that signs a hurler doesn’t want to know how he has pitched as much as they want to get an idea of how he will pitch.

K% and BB% (Strikeout Percentage and Walk Percentage)

Again, here’s two metrics roped into the same bundle, but that’s because they work best when utilized together to get a full sense of a pitcher’s ability to strike out batters while limiting walks.

K% and BB% are very similar to K/9 and BB/9 (strikeouts and walks per nine), except that instead of the results being on a per-inning basis, they’re on a per-batter one.

The reason this is better? A hurler who is giving up hits and walks or pitching in front of a poor defense is essentially getting more opportunities to strike out hitters, because of the very fact that he’s not getting them out in other manners.

Such a pitcher could still post a high K/9, but his K%—again, the percentage of all batters faced that he strikes out—would be lower, thus revealing how much less frequently he is whiffing the batters he does face.

Same goes for BB% compared to BB/9, and as we know, putting as few men on base freely tends to be a handy skill for pitchers.

GB% (Ground-Ball Percentage)

While strikeouts remain the most preferable form of out-getting a pitcher can achieve, ground balls are, for the most part, preferable to fly balls.

The reason, of course, is that even though flies turn into hits less often than grounders do, they are much more damaging (in the form of extra bases) when they do.

Ground balls, on the other hand, are very often either an out or a single.

The intention in all of this is to show how a few key statistics that are a layer or two below the mainstream (i.e., beyond batting average and runs scored, ERA and WHIP) can be rather useful when it comes to evaluating players on the open market.

By listing the top free agents in each metric, as well as highlighting the one who might be the best value (i.e., production per dollar) based on 2013 output, the goal is to open some eyes to show how the lesser names can actually, in some unconventional aspects, stack up against the bigger ones.

All statistics come from FanGraphs.

Read more MLB news on BleacherReport.com

If you see Miguel Cabrera and Andrew McCutchen walking around, they might be comporting themselves a little differently. Chest puffed out. Semi-smug grin. Bouncy steps.

If so, well, who can blame them? Awards tend to do that to people.

If you missed Thursday’s news, Cabrera and McCutchen were named the Most Valuable Players for their respective leagues: Miggy for the American League and ‘Cutch for the National League. It wasn’t particularly close either, as Miggy easily outpaced Mike Trout and ‘Cutch comfortably held off Paul Goldschmidt.

While Trout (especially) and Goldschmidt did have strong cases, neither Cabrera nor McCutchen was a truly outrageous selection. Cabrera led the American League in average, on-base percentage and slugging to help the Detroit Tigers to the AL Central crown. McCutchen hit over .300 and notched his third straight 20/20 season to help lead the Pittsburgh Pirates to their first playoff berth in two decades. 

But it’s in the past now. A good question to help pass the time is what the future holds for both of the 2013 MVPs. Where are Cabrera and McCutchen going from here?

We’ll tackle them one at a time, starting with Cabrera.

For Miguel Cabrera

You know you’re talking about a truly great year when an amazing hitter manages to outdo himself.

That’s what Cabrera did in 2013. He entered the year as a .318/.395/.561 career hitter and proceeded to hit .348/.442/.636. Only his OBP wasn’t a new career high, and he also set new career highs in OPS+ and, according to FanGraphs, wRC+ and WAR.

Whether or not Cabrera can keep doing his thing is not a matter that requires pondering his skill set. He’s proven himself many times over as an ideal hitter. Great plate discipline, excellent plate coverage, an extraordinary ability to put his bat on the ball, easy-as-it-comes power and so on.

However, there is still a question mark hanging over the notion of how much longer Cabrera can keep it up. It just has more to do with his health, his age and all the mileage he’s covered.

We all know what happened to Miggy down the stretch in 2013. He battled abdominal and groin injuries for much of the second half, and by the end of the year he just wasn’t himself anymore. He hit a respectable .284 with a .396 OBP in his final 25 games but with only two extra-base hits. He was able to pop a couple homers in October but was overmatched on anything hard that he had to reach for.

It all felt like a reality check. Cabrera was an iron man up until 2013, playing in at least 150 games every year between 2004 and 2012. His injuries ultimately forced him to miss that mark in 2013.

Now, Cabrera did have surgery to repair the groin injury that plagued him toward the end of the year. The word is that he should be ready for spring training. And if there’s a bright side to the Tigers getting ousted from the postseason when they did, it’s that Cabrera didn’t risk a more serious injury by playing in as many as eight more playoff games.

But still you wonder. Cabrera will be 31 years old in April and has already played in 1,660 career games and logged over 7,000 plate appearances. That’s an awful lot of action.

Historically a lot of action, in fact. According to Baseball-Reference.com, Cabrera is one of only 17 players in history with as many as 7,000 plate appearances through the age of 30.

Most of the other 16 didn’t do quite so well in the years following their age-30 seasons. I used FanGraphs to pull up their wRC+ totals through their age-30 seasons, and then compared those numbers to what they did over the next three seasons (31-33). 

The comparison looks like this:

The players who are highlighted are the ones whose offensive performances declined in the 31-33 window. Count ’em up, and 11 out of 16 players are highlighted. Not exactly an encouraging percentage.

A definitive sign that doom awaits Cabrera?

Not necessarily. There’s always a chance that Miggy will be an exception to the rule, a la Hank Aaron, Frank Robinson, Alex Rodriguez, Al Kaline and Robin Yount. And because his performance itself had never been better than what it was in 2013, Cabrera could obviously be standing on shakier ground.

A sharp decline, however, is a possibility that needs to be taken seriously. We know that Miggy has an awful lot of miles on his body, and we know that said body finally broke down as 2013, his 11th season in the big leagues, wore on.

We also know that Miggy‘s at an age when declines have been known to happen even regardless of workload.

According to research done by Jeff Zimmerman for Beyond the Box Score, most hitters are already declining rapidly by the time they hit their 30s. Zimmerman went on to do further research on star hitters (i.e. Cabrera) for FanGraphs, and what he found is that even Hall of Famers have tended to go into steep declines upon hitting their 30s.

For what it’s worth, disaster probably isn’t awaiting Cabrera in 2014. In fact, the Steamer projection system (via FanGraphs) sees his 2014 season being a lot like his 2013 season:

As good as his 2013 season? Nope, but still outstanding. At the least, it is encouraging that Steamer sees a wRC+ higher than Cabrera’s career mark. 

So my advice is to not take Cabrera’s 2014 season for granted, as there’s a decent chance it will be his last great year. He’ll be 32 in 2015, which is something of a frightening number. Guys like Alex Rodriguez, Mark Teixeira and Albert Pujols all got reality checks in their age-32 seasons. Josh Hamilton just did in his own age-32 season.

Cabrera’s recent injury troubles, the history of heavy-workload-before-the-age-of-30 guys and the aging curves of star hitters suggest that he could well be next in line.

For Andrew McCutchen

Who’s in for a different sort of discussion? One that’s a bit more optimistic?

You? Good. Because that’s what we’re in for here with McCutchen‘s future.

McCutchen is different from Cabrera in a couple ways. He’s several years younger, for one, as he just turned 27 in October and is only through his age-26 season. Whereas Cabrera is likely nearing the end of his prime, McCutchen is still in the thick of his own.

The other difference with McCutchen, however, is that with him it’s still possible to be curious as to what sort of hitter he really is. He went from being a .276/.365/.458 hitter in his first three seasons to being a .322/.402/.531 hitter in the last two. That’s quite the leap, so we can still look at him and ask, “Yeah, but is this really who he is?”

Given what McCutchen has going for him, I’d say yes. 

McCutchen didn’t hit for as much power in 2013 as he did in 2012, but that was bound to happen. He hit a career-high 31 homers in 2012 despite a career-low 34.3 FB%, according to FanGraphs. Factor in his home ballpark, the power-suppressing PNC Park, and his 19.9 HR/FB rate just didn’t add up.

Things essentially normalized for McCutchen in 2013. His FB% stayed steady at 34.8 percent, and the 12.4 HR/FB he posted looked a lot like his 12.2 HR/FB in 2011 and his career HR/FB of 12.3.

In terms of power, this is more than likely the real McCutchen. He’s a 20-homer guy rather than a 30-homer guy. A guy with above-average power rather than a guy with well-above-average power.

And that’s OK. McCutchen just won an MVP with simply above-average power, largely because he didn’t lose any of his hitting prowess. His on-base percentage increased from .400 in 2012 to .404, and the only reason his batting average dropped from .327 to .317 was because his BABIP went from .375 to .353.

And based on how he actually hit balls, he probably didn’t deserve that. McCutchen‘s contact habits had never been more BABIP-friendly.

Using batted ball data from FanGraphs, here’s a chart:

Fly balls are bad for BABIP. Ground balls are better, but line drives are better still. What McCutchen did in 2013 was keep his fly-ball habit steady while trading in some ground balls for line drives.

You can also see that his LD% is on an upward trajectory, which is good. What’s more, Brooks Baseball can show that his LD/BIP (line drives per balls in play) in 2013 skyrocketed on hard, breaking and off-speed pitches. He was hitting everything on a line.

This will do for an encouraging trend. If McCutchen keeps it up, perhaps he’ll get a BABIP he deserves in 2014 and beyond. If not, he should at least be able to keep the hits coming as frequently as he did in 2013.

If there’s another thing that bears watching, it’s how McCutchen is being pitched and how he’s adjusting to how he’s being pitched. 

One thing to know about McCutchen is that he’s an outstanding fastball hitter, as Brooks Baseball says he owns a .318 career average and a .224 ISO (Isolated Power) against hard stuff. He’s also very good at making contact within the zone with a career Z-Contact% of 87.8 percent, according to FanGraphs.

As such, maybe we shouldn’t be surprised that McCutchen has been seeing fewer fastballs and, not so coincidentally, fewer pitches in the strike zone:

McCutchen has certainly earned this kind of treatment. But as long as it keeps up, his plate discipline is going to be of paramount importance. He can’t let himself be beat by pitchers’ pitches.

To this end, things could be going worse. Here’s another chart:

Shown here are the amount of pitches outside the strike zone McCutchen is swinging at and how many he’s making contact with. One trend is that he’s been hacking away at more pitches outside the strike zone. In 2013, however, he made contact with more pitches outside the zone. And on those, Brooks Baseball can show that he did alright. 

While McCutchen did go after more pitchers’ pitches in 2013, he was good enough to make it worth his while. And besides, it’s not like he’s really developed a “problem” with hacking at pitches out of the zone. Because his O-Swing% in 2013 was 27.9 and the league average was 31.0, he still has better-than-average plate discipline. 

So McCutchen‘s power? Not as good as it was in 2012, but still there. His hitting? It was better than ever in 2012 and was at least as good, if not even better, in 2013.

Elsewhere, McCutchen shouldn’t be in danger of losing his physical prowess any time soon. Both his bat speed and his running speed should be sticking around for a few more years, which is good because he’ll need the latter to continue to come in handy on the basepaths and out in center field.

Whether or not McCutchen has another MVP in his future is something I can’t tell you. There are too many variables at work there. But he was an MVP-caliber player in 2012, was again in 2013, and there are few reasons to think he won’t be again and again and again.

Note: Stats courtesy of Baseball-Reference.com unless otherwise noted.

If you want to talk baseball, hit me up on Twitter.

Read more MLB news on BleacherReport.com

As so many championship teams have proved throughout the years, signing the top free agents on the market is rarely the key to success on the field. 

The Boston Red Sox had the payroll flexibility to sign Josh Hamilton or Zack Greinke last offseason. They passed. Instead, they spread out the wealth and filled out the roster with several veteran free agents who didn’t require more than three-year contracts. 

When Mike Napoli’s medical exam revealed a degenerative hip condition, they had to get creative to keep him from signing elsewhere by structuring a one-year, incentive-based deal. Stephen Drew was signed to a one-year deal at a bargain rate as he aimed to rebuild his value after an injury cost him most of the prior two seasons. Koji Uehara’s total cost for 2013-14 will be $9.25 million, which has already proved to be one of the best values of last offseason. 

It wasn’t a typical offseason plan, but general manager Ben Cherington executed it to perfection. 

The small market Pittsburgh Pirates also did well, freeing up about $6 million by trading Joel Hanrahan to the Red Sox for setup man Mark Melancon and three other minor leaguers after signing Jason Grilli to close at a much cheaper rate. Then there’s the Francisco Liriano’s deal, which will pay him less than $13 million for 2013-14. It’s an even better value than Uehara’s deal with Boston. 

With the reported asking prices for some of the top free agents having reached alarming rates, several teams will look to get creative this winter as they try to fill holes on their roster without making the risky big-money deal to land the top free agents.

Here are some cost-efficient and creative moves that six contenders could make.  

Begin Slideshow

A year ago, Ervin Santana was a reclamation project who was basically up for grabs. Taking him on meant fixing a pitcher who had allowed 39 homers while pitching to a 5.16 ERA in 2012.

Because funny things have a way of happening in baseball, Santana now finds himself looking for a $100 million contract.

That’s what Ken Rosenthal of FoxSports.com reported late last week, noting that Santana is looking for at least that much money spread out over five years. He had been projected as a $15 million-per-year pitcher by both MLBTradeRumors.com and CBSSports.com, but he’s looking for at least $20 million per year after turning his career around with a 3.24 ERA in a 211-inning campaign for the Kansas City Royals.

One reads into this as Santana and his people aiming high. That’s what players and their people do in free agency, after all, as it doesn’t hurt to do so. Either somebody will pay what’s being demanded, or somebody will come close enough.

Here’s hoping whichever club signs Santana gets him because it did the latter. He’s a good pitcher, but he’s not worth $20 million per year now, and it’s highly unlikely he will be later.

It’s to the first part of that statement that we shall go, um, first. We know that Santana’s not worth $20 million per year now because the numbers say so, darn it.

As far as FanGraphs‘ WAR-based value system is concerned, Santana was worth only $14.9 million in 2013. He’s been worth $20 million only once before: back in his excellent 2008 season, in which he posted a 3.49 ERA and compiled a 6.0 fWAR.

He’s being shopped as a pitcher worth that much now because his agents are crafty fellows. Via Ken Rosenthal, here are a few highlights of the plan they’ve put together for how to sell Santana:

• Santana’s last three seasons compare favorably to Zack Greinke‘s last three seasons before free agency.
• By Game Score, Santana had as many “strong or dominant starts” in 2013 as Max Scherzer, Yu Darvish and Jordan Zimmermann. Both Scherzer and Darvish had him beat in 60-plus Game Score starts in 2013, but whatever. It’s cool.
• Over the last three years, Santana has rated well in terms of his ability to keep runners off the bases, his durability and in pitching deep into games.
• His 2012 season, in which he gave up 39 home runs, is an anomaly. He’s homer-prone but not that homer-prone.
• His arm and shoulder are just fine, thank you very much.

That’s pretty much it. Santana’s agents are basically trying to sell him as a top-of-the-rotation guy who’s good for both innings and dominance, which tells us that his agents get what agents are supposed to do.

But even if Santana’s agents do have their stuff in order, the really smart teams out there will ignore all of it and ask themselves what they would stand to get from Santana over the life of a multi-year deal, as well as whether they’re willing to pay $100 million for whatever that may be.

As there is with just about every pitcher, there are good things and bad things about Santana. What’s troubling about him, however, is that the bad things are more discouraging than the good things are encouraging.

But let’s start with the good things Santana has to offer, namely control and an elite innings-eating ability.

Santana’s never been one to hurt himself with walks, but he was particularly good about not doing so in 2013. Per FanGraphs, his 5.9 BB% was his lowest mark since 2008, and it put him in the top 30 among qualified starting pitchers.

He earned it. Santana threw about as many pitches in the strike zone in 2013 as he had in 2012 and 2011, but only four starters threw first-pitch strikes more often, and he improved on his career strike percentage of 63 by throwing 65 percent of his pitches for strikes.

Put simply: Santana was one of the top control artists in MLB in 2013. That’s something worth being optimistic about. Pitchers who can throw strikes tend to do better than pitchers who can’t, after all, and good control is something that age has a hard time hurting.

Santana’s innings-eating ability needs less of an introduction. He’s topped 200 innings five times in his nine years, and is 11th among starters in innings pitched both since 2005 and since 2010.

But while an ability to eat innings is indeed one of Santana’s primary selling points, it’s also an area where the cracks in the notion of paying him $100 million begin to show.

A five-year deal would cover Santana’s age 31-35 seasons. By the time he gets to the end of it, it’s doubtful that he’s still going to be a 200-inning pitcher. In the last 10 years, only 11 34-year-olds have logged 200 innings in a season. Only 10 35-year-olds have done it.

For Santana, simple age could be what does him in. But based on what’s going on with his strikeout habit, there’s also a very real chance that he’ll cease to be a top innings-eater because opponents will begin knocking him out earlier in games more frequently.

While Santana’s 2013 season was a turnaround campaign in many respects, it wasn’t as far as his ability to strike batters out is concerned. He posted a K% of 18.7, which is right there with his career K% of 18.6 and the starter average of 18.9 percent, according to FanGraphs.

That there’s a trend:

In 2008, Santana was a much better strikeout artist than the average starting pitcher. In the years since, his strikeout habit has been more or less on par with that of the average starting pitcher. 

As for Santana’s chances of reversing this trend, well, they’re not very good.

It’s not as if Santana is lacking in stuff now. His stuff is already more overpowering and more capable of missing bats than the average starter’s stuff. If we just keep it simple and compare his fastball velocity and swinging-strike percentage in 2013 to the league average:

Santana already throws harder than the average starter, and he got more whiffs than the average starter in 2013. Despite this, he couldn’t find a way to rack up more strikeouts than the average starter.

This is distressing because it’s not like Santana is going to throw harder or get better at missing bats as he ages. His velocity peaked when he was 25 in 2008. He’ll be 31 years old in a few weeks, and research done by Bill Petti of FanGraphs shows that a starter’s velocity becomes more and more in danger of going “pluh” once he gets into his 30s.

Not so coincidentally, swinging-strike and strikeout percentages have a tendency to decrease as well. There’s more than a fair chance that Santana will live up to the pattern as his stuff becomes less overpowering.

If Santana is to have any hope of aging well, he’s going to have to become a more complex pitcher, one with a deep arsenal of pitches that he can use to finesse hitters to death. And from where he’s standing now, it’s totally up in the air whether he’s going to be able to make that kind of transformation.

What we need is a comparison. I figure we can go ahead and make like Santana’s agents and compare him to Zack Greinke on the eve of his free agency. Considering data from Brooks Baseball, there’s no ignoring the fact that the Santana of 2013 is a fundamentally different pitcher than the Greinke of 2012:

Santana worked in a sinker more often this past season, which helped him post a career-high 46.2 ground-ball percentage. It’s not a fluke that he was able to get over his bad case of gopheritis from 2012, and that sinker should prove useful at keeping another bad bout at bat as he gets older.

But because a sinker is just another fastball, Santana really didn’t alter his pitching style in 2013 all that much. With his hard stuff and slider still accounting for over 90 percent of his pitches, Santana carried on as one of the league’s preeminent fastball-slider pitchers.

That’s not how Greinke was making his living in his final season before free agency. He threw five of his pitches more than 10 percent of the time, making him the rare five-pitch pitcher. And in 2013, the only change he made was using his changeup more than 10 percent of the time rather than his cutter. He used it to hold lefty batters to a .226 average and an .095 ISO.

Now, Santana did use his changeup more often against lefty batters in 2013…but barely, and not very effectively at that.

Santana’s changeup accounted for over 12 percent of his pitches to lefty batters in 2013, but they hit .289 against it with a .154 ISO. He deserves props for experimenting with it, but the fact is it’s not ready to be a go-to pitch against lefty batters.

That’s a red flag for potential business partners. If Santana can’t develop a good changeup, then clubs are looking at a righty pitcher with bad platoon splits—lefty batters have hit him to the tune of a .773 OPS throughout his career, compared to .695 for righty batters—that could only get worse if age does a number on his fastball and slider. Indeed, righty batters will also be more capable of hitting these two pitches if they become flatter with age.

To be sure, Santana doesn’t necessarily need a deep arsenal of pitches in order to be a productive pitcher over the life of a five-year contract. If he can maintain his good command and at least a respectable ability to eat innings, he’ll have enough to be productive.

A merely “productive” pitcher, however, is not the same as a $20 million-per-year pitcher.

Look at it this way: As good as Santana was in 2013, he wasn’t good enough to be worth $20 million. And if he can’t be that good now while he still has good stuff, command and an ability to eat innings, he’s certainly not going to be that good when the good stuff is gone and he only has command and (maybe) an ability to eat innings. Rising salaries will lower standards for big contracts, sure, but there’s a limit to how low these standards can go.

Santana is being shopped as a $100 million pitcher based on his track record. I’m not convinced his track record truly deems him to be a $100 million pitcher. I am pretty well convinced that he’s highly unlikely to be a $100 million pitcher in the future.

In other words, my wagging finger is ready for the event of a $100 million contract for Ervin Ramon Santana.

Note: Stats (and middle names) courtesy of Baseball-Reference.com unless otherwise noted.

If you want to talk baseball, hit me up on Twitter.

Read more MLB news on BleacherReport.com

We tend to think of Major League Baseball as a league that has no equal. It’s practically the Mt. Olympus of the baseball world: a place where only the elites gather.

…Right?

Well, with star Japanese right-hander Masahiro Tanaka set to make the jump from Japan’s Nippon Professional Baseball to MLB, now’s a time when a good many are pondering that one question: 

Just how good is Japan’s professional baseball league?

Since there’s no definitive answer, it really depends on who you ask. And if you ask the right people, you’ll be told that NPB is just as good as MLB.

For example, former Kansas City Royals manager Trey Hillman did an interview with ESPN.com a few years back regarding his years as a manager in Japan in which he insisted that what they play in NPB is “major league-caliber baseball.”

There’s also a statistical argument for the notion that NPB is on par with MLB. Clay Davenport of Baseball Prospectus crunched the numbers back in 2002 and concluded, “By historical standards, the present-day Central and Pacific Leagues are fully deserving of the ‘major league’ label.”

Opinions such as these are out there. And because they do hold some weight, they should indeed be listened to.

But I’m guessing you’ve heard/tell of the more popular, less optimistic opinion of NPB at some point or another. I’m not sure it can be traced to any one source, but JapanBall.com says that the general feeling among MLB scouts is that the NPB is a Quadruple-A league—a step above Triple-A, but a step below the majors. 

If you’re asking yours truly, it’s this opinion of Nippon Professional Baseball that rings truer than the other.

Ordinarily, I favor numbers to make these sorts of arguments. But while we will be taking a look at some of those, they’re not going to tell the whole story. This is a rare case where numbers really can’t tell the whole story.

If the idea is to judge how “good” Nippon Professional Baseball is compared to Major League Baseball, after all, what must first be acknowledged is that comparing NPB to MLB is fundamentally silly because of the major differences between the structures of the two leagues.

If it can be taken for granted that the best players stage the best competition, how can we be so confident that MLB truly hosts the best players? Well, one reason is that major league teams can and do draw players from all over the world. Just as important is the fact that there are zero restrictions on how many foreign players they can carry.

This isn’t the case in Japan. According to JapaneseBaseball.com, there isn’t a limit on the number of foreign players an NPB organization can sign. There is, however, a limit for how many foreign players a team can have on its active roster. On their 25-man rosters, NPB clubs are allowed to have a maximum of four foreign players.

Since there are 12 teams in the NPB, the crude math says that no more than 48 of 300 players on active rosters can be foreign players. That’s 16 percent of the league.

For some perspective, that’s roughly half the norm in MLB these days. As reported by the Associated Press, the percentage of foreign-born players on Opening Day rosters (disabled and restricted players included) in 2013 was 28.4 percent. 

And remember, these are only foreign-born players who are good enough for MLB. That’s not the case with foreign-born players in Japan, a good percentage of whom are former major leaguers who didn’t prove to be good enough for MLB (a point we’ll come back to later on).

It’s also not just the MLB level that’s loaded with foreign talent. In 2013, close to 50 percent of minor league contracts belonged to foreign players. And therein lies the second key difference between MLB and NPB: The minor league structures of the two leagues aren’t mirror images of one another.

MLB has three minor league levels: Single-A, Double-A and Triple-A. Break it down even further and include rookie ball and the various levels of Single-A, and MLB clubs have a half-dozen different levels at which to stash young talent and organizational depth.

NPB clubs, on the other hand, have one minor league level to stash players at. There’s the Eastern League and the Western League, and that’s it.

Now, because there are only 12 teams in NPB, it’s true that it’s not entirely necessary to have MLB-style minor league systems from which to draw talent. However, the shallowness of Japan’s minor league system is felt at the NPB level.

As Grantland’s Jonah Keri explained:

[T]he least-skilled and least-polished players in Japan are far worse than the bottom of the barrel in the majors. They’re often 19-year-old kids, young enough to be better suited for rookie ball, only not even necessarily among the elite players at that level if they were hypothetically dropped onto low-minors rosters in the U.S.

In MLB, most players have to go through several minor league seasons before hitting the majors. For the most part, only future-superstar types debut in their late teens or early 20s.

Where the difference between the two leagues is really felt is on offense. Here’s a comparison of the cumulative OPS of 22-and-under players in NPB and MLB over the last 10 years, with data from Baseball-Reference.com and FanGraphs:

There have been a couple years in the last decade in which there’s been a small gap in hitting quality between the youngsters of both leagues, but NPB youngsters generally haven’t been as productive as MLB youngsters. In some cases, the gap has been huge.

This supports the notion that young players water things down in the NPB and, by extension, one of the notions proposed by Keri: that NPB pitchers have it easier. They do indeed benefit from facing young hitters who are out of their depth.

As such, an NPB pitcher has to prepare to face tougher lineups when he makes the jump to MLB. It’s no wonder that the track record of former NPB pitchers in MLB is a mixed bag.

Excluding pitchers who didn’t pitch in NPB before pitching in the majors (i.e. Boston’s Junichi Tazawa), Wikipedia lists 31 pitchers who have made the jump from Japan to the big leagues. Of those, nine have accumulated career WARs of at least 9.0, according to Baseball-Reference.com. 

There have been 11 Japanese imports, however, who have accumulated negative career WARs in MLB. In addition, two of the 9.0-plus WAR guys compiled a career ERA+ at or below 100: Hideo Nomo and Daisuka Matsuzaka. They had their moments, but both technically qualify as at-best average MLB pitchers.

It should be acknowledged that 2013 was something of a banner year for former NPB pitchers in MLB. Yu Darvish, Hiroki Kuroda and Hisashi Iwakuma all had Cy Young-caliber seasons, and nobody could hit Koji Uehara after he took over as Boston’s closer midway through the year.

However, none of these four pitchers was particularly dominant in MLB right out of the gate.

Kuroda pitched well in his first three seasons as a Dodger, but his ERA+ in his last three seasons is 12 points higher than his ERA+ from his first three seasons. Darvish had an ERA in the mid-4.00s as late as August in his rookie year. Iwakuma had an ERA near 5.00 in his days as a reliever in 2012. Uehara only had a 4.05 ERA and a 6.5 K/9 in his rookie season in 2009.

As FanGraphs’ Dave Cameron recently argued, pitchers from Japan and other Asian countries do need to be taken more seriously in light of the success of recent Asian imports. But for all the statistics that can be bandied about, the writing is still on the wall that going from NPB to MLB means making the necessary adjustments to survive in a harsher league.

As for hitters going from NPB to MLB, well, their track record is even spottier.

Of the 14 Japanese position players who have made the jump from NPB to MLB, only two have career WARs over 10.0, according to Baseball-Reference.com: Ichiro Suzuki and Hideki Matsui. After them, the most successful Japanese position player in MLB to date is Norichika Aoki, whose MLB career is just two years old.

There’s a good reason for the shortage of Japanese position players who have had a legit impact in MLB. For many years, hitters faced a significant adjustment in their own right. Whereas pitchers faced the prospect of pitching to tougher lineups, hitters faced the prospect of hitting a tougher baseball.

You’ve probably heard about the juiced ball scandal in NPB, one that helped offensive numbers skyrocket and ultimately forced commissioner Ryozo Kato’s resignation. But just as important is what happened before the ball was juiced for 2013. 

According to the Bangkok Post (by way of Jay Jaffe of SI.com), it was in 2011 that Kato originally called for the league’s balls to be altered so they would be more in line with those in the States. This essentially involved making them less springy and, thus, less hitter-friendly.

The change resulted in the desired effect. Too much so, in fact.

With more data courtesy of Baseball-Reference.com and FanGraphs, here’s a quick look at the power production of NPB hitters over the last decade, as compared to that of Major League Baseball:

The 2004 season notwithstanding, there was already less power to be found in NPB than there was in MLB. Then along came the new baseballs, which sucked power out of the league in a big way. 

And that makes sense, as the new baseballs were being unleashed on a population of hitters used to hitting more springy balls. Take away the hitter-friendly balls, and you take away their numbers. Just like what’s happened with a good chunk of NPB imports in MLB.

By that same token, however, what also makes sense is that the foreign hitters in NPB would be less impacted by the change. Hitting a more MLB-style ball would be nothing new to them. Consider the following table, which displays how many non-Japanese former MLB players have ranked in the top 25 in OPS in both the Pacific and Central Leagues over the last 10 years:

In the last decade, foreign hitters have tended to account for between 10 and 15 of the best hitters in NPB. That didn’t change in 2011 and 2012 when it suddenly got harder to hit the ball, and former MLBers continued to be a force with a juiced ball in 2013.

Notably, former Seattle Mariner and Cincinnati Red Wladimir Balentien set a new single-season home run record in 2013 by launching 60 home runs. After managing a .655 OPS in 170 major league games, he now owns a .989 OPS in 376 NPB games.

Now, Balentien also happens to be an example of one of the key circumstances that makes it hard to compare NPB-to-MLB crossovers to MLB-to-NPB crossovers. Players going from Japan to MLB tend to be in their late 20s or early 30s, meaning they have to make the necessary adjustments while also fighting the effects of age. Players going from MLB to Japan can be much younger, and thus spared the battle against age.

Balentien was 26 years old in his first season in Japan. He therefore arrived in Japan at an age when, according to research done by Jeff Zimmerman of Beyond the Box Score, MLB hitters tend to hit their primes. The hitters who have come from Japan to the States have tended to be in a different boat.

The tradeoff, however, is one that I mentioned in passing a while back.

The players going from Japan to the majors tend to be among the most talented players in NPB. The players going from the majors to Japan, on the other hand, tend to be guys whose talent has proven to be unfit for MLB. It doesn’t reflect well on the quality of the NPB’s competition that so many of these players have found success in Japan.

Just look at Casey McGehee. He had a .632 OPS in his last two years in the big leagues. He posted an .891 OPS in his first year in Japan in 2013. Nyjer Morgan has also resuscitated his career, posting a .795 OPS in Japan after posting a .610 OPS in the majors in 2012.

Then there are guys like Tony Blanco and Lastings Milledge. Blanco managed a .490 OPS in just 56 major league games in 2005. He has an .897 OPS in five NPB seasons. After compiling a .723 OPS in parts of six major league seasons, Milledge has compiled an .821 OPS in his two seasons in Japan.

On the pitching front, there are guys like Daniel Cabrera and Brandon Dickson. Cabrera pitched to a 5.10 ERA in the majors, where he was last seen in 2009. In his first year in Japan in 2013, he posted a 3.09 ERA. After being stuck at Triple-A for three years, Dickson posted a 2.77 ERA in his first NPB season in 2013.

Then there are the former first-round busts. Bryan Bullington, the former No. 1 overall draft choice of the Pittsburgh Pirates, has a 2.93 ERA in three NPB seasons. Jason Standridge, the former first-round pick of the Tampa Bay Devil Rays who accumulated a 5.80 ERA in 80 major league appearances, now has a 3.04 ERA over six seasons in Japan.

Not every former MLBer who goes to Japan finds success waiting for him, mind you. Matt Murton’s .794 OPS in Japan looks a lot like his .788 OPS in MLB. Ryan Spilborghs only posted a .625 OPS in his first season in Japan in 2013. Casey Fossum had an ERA over 5.00 in his one and only NPB season. Darrell Rasner has a modest 4.17 ERA in Japan. And so on.

There is no question, however, that there are more success stories to be found among the players who have gone from MLB to NPB than there are vice versa. That wouldn’t be the case if NPB was as tough as or tougher than MLB.

We know the reasons why it’s not. The NPB doesn’t filter elite talent into the top level like MLB does, nor can it really hope to. Pitchers benefit from a steady diet of matchups against young, overmatched hitters. As for the hitters, the list of failed NPB-to-MLB imports and the events of 2011 and 2012 clearly suggest that most of them need a more hitter-friendly ball to maximize their offensive potential.

Again, there’s no definitive answer to the question of how “good” Nippon Professional Baseball is. And taken for what it is on its own, it’s not bad baseball. But due to various circumstances at play, there’s no way for it to measure up against Major League Baseball.

So those MLB scouts who view NPB as a Quad-A league? They have the right idea.

Note: Stats courtesy of Baseball-Reference.com unless otherwise noted.

If you want to talk baseball, hit me up on Twitter.

Read more MLB news on BleacherReport.com