This Offseason...

Is going to be absolutely crazy. With the new labor deal in place basically allowing the Mets, Red Sox, etc., and especially Yankees to keep buying up whatever they want and thus raising the prices for everyone else, there are going to be some crazy contracts handed out. And since even the cream of the crop this year (guys like Barry Zito and Jason Schmidt) have their flaws, many of these deals are not going to work out very well. Baseball is swimming in money at the moment (fox nielson ratings be damned) so I guess it's better to go to the teams/players than in the owner's pockets. What I've been thinking recently (during the playoffs) is that there are quite a lot of young, very talented pitchers out there, but most are signed up for several more years with teams that aren't very good. While it's encouraging to see low market teams sign up their stars, at the moment it's also keeping a lot of them out of the playoffs and the national stage. Especially in the NL, many of the best young pitchers are on poor teams (Zambrano, Sheets, Webb, Oswalt, Harang, Willis) which also means more money will be thrown around for slightly less talented, older guys who are available.

Close to home, I mainly hope the Red Sox don't add too many more Matt Clements this year. Honestly what I'd like to see happen is for the Red Sox to quickly add both Mark Mulder and Brad Lidge for maybe a couple years at some decent, but not crazy, amount of money. The only other way I see the FA pool working out for them would be if they went after Zito, Schmidt, Asian Import, etc. and ended up being outbid by the NY teams. If that happens then suddenly guys like Mulder could start being more expensive. I'm realistically thinking the Sox won't acquire any huge FA (unless big Stein drugs Cashman), so I really think they should either go very hard after the underrated talent early, or make some trades.

Because so many teams could add payroll this offseason, so many teams think they are within sight of a playoff berth next year, and there aren't all that many good FA out there, this will be a huge offseason for trades. I'm fully prepared to not recognize many teams at the start of next year (with the World Champion Cardinals at the top of that list). That's not exactly the way I like it, but hey I'll memorize the rosters in April. The team I hope I won't recognize is the Red Sox, because if I do, that probably also means I'm just looking at another 85 win team.