It's time for our annual offseason tradition, served up with your turkey and cranberry sauce: predicting one big move for all 30 MLB teams.
It's difficult to do this for every club, since we try to be reasonable and realistic, and several teams already appear to be maxed out -- or close to it -- on their payroll, limiting their ability to sign a major free agent or make a splashy trade. But here goes.
This year's guidelines:
1. A player can sign only once. Signing Juan Soto would be a big move for every team, but only one will sign him in the end.
2. Each team is used for just one big move (although a team like the Mets will certainly have several big moves). For this exercise, that means a team can't sign a free agent and also make a big trade.
3. No re-signing of free agents, so we don't have Soto going back to the Yankees, Alex Bregman returning to the Astros, Pete Alonso rejoining the Mets and so on.
Why that last restriction? Yes, the Yankees hope to re-sign Soto as they did Aaron Judge two years ago, but that rarely happens. Of the top 20 free agents from each of the past three years, only eight of the 60 re-signed with the same team -- Cody Bellinger and Lourdes Gurriel Jr. last year; Judge, Carlos Correa, Brandon Nimmo and Anthony Rizzo in 2022-23; and Clayton Kershaw and Raisel Iglesias in 2021-22. (And Correa went back to the Twins only after the Giants and Mets both backed out of deals.)
The goal is to examine the offseason and understand the potential domino effect of what is really a wild game of musical chairs. We'll include Kiley McDaniel's contract projections from his top 50 free agents ranking for each player. We start, of course, with the biggest fish on the market.
