A busy baseball offseason

Baseball's Winter Meetings are currently in progress. This offseason (and especially these last few days!) has been the busiest one in terms of trade volume in recent memory. A big chunk of the reason is that the free agent class is one of the weakest in recent memory. (This has also led to seriously inflated prices and contract lengths for the few reasonable names out there. For a few notable examples, take a look at how much money Rafael Furcal, BJ Ryan, and AJ Burnett received. The contracts the good free agent pitchers have gotten harken back to the what Darren Dreifort and Chan Ho Park got back in the day in contracts that the teams who signed them came to regret deeply.) Other things seem to have fallen into place as well.

One of the things we've seen is an entire revamping of the NL East. The Marlins have been completely gutted, the Braves have experienced several personnel changes in recent days, and the Mets are much stronger than they were before. (Florida did get some good young players, though, so in 2-3 years, they may be really good if things turn out well.) The Nationals just made a blockbuster deal (getting Alfonso Soriano from Texas, assuming everybody passes their physicals), but I actually think it's a bad trade for them. In the AL East, The Blue Jays have strengthened themselves a lot, although I still think they'll eventually regret some of the contracts they've given out.

All this trade talk is really exciting, as the Winter Meetings had mostly been free agent singing sprees in recent years, and trade speculation represents a higher level of fun than free agent speculation.

It's also distracted me from work a bit this week, but so has the flu.