For literally as long as professional baseball has existed, people have been predicting its imminent demise. Yet every year, more and more money is spent on baseball, by more people watching in more countries. And every winter, a great deal of that money is unleashed as baseball's free agents participate in the biggest auction outside of Christie's or Sotheby's. Even that's selling baseball short, given that Pablo Picasso's highest-priced painting, which recently sold for $179 million, wouldn't have been enough to land 10 years of Robinson Cano a few years ago.
With baseball's free-agent market generally not as deep as in the early years of free agency -- teams have long realized the wisdom of signing star players before they hit the market, when possible -- more money is chasing fewer stars and those lucky few are about to score a quantity of dollars written with many commas.
Below we have the players with the top 25 highest free-agent valuations, as projected by the ZiPS projection system. These are not necessarily what each player will get paid in the end or what he should expect to get paid. Rather, based on the projections, these are estimated valuations of what the player's contribution in wins is worth. In other words, this is how much ZiPS says the player is worth.
Players are ranked by total projected contract value, and we'll progress from cheapest to most expensive. In doing so, we'll compare their ZiPS projected value with their market value, as determined by former GM/ESPN Insider Jim Bowden, whose valuing the free agents file was posted recently. Jim's market valuation of each player, determined through tedious market research and through speaking with various MLB executives, has proved to be very accurate over the years, and it'll give us a gauge of how much the market can be expected to inflate -- or bring down -- each player's contract.
25. Daniel Murphy, 2B/1B/3B
Age: 30 | DOB: 4/1/1985
Years in league: 7 | 2015 WAR: 1.4
No top free agent saw a bigger boost to his stock this October than Murphy. Coming into the World Series, he was the biggest playoff story, crushing seven homers in nine playoff games. A lot of that "goodwill" evaporated in the Series, with Murphy going 3-for-20 with no extra-base hits and playing lousy defense. He's a good hitter for a second baseman -- he has a 111 OPS+ over the past five seasons -- but has always been stretched defensively at second.
The Rockies have made noises about pursuing Murphy to play first base, which is a classic Rockies maneuver (signing an average, over-30 player to a contract despite little hope of contending), but Murphy's best fit is a contending team that needs a stopgap second (or better yet third) baseman for a few years.
24. Austin Jackson, CF
Age: 28 | DOB: 2/1/1987
Years: 6 | 2015 WAR: 1.5
ZiPS sees Jackson getting $35 million, but in truth, I think he'll be available for less than that (as Bowden predicts). While he has never matched his .300/.377/.479 age-25 season in 2012, he was still putting up a .730 OPS for the Tigers before being traded to the Mariners in 2014, so he could very well turn out to be a bargain. While it seems like he has been around forever, he turns just 29 in February.
23. John Lackey, SP
Age: 37 | DOB: 10/23/1978
Years: 13 | 2015 WAR: 5.6
Age tends to mean a lot less for a pitcher than for a hitter -- the big thing for a pitcher is whether or not his arm is attached well at the elbow and shoulder -- but once any player approaches his late 30s, age does play a role in the market, which will keep the dollar figure well below what the 37-year-old hurler is actually worth.