With an offseason of trades, signings and re-signings already underway, it behooves us to lay out where each MLB team stands and what its current big-picture objective is as we head toward the winter meetings in Washington, D.C., set for early December. Here is the current landscape, division by division and team by team.

The O’s are not expected to have a free-spending offseason like they did a year ago, but they are trying to retain free agent Mark Trumbo following the AL home run champ’s 47-homer season. The Orioles are hoping starting pitchers Dylan Bundy and Kevin Gausman continue to develop into top-of-the-rotation starters to go with Chris Tillman; their progress as pitchers will have a lot to do with the Orioles’ chances of winning their division next year. You can expect GM Dan Duquette to be more active in January than he will be between now and then because that’s when he goes after his signature pickups: undervalued free agents who are left standing.

This year’s free-agent class is light on top-tier talent and depth, but there’s plenty of power to go around, including a few 40-homer guys.
The negatives: He just turned 31, and for a player who relies so much on his physicality, there are concerns about how he might age if his body doesn’t hold up, aside from the general risk of signing a player his age to a multiyear deal. Some analysts have suggested that teams are concerned he’ll lose focus if he signs a long-term contract, which could be one reason he didn’t get the lucrative deal he sought last offseason and returned to the Mets on what turned out to be a one-year contract. He will probably be limited to left field for the most part, as he doesn’t like right field and his defensive metrics in center with the Mets were below average.

That said, with few other star options on the market, some team will spend a pile of cash on Cespedes, and projections are in the area of a five-year, $120 million price tag. That dollar amount limits the market, but here are five places Cespedes could land.

For four riveting weeks, we watched games that were being played and managed in a style that often bore zero resemblance to the way this sport has operated for the past two decades. And that’s a tribute to how many people in baseball now look at the way things have been done for a century and ask: Why?

There were 10 games in this postseason in which at least one team used at least 18 of the 25 players on its roster. We also saw games in which the Dodgers and Indians almost seemed to be changing lines on the fly, fueled by data and the constant search for platoon advantages. If rosters expand to 26 or 27 players, as seems likely to happen in the next labor agreement, that trend toward maximizing platoon advantages could be a bigger focus than ever.

But the most significant development of this postseason was clearly the emergence of the “Multi-inning Super Reliever.” And by the middle of next season, we should know definitively that when we utter that phrase, we won’t be talking about only Andrew Miller. Just ask Miller himself.

Andrew Miller was a postseason monster — and now everybody wants to go find their own multi-inning relief solution. Ken Blaze-USA TODAY Sports
“I think it’s maybe a little harder to do that for 162 games,” the Indians’ left-handed game-changer said during the World Series. “But I think we’re heading in the direction.”