Welcome to rates and barrels to Monday, November 25th, Derek Van Riper, Inoceris here with you on this episode. We are looking at the very top of this free agent class and making some predictions as to where those players will land in the weeks and months ahead. It's a good thing we're doing this episode today, you know, because the angels cannot be contained. The angels refuse to lose November. In fact, I think they're winning November, and that was the advice my grandmother always gave me growing up. She said, you've got to win November. That's the most important thing of all. Win November. And look, Perryman Asian, you know, his grandmother probably told him the same thing because he is winning November right now. I think I tried to, like, look at this in the numbers once and was like,

you know, of course there's way too many, too much noise and too many things pointing

in different directions to be like to try to look at like winning the off season and how you,

you know, how you do. You know, the saddest thing about all this is that and this is, I don't mean to throw any water on the parade here, but the saddest thing is, like, because of aging and stuff, like, we're probably looking at a bunch of players that have done cool things that will do less cool things in the future.

Hey, but let's just pretend like that won't be the outcome.

Let's think pie in the sky for everyone.

Well, Wadal Soto is so young that maybe there is like a triple crown season in there.

You could see him winning the MVP.

Yeah.

I mean, as far as your superstars hitting free agency at a young age, this is the rare 26-year-old who hits like a Hall of Famer and should continue to hit like a Hall of Famer for the duration of whatever contract he gets.

And that might be 11 or 12 years. It's going to be a ton of money. We know that. There are a lot of suitors out

there that are actually lining up to make big pitches to Juan Soto. And I think there are four

teams listed on the Athletics Roundtable free agent rankings. All of them sort of clustered in

the Northeast. Both New York teams are returned to the nationals,

the Phillies all being kind of tied in there. And there's one important thing to think about

before we start diving into each individual player, you were looking at teams that seemingly

have more money to spend than others. So you put a chart together just looking at 2024 payroll, looking at what's on the

books for 2025, and you found a group of teams that we would expect to see generally be pretty

active, all with significant room in their budgets to make a splash. The first two columns of

numbers, they're going to be different no matter where you look.

And I actually don't think it's as important what those numbers say as what the difference is.

Because, you know, if you look at even this is fan graphs, but it's not the luxury tax number that's at the bottom, right?

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