My own two cents that I didn’t put in the article:
For me, I use three key factors to decide where to allocate arbitration dollars:
- The Surplus Value of player assets
- The “Next Year” (2018) projected competitiveness of each roster
- The overall Ottoneu skills of each owner (where better owners are more likely to get a higher share of allocations if the two other factors above are not obvious)
Looking at players only at this point, here are some players I’m probably not going to target in arbitration even though they had very valuable 2017 seasons:
- Alex Avila
- Logan Morrison
- Ryan Zimmerman
- Mark Reynolds
- Jed Lowrie
- Whit Merrifield
- Marwin Gonzalez
- Tim Beckham
- Zack Cozart
- Paul DeJong
- Justin Upton
- Brett Gardner
- Avisail Garcia
- Gio Gonzalez
- Ervin Santana
- Drew Pomeranz
- Fernando Rodney
- Greg Holland
- Ryan Madson