I’m an optimist. I’m not really sure why. I’m a pretty anxious person and am heavily analytical. I know all of the things that can go wrong, but I still expect things to work out for the best. It’s hard-wired in, so we’re all going to have to deal with it.

Things didn’t go well this winter. There’s no way around it. I was disappointed and most of you were too. We lost Fister, Peralta, Infante, and Benoit. Iglesias and Rondon are down for the year. Dirks is out, Fielder is out for Kinsler. It looks like a lesser club, but you know what? They’re going to win it all anyway.

Despite the problems, winning a title is about getting to the playoffs and then playing well once you get there. That’s an obvious statement, but it means that they don’t have to be great during the season – they just need to be good enough to finish ahead of the Royals and Indians. Fortunately, that isn’t a terribly high bar to cross. Without the injuries and the Fister trade, they’d have been a mortal lock. They’re short of that, but they’re the best team. As long as the injury bug doesn’t bite any harder, they’ll make it to the postseason.

And once they’re there, they’re built to win. Even without the exceptional Fister, the Tigers have an extraordinary rotation. Verlander, Scherzer, Sanchez, and Porcello can carry them far. Cabrera and Martinez can drive in Kinsler and Jackson. Davis can run when they need to. You don’t love their chances to outplay the Red Sox over a 162 game season, but they can do it for seven games with this roster.

The Nationals or Dodgers will be a tall order, but the same logic applies. You don’t have to be built for the long haul, you have to be able to turn over the rotation one time. The Tigers aren’t the favorites, but they’re certainly in the conversation.

And that’s all it takes. The Tigers have two main weaknesses. The bullpen and their lack of depth. The depth thing won’t be a huge issue because you stick with your starters in October. Sure they’ll lose a little by not being able to matchup, but they don’t have a ton of guys with serious platoon issues. The bullpen is another story, but bullpens are weird. You can’t really rely on any of them, so all it takes is a bad week from Kenley Jansen. Maybe just one bad outing.

I guess the point of this exercise is that the Tigers aren’t the best bet for the title, but that there’s a very reasonable path for them to get there. I’m an optimist. This isn’t like saying the Twins will win the series just because anyone can technically win. They’re one of the best couple of teams in the AL and the difference between the top teams over a small sprint in October is virtually nothing.

It was a rocky winter, but it’s going to be a good summer and a great fall. Who cares if they probably won’t win it all? Until proven otherwise, I’ll choose to believe that they can. And will.

See you tomorrow, Tigers. We’ve all missed you.

All sports coverage is slowly becoming an analysis of contracts. Watch carefully sometime. Money gets mentioned all the time. We talk extensions, free agency, trades, etc almost as much as we talk about the actual competitions. It’s true in every sport. It’s odd, but it’s a thing we all do. We’re caught up in the culture of it.

There were a lot of comments about the size of the Cabrera deal on Thursday night. And rightfully so, it was big news when pretty much nothing else was happening. It’s a record deal, he’s a great player, you know, the whole nine yards. It’s worth talking about, and I was among the many who thought it was a bad move from a value standpoint. The cost to value ratio was all wrong and the timing was weird. That doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate Cabrera, it just means I’d run a baseball team differently than Dombrowski.

So let’s ask the follow up question. The Tigers are paying Cabrera more than he’s likely to be worth objectively. So what? Does that matter?

It only really matters if it affects the team’s ability to put together its best possible roster. I don’t care if the Illitch family has a lower number of millions, but I do care if they are allocating money to Cabrera that should be going to another set of players in the future who would help the Tigers win more games.

I’ve made this point privately, and if Lewie Pollis is reading this, his hair is likely on fire, but it doesn’t really matter if a team is getting good value. Joe Nathan was probably the best reliever on the market this offseason. The Tigers needed some relievers. Would they rather have a 2 win reliever for $25 million or a 1 win reliever for $6 million? From an economic perspective, the second guy is a better return on investment. But the Tigers need that other win. It’s an expensive win but they need the win. You don’t get a trophy for having the best $/win ratio. You’re trying to maximize your win total. I’d rather have a 95 win team that costs $200 million than one that costs $95 million but wins 83 games. That’s a slightly controversial opinion in some circles.

The counter perspective is that the team that gets better value has resources to allocate elsewhere. But that isn’t really true. The Tigers couldn’t go out and sign a bunch of 1 win relievers and use them instead of Nathan. Those relievers didn’t exist and you only have so many roster spots. If you have five starters who are all 3.0 WAR pitchers, you can’t sign a 3 win starter, even for next to nothing and improve your team. Wins are fungible, but it’s not a perfect market.

This is a complicated way of saying that I only care if the Tigers waste money if it means they don’t spend money on stuff that it available and fits a need. If they need a 2B in three years and they can’t afford one, and the combination of 2B and DH is better and cheaper than Cabrera, then it’s a problem. If not, you live with it.

$352 million is an insane amount of money, but it’s not my money. If the Tigers want to spend $8 million/WAR, that’s cool with me as long as they keep buying their way into the playoffs. The goal is to build a team good enough to make the playoffs and then hope luck is on your side. Someday, the gravy train might dry up, but as long as Illitch is going to spend and spend, this really isn’t a problem.

I don’t know what the plan is overall, but as long as you don’t spend $10 million on Rajai Davis instead of spending that money on a player that helps you win more games, who cares if Davis is actually worth $8 million? Economists care, but very few of us are economists!

It didn’t take long for the Scherzer dust to settle and for Dave Dombrowski to move on to his other star nearing free agency. On Thursday, the Tigers and Miguel Cabrera agreed to a 10 year, $292 million deal (or an 8 year, $248 million extension) that will keep him in a Tigers uniform until 2023. Cabrera had been under contract for the next two seasons for about $44 million. Update: The deal also appears to have two vesting options, so, yeah.

Earlier this offseason, I wrote that the Tigers should wait to extend Miguel Cabrera because I estimated that his price would go down as he aged rather than up as he approached free agency. Dombrowski decided not to wait and locked up Cabrera for the remainder of his productive career.

Cabrera’s defensive value has already bottomed out. At worst, he’ll move to DH for the 2015 season and will cost you about 1.5 to 2 wins of value from the positional adjustment. In 2013, his poor defense at third put that figure around 1.4 or 1.5 wins, so there’s nowhere to go on that side of the ball. This deal becomes about how you expect his bat to age. He’s one or two more good seasons away from the Hall of Fame and he’s established himself as one of the best 30 or so hitters of all time.

But an extension is about who he’s going to be going forward, not who he’s already been. Cabrera’s been worth 5 or more wins in 8 of the last 9 seasons and is on a four year streak of 6+ WAR seasons. If we figure you’d pay $6-7 million per WAR on the free agent market, Cabrera would have to be worth 42-49 WAR over the course of the deal to make it balance out.

And that’s not a great bet. Cabrera isn’t the kind of player that ages well defensively, but he’s already found the defensive floor. You don’t really care about anything but the value he will provide at the plate and as long as his body doesn’t break down, but that also puts a cap on the value he can add. If Cabrera ages pretty normally, you’re paying above market rate for a player who just spend the final two months of the season walking around like he’d been shot in the kneecaps. We’ve just spent the last three seasons watching Albert Pujols’ Hall of Fame skills erode before our eyes and Cabrera just got paid more money without the ability to add value on defense. Cabrera is an all-time talent, but the odds that he’s going to continue to be this great for this many years is a bad bet. And it’s not a bet the Tigers needed to make. You have him locked up for two more years. Take one of them and see how things go. Maybe he gets hurt or declines and either you don’t want him or you can extend him for less. If he looks great, you pay a little more for the year you waited.

Cabrera is coming off a serious injury. This wasn’t a broken finger, it was a injury that completely sapped his power and mobility for two entire months. He’s a great hitter, but the Tigers shouldn’t have been in a rush to sign this deal. It might not be a disaster, but there’s almost no way that it ends up being a good value either. The options are slight overpay and disaster. If those are your choices, it makes sense to wait.

It’s hard to be upset about making sure Cabrera is with the organization deep into his career, but it’s not a move you applaud. It’s a move you just accept. The smart money is on a slow, easy decline. No collapse, but no Bondsian surge. And that track makes this an overpay and an overpay you could have pushed down the road one more year.

In fact, I’m not sure you’d have seen him make this much if he was a free agent this offseason. It would have been close, but I can’t imagine it would have been much over. Why would you sign this deal? If you wait two seasons, does he really sign for more than 8/$248M? I don’t think so. Maybe Cabrera makes this deal look good, but the alternative track is far wiser. You’re paying Cabrera for the best case scenario before you back is up against the wall. Cabrera’s a great hitter and I’m glad he’ll stay on the roster for the next ten seasons, but the cost is too high and the trigger was too quick.

The Tigers employed a controversial offseason strategy this year. They traded Fielder for Kinsler to free up cash (a move most liked), they dumped Fister for prospects (a move nearly everyone hated), they signed a closer, a Rajai Davis, and a Joba Chamberlain. I don’t think you could have looked at the roster and thought they got better. Some people think they held their ground, some argued it was the right long term plan, but you can’t really say they got better for 2014.

Then Dirks got hurt, out for half a season. Iglesias got hurt, out for the season. Rondon now needs Tommy John Surgery and is done for the year. Sanchez is dealing with some shoulder inflammation, but thankfully it doesn’t look too serious at this point.

So the Tigers were already down a couple of wins and then they lost something like 4-5 with a set of injuries. They had a cushion, but that cushion is nearly gone. To fight back, they’ve traded for Andrew Romine at the cost of Jose Alvarez. It’s a strange move because you’re trading for a player that becomes the fourth or fifth best option at SS organization-wide for a player who was probably one of your rotation insurance policies. I’d rather have Alvarez than Romine on balance, but neither is worth getting upset about. The Tigers have other guys who can fill the Alvarez role.

But then, there was this:

The Tigers brought in a player to share the shortstop job who is worse than their in house options? They gave away Alvarez for the right to play another replacement level shortstop. It’s not a huge waste or anything, but what’s the point of that? Why bother?

I don’t really buy Dombrowski’s “internal options” talk. I think they’ll make a move to improve at least one of the problem areas. In fact, I’m starting to think there’s a handshake agreement with Drew to sign him on April 1. That’s speculation on my part, but I think Drew is going to accept a one year deal for a reasonable price with the understanding that the Tigers can’t offer him the qualifying offer if he signs after Opening Day. But…

There really isn’t a good explanation for what’s happened this offseason in Detroit and my theory on Drew is predicated on an assumption that Dombrowski is actually trying to win a title in 2014. You’re going to have bad fortune with injuries, but the organization was unprepared and reckless in how they went about building for 2014. They are still the best team in the Central, but man, it’s getting close and they no longer look like an October powerhouse.