Once upon a time, Black Friday meant standing in line at your local shopping center or department store at ungodly hours, ready to throw some elbows at strangers for the chance at scoring 40% off a mid-tier flatscreen TV. Now, all the discounts one could possibly need are just a few clicks away. Maybe doing away with Walmart stampeding is a good thing, but there’s still some level of nostalgia for the way things used to be.
No baseball executives will need to bulldoze their competitors (at least literally) this winter, but all of them will pursue the same thing holiday shoppers across America will this weekend: bargains. In order to identify these bargains (or the five most intriguing under-the-radar free agents still available), there are a few factors to consider.
First, none of these five appear in the top 30 of our best free agents list. In fact, two weren’t even ranked in the top 50. Second, there’s a reason that each of these players is overlooked: age, injury history, recent production or all of the above. The five have some combination of the those three things that makes them less than top-billed, at least for the moment. And third, the goal here is to identify players with at least a modicum of upside, or who give us a reason to believe that they may ultimately outperform whatever contract they land.
