Okay folks, the 2019 season is upon us, and the off-season will officially be closed tomorrow. No I’m not actually counting the Japan Series as the start of the Season. This off-season I decided to host a Community wide FA Prediction Contest much like you’ll find in other avenues around the baseball internet. This one however was open only to Talking Chop members. The winner, gets to decide on a signature for me (if it's questionable, it must be approved by a mod, I'm not getting the boot due to your shenanigans). We started with 40 FA’s and we’re down to 2 left unsigned as players take the field for real. If Kimbrel or Kuechel sign between now and tomorrow's games we can revisit if that changes the results. I'm not holding my breath at this point though so let's continue.

The rules were simple, predict where you thought the Free Agent would sign, for how many years and the contract value (points were based off AAV). For the actual results, because of nuances like options, and opt-outs, I used the total guaranteed years and money.

Point System

Correct guess of Opt-In: 2 points

Correct guess of Retirement: 7 points

Correct guess of Accepting the QO: 7 points

Correct Team: 2 points

Correct length: 2 points

Correct AAV: 3 points

+/- 10% AAV: 2 points

+/- 15% AAV: 1 point

I’m not going to get too much into what teams ended up doing, spending what or signing who as this has all been covered quite extensively during the off-season, and if you want to get an idea of the money teams have spent this off-season, total or AAV, search FONZY’s comments as he’s posted snippets throughout the off-season.

Unsurprisingly, no one was able to correctly guess all facets of the contract. The easiest FA to predict, aside from Price and Heyward deciding not to opt out, was Kershaw. He allowed the most points scored. The hardest one, seems to be Gio Gonzalez as most presumed he would get a multi-year deal, the lowest AAV guess was 6M, and the lowest total money guess was 8M. Conversely, with Kershaw, while the total years and money fell short of any predictions, everyone was at least in the ballpark of his AAV. Him staying with the Dodgers just seemed too obvious, which also helped the group score more points with his signing than any other Free Agent.

Without further ado, the winner of this year’s contest is longtimebravesfan43. He totaled 68 points and narrowly edged out Ncristolderman who had 66. The rest of the pack followed with

1. Me at 59 points

2. Loganutk with 58 points

3. BackOnMyBullshit with 56

4. Coxatron with 52

5. Braves95 with 49

6. Brentjmcdade with 44

7. Ivan The Great with 42

8. Lieutenant Dan...sby with 41

9. JoeRonnieRice with 16

To be fair to Joe, he only submitted team names, so he was behind the 8 ball from the get go.

Ok, so, I haven't seen longtime around these parts in a while and doing a search of his activity shows he hasn't had any activity since Jan 11th. I know I've seen this asked before, but don't know if I've seen an answer. Is he just MIA or did he get put in the corner for being unruly? If he's just taking a hiatus, longtime, come back at least to tell me what my new sig is. If he's been asked (or told) not to return to the playground then congrats to Ncristolderman, please submit your new sig for me in the comments.

The breakdown of everyone’s points are shown below, followed by a table with the signing information for the FA’s involved.