Just four members of the 2018 Reiter 50—SI.com’s annual ranking of baseball’s top 50 free agents—are off the board, and each re-signed with the team that I deemed their best fit: Clayton Kershaw (No. 3) and Hyun-Jin Ryu (No. 20) with the Dodgers, and CC Sabathia (No. 32) and Brett Gardner (No. 42) with the Yankees. But as the baseball public continues to focus on Manny Machado and Bryce Harper, as well as the 45 notable names behind them, savvy clubs have already begun to set their sights on a different sort of free agent: those who won’t cost very much—in some cases less than one percent of what Machado or Harper will—but might represent a complementary piece of a winner.
The Best of the Rest: Lance Lynn, Evan Gattis Among Valuable Free Agents Outside the Top 50
