Spring training starts in less than a month. Every major free agent is signed. Almost all of the second- and third-tier ones have jobs, too. It's almost like Major League Baseball free agency doesn't need to bleed into the beginning of a new season.
With that clarity, we can find takeaways, lessons and trends -- the sort of things that inform not only the past three months but the season to come and, possibly, the years ahead. Teams have guaranteed players a record $3.8-plus billion this winter. Maybe it is an outlier -- a confluence of a free agent class with a bigger-than-usual group of star-caliber talent, a new collective bargaining agreement that juiced spending and a handful of motivated owners willing to ignore convention and logic in search of winning.