Opinion

As you'd expect from a Cy Young-caliber pitcher with baseball's most powerful agent, Max Scherzer has some rather large contract demands that he doesn't seem interested in backing down from.

The Boston Red Sox enter 2015 with a number of fresh faces and many returning veterans.  The end results of a variety of winter dealings so far are favorable to some Red Sox players and not so kind to others.  With spring training lurking around the corner, here are the biggest winners and losers of Boston's offseason so far, categorized by position players and pitchers.

Position Players

Winner: Hanley Ramirez

Andre Ethier was once a pillar of the storied Los Angeles Dodgers organization, so stable a contributor that the previous ownership/front-office regime gave him a heavy eight-figure contract.

Here's a thought: Let's step into the (imaginary) lab, dissect some of MLB's biggest stars (metaphorically) and build ourselves the ultimate hitter.

Hey, it's mid-January, otherwise known as not the best time to be a baseball fan. There's another long, cold, soggy month until pitchers and catchers report.

Other than obsessively warming our hands by the hot stove, what can we do?

Frivolous theoretical exercises, that's what. (You thought I was going to say be a productive member of society? Pssh.)

Already blessed with a future that looks plenty bright, there's a chance the Pittsburgh Pirates' future will look even brighter before long. It depends on what will become of their newest acquisition.

If you're just now joining us, that's Jung-ho Kang. 

Major League Baseball's offseason is undeniably the most exciting in sports.

Once the winter meetings get going in early December, players begin signing contracts and switching uniforms at a rapid pace. Teams are making trades, bringing in free agents and bidding against one another in the name of improving their own ballclub.

There's less than three months remaining until Opening Day, and the Los Angeles Dodgers look decidedly different than they did at the beginning of the offseason.

For starters, the front office was stripped down and replaced with a new regime headed by president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman and general manager Farhan Zaidi.

Max Scherzer is the biggest pitching prize still on the free-agent market, but there is another starter still without a team who is due for a big payday soon.  Former Kansas City Royal James Shields is a little old at 33, but he has had an impressive career and should have plenty of suitors.

The Oakland A’s have planned to contend in 2015 all along.

Well more than two months have peeled off Major League Baseball’s offseason calendar, a hot-stove season that has been as active and stunning as any in recent memory. 

Yet it is not finished. Two big-money free agents still swim around untouched—Max Scherzer and James Shields—while several clubs with World Series visions remain a player away from being legitimate threats in October.