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AP Photo/Frank Franklin II
Nobody ever accused any Major League Baseball free agent of being a wholly safe bet, so it’s perhaps fair to say that any player in any given market is a boom-or-bust type.
Still, we’d naturally prefer to focus on the ones in the 2022-23 market who match that description more than most.
We only considered players who haven’t yet signed, as we otherwise would have been all over Edwin DÃaz. We ultimately identified eight free agents who have three things in common: tremendous talent, obvious pitfalls and projections for multi-year deals worth tens or hundreds of millions of dollars.
Many of those will be given out, but not all of them will be overloaded with risk. Not to name names, but…well, hitters like Carlos Correa, Dansby Swanson and Brandon Nimmo don’t have much in the way of downside, and it bodes well for pitchers like Chris Bassitt, Taijuan Walker and Jameson Taillon that they don’t need power stuff to be effective.
In any case, we’ll check off our eight biggest boom-or-bust targets in ascending order of likely earning power.