David Roth has an extended essay about Major League Baseball’s free agency.

There are three types of Major League Baseball teams where free agency is concerned. There are the ones that try to sign players, and ones that do not try to sign players, and then there are the teams that sort of try to sign players but mostly want it to be known that they were also in on a player that some other team signed. The membrane between these types is thin and highly permeable. Teams that signed players will reassess and decide to become the type of team that doesn’t, generally for reasons having to do with a plan that an executive the owner hired away from the Astros will hint at without ever really quite laying out in a legible way.

The rest is equally that much fun.