In the quest to analyze a team’s offseason moves, numerous analysts spend the majority of their time arguing the merits of superstars’ new contracts, that is, the multiyear, 8-figure-a-year contracts. This past winter, the free agent signings of outfielders Matt Holliday and Jason Bay and pitcher John Lackey, rightfully so, occupied a great amount of the experts’ breakdowns of the successes of teams’ offseasons. While, as a single superstar can shift the outcome of an entire season and almost singlehandedly boost a team to the playoffs, an ill-advised contract can correspondingly cripple a team economically for years.

However, many of these experts give short shrift to or even fail to mention entirely in their analyses the lesser signings, the smaller, less publicized contracts. Contrary to their limited exposure, though, these signings are usually the real difference between a playoff berth and an offseason spent lamenting the issue which had prevented a team from making a run.

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In a matter of days, Joe Nathan, Huston Street and Andrew Bailey encountered injuries that knocked one of the closers out for the entire season and set back the other two in their preparation for the season. Other pitchers and other players suffered injuries as well as spring training moved inexorably toward the start of the 2010 season.

I must have missed something. I didn’t see any articles or television reports or highlights of games in the World Baseball Classic. As far as I knew, the Classic wasn’t scheduled to be played this year. The second was played last year, and the third, I thought, is scheduled for 2013.

But if there was no World Baseball Classic this year, how did all of those players get hurt?

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Ron Shapiro has completed his trifecta – Kirby Puckett, Cal Ripken, Joe Mauer. They are two Hall of Famers and one future Hall of Famer who have made Shapiro an agent of distinction. You can have Scott Boras. I’ll take Ron Shapiro.

Mauer signed an eight-year, $184 million contract with the Twins the other day, eschewing the opportunity to become a free agent at the end of the season and leave Minnesota for far greener pastures, in New York or Boston, for example.

If Mauer were a Boras client, he would not have signed that contract. But then, he wouldn’t have chosen Boras as his agent.

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