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In the canonical “Simpsons” episode “Marge vs. the Monorail,” the town gathers to vote on how to spend the $3 million it earned by fining Mr. Burns. As Mayor Quimby attempts the pledge of allegiance and the minutes from the prior town hall, citizens one after another shout, “Get to the money!”

This is what I think about in the early days of the major-league offseason, when every team is interested in players “at the right price” and every player is seeking $50 million more than you expected. Let’s just get to the money.

This is the second winter I’m projecting free-agent contracts for The Athletic. To do this, I’ve got a big Excel spreadsheet with a bunch of free-agent and extension contracts in it (mostly from the last decade, but some landmark contracts from earlier), as well as players’ performance in the years leading up to those contracts, as defined by FanGraphs’ wins above replacement. Whereas players get paid off home runs and saves in arbitration, I’ve found fWAR to be a solid (though not all-knowing) predictor of earnings on the open market. When I use WAR in this story, it’s referring to FanGraphs’ version of it.

I plug impending free agents into the spreadsheet, find players with similar levels of production before they signed their deals, and work off of those historical comps. Several points worth noting:

• I used to look at fWAR in samples from each of the last five seasons. Now I concentrate heavily on the most recent season and the combined production over the last three for starting pitchers and position players.
• For relievers, I look at one- and two-year samples. What happened five years ago isn’t really relevant for such a volatile position, and I’ve found more of a recency bias in contracts here than elsewhere.
• I’ve used the U.S. Bureau of Labor’s inflation calculator to translate contracts into “today’s money,” though I define “today” as the start of 2023.
• There remains a decent amount of subjective judgment that goes into creating the comparisons, and factors beyond fWAR play into that.
• I explained some of what I learned from last winter here.

Today, we’ll start with pitchers. Thursday, we’ll tackle position players. We’re saving Shohei Ohtani for that group because he likely won’t pitch in 2024, because frankly, the position players could use a bigger headliner, and because we like creating suspense.

Yoshinobu Yamamoto, 25

Pitchers moving from Nippon Professional Baseball to MLB don’t really fit my methodology; there’s no major-league WAR to go off of. One way to compensate for this is to look at pitchers’ NPB performance against that of their peers who then moved to the United States. To do this, I’ve constructed a crude form of “ERA+,” which gauges the pitcher’s ERA compared to the rest of the league in the three seasons before coming over. (It’s not actually ERA+ because it doesn’t account for park factors. Yamamoto’s home parks with Orix have traditionally been slightly pitcher-friendly.)

By this measure, Yamamoto is the best NPB pitcher ever to be available to the major leagues, just outpacing Masahiro Tanaka.

In this table, NPB ERA+ is for the three years prior to signing in the majors. It is not adjusted for ballpark. MLB ERA+ is for the first three years in the majors, except for Kodai Senga, who has only played one major-league season.

Tanaka, who was also 25 when he switched leagues, signed a seven-year, $155 million deal with the Yankees, not including a $20 million posting fee. The Yankees’ investment in Tanaka would be valued at just under $225 million in today’s money.

With the changes to the posting fee — a team that signs Yamamoto would pay Orix $5 million (20 percent) for the first $25 million of Yamamoto’s contract, $4.375 million (17.5 percent) of the next $25 million and 15 percent of the remaining total over $50 million — the same $225 million investment would equal a contract worth seven years and $195 million for Yamamoto.

Let’s round that up just a touch for a contract of seven years and $203 million — $29 million per season — with a posting fee of $32.3 million. The total investment would be seven years and $235 million.

Projection: Seven years, $203 million

Heading into this season, I said Nola looked more like prime-age Max Scherzer heading into free agency than you probably expected, positing that he could potentially earn $200 million in a long-term extension. Instead, Nola had one of the roughest seasons of his career, meaning he’s posted subpar results in two of the last three campaigns.

A strong October, however, was a reminder of how good Nola can be, and in that regard, he reminds me a bit of Jon Lester’s free agency following the 2014 season. Like Nola, Lester had dealt with some uneven regular-season results over the previous few seasons. (In 2012-2013, Lester had a 53-start stretch with an ERA of 4.73; he was dominant in the 2013 postseason and then had his best regular season in his walk year in 2014.) The comparison makes some sense, and an even closer one remains eye-opening.

In this and the following tables, “Signed” is the first season of the contract, “Age” is the player’s age on June 30 of that first season. The “fWAR1” is FanGraphs’ wins above replacement the season before the contract was signed, “fWAR2” the FanGraphs’ wins above replacement for the two seasons before the contract was signed, etc. (These numbers can change slightly over time, so when possible I’ve used the values from when the contracts were signed.) “Yrs” is the years of the contract, “Total” the total value at the time it was signed, and “2023 AAV” the average annual value of the contract when accounting for inflation to today’s money.

It’s rare for a pitcher as consistently accomplished as Nola and as young as Nola to be available on the open market. He hasn’t missed a start due to injury since May 2017. And so I still think it’s reasonable for him to land $30 million per season on a deal that takes him through his age-36 season. Again, the industry as a whole (and the Phillies in particular) has shown an inclination to extend deals longer to lessen the AAV hit. But in a vacuum, I’d peg Nola at six years.

Projection: Six years, $180 million

Jordan Montgomery and Blake Snell, 31

This is a comparison a lot of teams will be making this winter.

Snell may very well win his second Cy Young. Montgomery has never made an All-Star team. Montgomery has been excellent in the postseason for Texas. Snell has never finished the sixth inning in a postseason start.

They arrive at their similar values through different means, and thus it’ll be fascinating to see how teams value them.

For Montgomery, a decade-old deal for Aníbal Sánchez and a recent one for Kevin Gausman make for good comps.

That establishes a pretty narrow range settling around five years and just above $20 million per season.

Snell’s success is more atypical. He doesn’t go deep into games, he walks a ton of batters, and he’s always pitching his way out of traffic. FanGraphs’ WAR reflects that, and he feels riskier because of it. But he’s been productive in his own way, showing a consistent knack for stranding runners and preventing runs. He owns the second-best career ERA of any hurler on the open market, behind only surefire Hall of Famer Clayton Kershaw.

The reward here is pretty obvious, as shown during a Cy Young season in 2018 and another possible one this year. That kind of performance, especially in a walk year, should push Snell’s value higher.

Projection for Montgomery: Five years, $105 million
Projection for Snell: Five years, $135 million

Gray is set to hit the open market for the first time in his career coming off what WAR considers the best season of his career. He tossed more than 180 innings for the first time since 2015 and finished with an ERA below 3.00 for the first time since 2015. His 5.3 WAR this past season was the fourth-best of any starter and a win clear of the next best hitting free agency.

The downside is he’s about to turn 34, and thus there isn’t a lot of precedent for a long-term deal. Chris Bassitt did well in free agency at 34 last winter, but Gray is a level above that.

Gray is a little shy of Lester’s overall track record but compares favorably to Gausman. If teams stay on the shorter end of contract length at three years, that could bump up the AAV.

Projection: Three years, $72 million