The St. Louis Cardinals didn't have a place for Stephen Piscotty to play after the acquisition of Marcell Ozuna, and probably could have traded the Stanford product to a lot of different places. But they did the right thing for Piscotty as a person by sending him to Oakland -- and they still got a little value back from the Athletics in the exchange.

Piscotty put the ball on the ground more often in 2017, but he actually walked more and his swing wasn't substantially worse; he did seem to change his approach enough that pitchers kept attacking him down and away, and he kept chasing, which seems like a mental shift that could be corrected rather than a permanent loss of a physical skill. The bigger issue for Piscotty in 2017 was that his mother was diagnosed with ALS, which could also have affected him mentally and contributed to his drop in production, although he tailed off in the second half of 2016, too.

I have always been a fan of Piscotty's swing, as he has above-average pull power while also showing the ability to go the other way, so this seems like a good buy-low opportunity for Oakland that also allows the player to be closer to his family, for which the Cardinals' front office deserves tremendous credit, as well. Oakland loves to take chances on players like Piscotty anyway, although I think his arrival might make Matt Joyce, under contract for 2018 at $6 million, expendable. Piscotty himself is entering the second year of a six-year extension, with $30.5 million still owed to him -- although for our purposes, it's more of a four-year deal from 2019 through 2022 for $29.5 million, as he earns the other $1 million this year in what would have been a pre-arbitration season anyway. Even getting Piscotty's power halfway back to its 2016 level would make him worth the roughly $7.4 million a year he'll get from 2019 onward.

In exchange, the Cardinals get one of the A's top-10-or-so prospects in shortstop Yairo Munoz. Signed for $280,000 as a 17-year-old in 2012, Munoz reached Triple-A this past season at age 22 and had his best season as a pro, hitting .300/.330/.464 across two levels while playing six different positions. He's still fairly raw as a baseball player, thriving on physical tools but also rarely walking (4.2 percent this year) and playing erratically enough at short that the A's have moved him around the diamond, including second, third and all three outfield spots. It's within the realm of possible outcomes that he'll still develop some real baseball skills; he could learn to be less aggressive at the plate or to slow the game down in the field, so while it's not likely, I could still see him ending up an above-average player. The most probable outcome is that he's a very good multi-position player, the sort of Swiss Army Knife bench player you need in this era of the 12- or 13-man pitching staff. They also acquired Max Schrock, an offensive second-base prospect who never strikes out but doesn't have much power or defensive value, and did get a big boost from the modest hitters' park in Double-A Midland this year.

• The Angels had a black hole at second base last year. With an aggregate line of .206/.274/.327 from the position, that's probably not even fair to black holes, which at least emit black-body radiation -- and that's more than the Angels got out of second base in 2017. Enter Ian Kinsler, a player clearly on the decline but who was Rogers Hornsby last year compared to the Keystone Kops the Angels employed, and who also gives them another right-handed bat to, one would hope, improve the team's dismal performance against southpaws. This is a salary dump, as the Tigers got back two very fringy prospects. One is 23-year-old outfielder Troy Montgomery, whom you might remember from such movies as "This Prospect Isn't Very Good" or "We're Just Glad to Move the Salary," and the other is 18-year-old pitcher Wilkel Hernandez, a right-hander who shows a lively, mid-90s fastball and some feel for a changeup but has no breaking ball whatsoever.

• There were no high-profile, free-agent signings at this year's winter meetings, but we did get a slew of reliever signings ... and the price of relief pitching just keeps going up, as relievers with limited track records of production and/or health are getting $9 million to $11 million a year, often on multiyear deals. Bryan Shaw signed a three-year deal with the Colorado Rockies for $9 million a year; he's one of the only free-agent relievers this year who has been healthy (59 or more innings in six straight years) and never had an awful year, but he has been worth about 1 WAR, with some seasons well below that. I can find only four relievers who had nine straight seasons of 59-plus innings since 1990, which I think is evidence of how hard it is for any pitcher to stay healthy for that long under the kind of usage patterns seen for one-inning relievers now. The Rockies also re-signed my No. 1 reliever on the open market, Jake McGee, to the same contract plus an option for a fourth year. He might really be worth that money, as he has had a few seasons in which he was among the most valuable relievers in baseball, at least on a per-inning basis, but he hasn't seen 60 innings in a season since 2014. Given the volatility and attrition rates of relievers as a whole, I would wager that the Rockies won't get their $54 million worth out of these two guys. But they will get some great individual seasons within the three-year span, and they did do a nice job of diversifying the portfolio by adding a steady, above-average performer such as Shaw to the higher-variance, higher-upside McGee.