The New York Mets and Los Angeles Dodgers both just spent dearly to upgrade their bullpens, overpaying two competent but hardly elite relievers with three-year deals that don't seem to reflect those relievers' performances or the current imbalance of oversupply and insufficient demand in the marketplace.
The Mets already traded their top two prospects (Jarred Kelenic and Justin Dunn) for 36-year-old Robinson Cano and an elite reliever in Edwin Diaz, and even that entails a ton of risk given how often relievers break down or fail to hold their performance year over year. They might argue that adding Jeurys Familia provides them with a failsafe in case Diaz isn't as good in 2019 as he was this past year, but this is a commitment you might make to just one reliever, the one you intend to use most in high-leverage situations.
Familia is a solid reliever with Proven Closer experience, but he's always had a little trouble with lefties and doesn't throw a ton of strikes, with walk rates of 9 percent or higher in every season of his career but one. Last year, he stopped getting so many groundballs, and his low home run rates don't seem likely to continue if that's his new normal. He did miss more bats than he ever had before, largely due to more use of his slider and disuse of his splitter, so if he stays healthy, he could be a 1-1.5 win reliever via WAR, but he wasn't healthy in 2017, missing three months after shoulder surgery. There's some downside performance risk, as well as concerns about his arm and the natural attrition rate of even very good relievers.
Of course, there's a second reason not to bring Familia back, as the Mets finally rid themselves of one player with a domestic abuse suspension on his record only to bring another one back in to replace him. Granted, it was already completely evident that Mets ownership does not care about domestic violence at all, retaining the useless Jose Reyes for years after he had served a 51-game suspension for choke-slamming his wife into a glass door, so we shouldn't be surprised by this, but that history makes a bad deal for Familia a little worse.
The Dodgers paid just slightly less for Joe Kelly on a three-year, $25 million deal that seems even more of an overpay given Kelly's lack of any kind of production at that level. Neither Baseball-Reference nor FanGraphs has him ever posting a 1.5 WAR season since he became a reliever, and he has never had a full-season FIP below 3.49 in any role or thrown 70 innings of relief in a season. The Dodgers had an acute bullpen problem last year between their unreliable middle relief corps and Kenley Jansen's heart issue and subsequent struggles, so Kelly is an upgrade over their in-house options, just not worth this size of a commitment between his performance to date, reliever attrition and the wealth of options on the market this winter.
The Rule 5 draft generates more buzz than actual production; the best player taken in the 2017 Rule 5 draft was Brad Keller, who had a fine rookie year as a swingman for the Kansas City Royals but whose strikeout rate doesn't point to much future success. This year's Rule 5 draft had one truly notable name taken, former first-rounder Richie Martin, selected first overall by the Baltimore Orioles from the Oakland Athletics.
Martin was the 20th pick overall in the 2015 draft from the University of Florida. He's a plus runner with some bat-to-ball skills who showed the athleticism to play short but not the hands or consistency. He did hit .300/.368/.439 repeating Double-A this past year, a nice bounceback after a dud season in 2017 split between High-A and Double-A, and the Orioles really had nothing to lose with the selection since they only had two major-league-ready middle infielders on the 40-man roster in Jonathan Villar and Breyvic Valera going into the draft.
Baltimore also added Drew Jackson, another shortstop but out of the Dodgers organization, this time a better defender and plus runner with a great arm and a 40-hit tool at best. He's a potential backup infielder or could be a convert to the mound at some point.