In the 1976 classic “Network,” executive Arthur Jensen dims the lights in a conference room to lecture Howard Beale on how the world really works.

“There are no nations. There are no peoples. … There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immune, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars,” he roars. “The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime.”

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Welcome to the Baseball Offseason!

Baseball is a business, you hear at various junctures of the season. But late July and winter are the two times that dynamic becomes most explicit.

Now’s the time to talk about money.

This is the fourth winter I’m projecting MLB free-agent contracts for The Athletic. I’ve got a big Excel spreadsheet with a bunch of free-agent and extension contracts in it (dating mostly to 2014, but with 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 for 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 production before they signed their deals, and work off those 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 past 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.”

There remains a decent amount of subjective judgment that goes into creating the comparisons, and factors beyond fWAR play into that.

These are not necessarily deals I’d advocate the player sign or the team sign the player to. I’m trying to peg fair value.

The values I’m proposing here are in present-day money. It’s possible players here sign for amounts that look larger before deferrals bring them back down (i.e., Shohei Ohtani’s deal two winters ago).

The ages listed for the player are their ages on June 30, 2026.

Some players have “spring projections,” culled from the extension projections I did back in March.

For players coming from Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB) in Japan or the Korea Baseball Organization (KBO), I compare their performance in that league to that of other players who have come to MLB.

In general, these projections feel a little high. That’s in response to last year, when I (and most other people who try their hand at this) was low on several big-name players. As a result, I’m aiming to err more on the high side than in the past.

Kyle Tucker, 29

Spring projection: 10 years, $350 million

Tucker stands to cash in thanks to two deals signed in the last 12 months: Juan Soto’s $765 million contract with the Mets and Vladimir Guerrero Jr.’s 14-year, $500 million extension with the Blue Jays. Let’s look at how Tucker ranks with those two and some other big-name free agents of late:

The Guerrero deal is especially helpful, as it removes a comparable bat from this winter’s market and sets a very sturdy baseline for valuing Tucker. Given how his production compares to Guerrero’s at the time of the extension, Tucker should be able to argue that a $35.7 million average annual value is his floor. But how close can Tucker get to the $40 million-plus AAVs of Soto, Aaron Judge and Shohei Ohtani?

In Guerrero’s deal, you can see a kind of crude math: No, he’s not Soto, but his production was about two-thirds of Soto’s, and so the contract valued him at about two-thirds of Soto’s deal. In Tucker’s case, he’s been about 75 percent as valuable as Soto in the three and five years leading up to free agency. Seventy-five percent of Soto’s $51 million AAV would be just over $38 million per season.