Mookie. Lindor. Arenado? Players who will (or should) be in

[Christianss12]

For the many thousands of hours executives have spent talking with their counterparts about potential trades since the end of the baseball season, there have been a grand total of four deals involving players who spent all of 2019 in the major leagues. Half of them took place before Monday's tender deadline and involved players who otherwise would've been cut.

To those feeling generous, baseball's offseason is simply a slow burn, building toward a climactic scene, like, say, the 2019 winter meetings, which start Monday in San Diego. And to others, who see the hot stove as a microcosm of the sport's greater issues -- it's ... so ... slow -- this is just another tease, baseball's promise falling short.

With free agency beginning to churn into high gear -- the first nine-figure deal could be coming sooner than later -- and teams that miss out needing fallback options, the trade market is always there. And conversations with more than two dozen executives in recent weeks illustrate a trade market that is filled with available players -- for the right price. The prices have been high, clearly. How exactly they shift will determine whether the winter meetings will indeed be livelier than last year's festival of tedium.

Trade discussions, it should be noted, do not take place strictly at the president/general manager level. Midlevel executives talk. Lower-level executives converse. These parleys are not in and of themselves of great import. Talks are talks, simply the first layer of blocks for deals. But now that those foundations are set, teams know the available player pool and can maneuver in that space.

Because so many names have been bandied about, it's easier to separate them into categories for assessment. Some of the strata are overloaded. Others contain a few names. The first consists of just one.