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The most boring standoff in baseball history continues. Manny Ramirez and Scott Boras still seek a four- or five-year deal worth at least $100 million working in a bleak financial landscape that has teams looking to cut costs while other players prepare to settle for lesser deals than they'd have received via arbitration. Dodgers GM Ned Colletti hasn't budged beyond an initial two-year, $45 million offer (plus club option), posturing with All-Star form at Boras' failure to dignify his advances with a response.

With spring training rapidly approaching and Baseball Prospectus 2009 in the pipeline, we can use our fresh PECOTA projections to estimate the marginal gains several teams would make if they signed the free-spirited free agent. The PECOTA forecasting system (invented by Nate Silver before he began predicting the outcome of presidential elections) compares a player's track record, age and body type to the most similar players among a database of more than 20,000 major league player-seasons dating back to World War II, generating a range of performance possibilities which are expressed as percentile scores and centered around a weighted mean.

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