And so the field narrows to one.

James Shields was not who many would have picked to be the final available member of the big three free-agent starting pitchers this winter; while everyone thought Jon Lester would sign first to set the market, Max Scherzer, being a Scott Boras client, was always expected to sign sometime in January, with the assumption being that the Shields question would be settled by then. Scherzer is now a Washington National, and most of the second-tier pitchers below Lester, Scherzer and Shields have been squared away, like Ervin Santana to the Twins, Francisco Liriano and AJ Burnett back to the Pirates, and Jason Hammel returning to the Cubs – yet Shields lingers as the days lengthen and January draws short.

This is partially his fault, for reasons that aren’t his fault. He is not responsible for the cult of perseverance and veterancy that pervades Major League Baseball (and, to some extent, all Western sport); he is not responsible for his most recent general manager, Dayton Moore of the Kansas City Royals, making what was then widely considered a massive misstep in trading top prospect Wil Myers to the Tampa Bay Rays for his services before the 2013 season. He is not responsible for Moore building him up in the press repeatedly as one of the game’s few elite pitchers, when in fact he is “only” one of its very best. He is not responsible, in any meaningful way, for the nickname “Big Game James.”

He is, however, responsible for pitching like garbage in the postseason. This last October was his first trip there with Kansas City, though he’d visited with Tampa Bay previously in 2008, 2010, and 2011. Following this year’s disastrous string of nationally-televised playoff outings, Shields’s postseason ERA sits at a hideous 5.46 through 59.1 IP; not a massively representative sample, but far more than many pitchers ever get to prove themselves on the game’s largest stage. This is the problem with a narrative: if your career lives or dies on it, it’d best be healthy. Without a strong postseason this year to “dispel the demons of years past” or some other such nonsense, and without a World Series ring to show for his troubles, “Big Game James” rings a bit hollow.

The (perhaps temporary) death of that narrative allows us to examine Shields as he truly is: a very, very good pitcher who’s thrown over 200 innings each of the past eight years and over 225 innings each of the last four. That’s his primary value: quality innings without injury. The precise quality of those quality innings varies; some years it’s quite good, such as in 2011 when he pitched to a 2.82 ERA (134 ERA+) and went to his only All-Star Game. Some years it isn’t, such as the previous season, when he threw to a 5.18 ERA (75 ERA+).

But to his credit, that 2010 season line is the only time he’s been a below average MLB starting pitcher; he is usually slightly above average to very good in the results he gets. Never quite elite, but always very good. And every very good – or even slightly above average – inning that a team gets out of Shields is one it doesn’t have to go looking for from either another starting pitcher behind him in the rotation or from one of the shorter arms in the bullpen. These are good things, well worth having, even if Shields is 32 and ageing into what will inevitably be his decline phase. They are not, however, worth paying for at the same rate and term as your Jon Lester or your Max Scherzer – at least, not for the marquee teams where Shields is clearly eager to sign, having weeks ago turned down a five-year, $110m offer from a mystery club that either didn’t have the pedigree he desired or simply didn’t meet the dollar figure he wanted (that team has since been heavily speculated to be either the Colorado Rockies or Miami Marlins).

That was 5 January; now, with Scherzer signed, his options narrow further, and executives continue to leak to media sources that they “can’t imagine” he signs for less than four years, $80m, as if readers are supposed to take any front office leaks about a player during negotiations at complete honesty. Dave Dombrowski of the Detroit Tigers and Brian Sabean of the San Francisco Giants hemming and hawing to local media about payroll size and uncertainty about spending any more money on pitching should be taken with similarly large doses of salt.

The landing spot that makes the most sense for Shields is one of those teams, regardless of what its general manager might say to the public – the Tigers have a Max Scherzer-sized hole in their rotation, and despite the record-setting award David Price received for his final year of arbitration (and the very real work Detroit still has to do on that bullpen), the only limiting factor in Detroit making a financial commitment is whether they want to – not whether they can – spend the money. The supposed side-benefit of convincing Price to sign long term in Detroit seems specious; you don’t spend $80m with part of the primary reasoning being it’ll give you a better chance of being able to spend $155m (for example) down the road. You spend it because it’ll get you a player to help you win more games, to get you back to the playoffs, and make you even more money. With the new influx of cash from the MLB’s new national TV deal making its way into teams’ financial bloodstreams, that might seem a lot more palatable to Detroit even with an already-record payroll for them, especially if the deal is backloaded.

Arizona have made noises about also wanting Shields on the cheap, mainly delivered by new general manager Dave Stewart in a somewhat ham handed fashion last week. The word around the league is that they’re trying to dump payroll, but that’s not mutually exclusive with signing Shields, especially if they’ve got a bit of a higher budget than they’re leading their negotiating partners to believe. Stewart angling for salary concessions through the media is unlikely to be an effective tactic, but stranger things have happened.

One team for whom salary concessions are alien, complete non-starters is, of course, the New York Yankees. We’ve all weathered enough offseasons of media pundits – and the Yankees themselves – proclaiming to have seen the light and the truth of payroll “responsibility,” whatever that means for one of the most popular sports brands in the world, and just about every offseason the Yankees go out and do whatever they damn well please. They’ve been relatively quiet this offseason because of the huge moves last offseason, but if there’s one team that absolutely, positively needs to contend this year and needs guaranteed, quality innings in order to do so, it’s the New York Yankees. Another year of middling middle-of-the-pack baseball would be an institutional embarrassment, regardless of how likely it might seem right now, and a rotation whose success hinges on strong returns from injury from three pitchers (Sabathia, Tanaka, and Pineda) and still has Chris Capuano in its presumptive starting five could use a Shields.

There are a number of other teams leaking poverty to the media in connection to Shields – the Blue Jays, Rangers, Cardinals, Brewers, and so on have all been very candid in some form or another about how they can’t afford or don’t need the right-hander – but it’s hard to rule out anyone completely, except teams like the Mets, Athletics, Royals, and Orioles who have shown steadfast commitment to not spending money at the moment, at least not on players like Shields. Ideally this is the situation where someone’s dark horse team that’s been silently stalking the market for the past couple weeks suddenly rears up and strikes – your Chicago White Sox, for instance. But it’s just as likely as not that one of the teams above that can’t stop talking about the problems with a Shields deal suddenly reverses course and inks him as soon as his price drops to around that four years, $80m price point that one executive gave ESPN’s Jayson Stark.

The only question is: will they get him down there before someone gets impatient and decides to solve the offseason’s last major remaining mystery?