Top assets: What FA hitters bring to the table

Free agency is in session, and all 30 teams are in full window-shopping mode as we wait for the first major dominoes on the market to fall.

Each club has a specific set of needs to address based on how it fared in 2016. As teams finalize their holiday shopping lists, here is a look at the top free-agent hitters and what specialties they bring to the table. These players have been assigned based, in part, upon a combination of their average statistics over the past three seasons, as well as FanGraphs’ Steamer projection numbers for 2017.

PLAYERS WHO CAN HIT FOR AVERAGE

1. Justin Turner Past three seasons: .303 BA2017 Steamer: .284 Teams will be hard-pressed to find any consistent .300-plus hitters in this winter’s free-agent class, and take Turner’s three-year average with a grain of salt, since 2016 was his first season in which he topped 150 games. Still, MLB.com’s top free agent (based on Tom Tango’s WARcel formula) has kept his contact percentage well above 80 percent while expanding his power numbers. Turner finished second on the Dodgers with 48 multi-hit games this past season.

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2. Matt Holliday Past three seasons: .266 BA2017 Steamer: .275 Teams could interpret Holliday’s .246 average in 2016 as a first sign of decline for a consistently productive hitter who will turn 37 in January. They could also judge it as an aberration in a season in which Holliday was never quite right — especially considering he’s a career .303 hitter, and 2016 was the first time he had ever batted below .272.

Holliday was tied for the Cardinals’ team lead with 19 home runs when he went down with a broken thumb in August, so the power is still there, and his contact rate remained as high as ever last season. It’s hard to imagine a hitter with as much ability and pride as Holliday won’t put together at least one more high-caliber season.

3. Carlos Beltran Past three seasons: .268 BA2017 Steamer: .270 Was Beltran’s phenomenal 2016 campaign — in which he finished with a .295 average — a return to All-Star form, or was it a final glimmer of greatness in a potential Hall of Fame career?

Perhaps it was somewhere in the middle. Beltran will turn 40 in April, but his plate discipline and contact rate have remained relatively the same over the past five seasons (including a down 2014 campaign, when many thought he might have been finished). What’s more, Beltran’s line-drive rate has actually increased above some of his All-Star years with the Mets a decade ago. Like Holliday, it …

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