The Angels avoided arbitration with their final two eligible players on Friday, agreeing on a $5.05 million contract with David Freese and a $1,462,500 contract with Kevin Jepsen.

Second baseman Howie Kendrick and shortstop Erick Aybar will be the Angels’ double-play tandem for the seventh consecutive season.

Veteran infielder Alex Gonzalez will look to extend his big league career, having signed a Minor League deal with the Orioles that includes an invitation to Spring Training.

The Reds made another late offseason free-agent addition Friday, when outfielder Roger Bernadina was signed to a Minor League contract and invited to Spring Training as a non-roster player.

Having an offense that consistently clears the fences becomes a necessity and not a luxury for the White Sox to hold serve over 81 games at the hitter-friendly environs of U.S. Cellular Field.

The Marlins seemingly filled their need for a right-handed-hitting outfielder on Friday, signing veteran Reed Johnson to a Minor League contract with an invitation to Major League Spring Training.

Switch-hitting veteran Wilson Betemit has agreed to a Minor League deal with the Rays, according to CBSSports.com. The club has not confirmed the deal.

Already one of international baseball’s most entertaining events, the Caribbean Series will get an extra boost this year with the return of Cuba after an absence of more than half of a century.

Right-handed relief pitcher Manny Corpas has agreed to return to the Rockies in 2014, and fellow righty reliever Nick Masset — formerly of the Rangers, White Sox and Reds — is completing talks with Colorado after missing the last two seasons because of right shoulder surgery. Both will have Minor League contracts with invitations to Major League Spring Training, sources told MLB.com on Friday.

Platooning is increasingly in vogue in this era of pitching prominence and diminished offensive returns. As we sit here today, more than half of MLB’s 30 clubs have some sort of timeshare on the table at one or, in many cases, multiple positions.

The Top 100 Prospects list has been out for a week now, giving everyone ample opportunity to scour and analyze it. Truthfully, we could spend an eternity answering all queries about the Top 100. Instead, I’m devoting this week’s Inbox to it, taking all of this edition’s questions from Twitter.

Equipment trucks were parked at Tropicana Field on Thursday morning. By the time the Rays’ clubhouse staff had finished packing each, both swelled with supplies, which signified one thing: Spring Training is near.

Masahiro Tanaka’s pending arrival in the Majors is only part of what is emerging as a golden age for Japan-U.S. baseball relations — and not all of the highlights involve the posting system that grabs so many headlines and made the pursuit of the righty so intriguing.

For six innings, Wednesday’s Mexican Pacific League contest between Hermosillo and Navojoa was as tight as you’d expect any Game 7 to be. In the seventh, however, Hermosillo erupted for seven runs — more than enough to send the club to its first Caribbean Series berth since 2010.

Midway through the first period of the New York Rangers’ 2-1 victory over the New York Islanders on Wednesday night at Yankee Stadium, with the temperature hovering around 20 degrees and the wind chill in the single digits, Rangers head coach Alain Vigneault was interviewed on the bench. “The puck is bouncing,” he said.

Yankee Stadium was a white jewel under the lights on a wintry Wednesday night as the Rangers defeated the Islanders, 2-1, to close out the four-day, two-game NHL Stadium Series residency in the Bronx.

Wednesday’s meeting between the New York Rangers and New York Islanders was the main event in the four-day span of two NHL games at Yankee Stadium. Nothing attracts puck enthusiasts in and around the Big Apple quite like a duel between the Blueshirts and their archrivals from Long Island.