Your midday sports snack.

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• Toronto FC celebrated its resounding win in the MLS Cup championship game with a downtown parade earlier today. TFC beat Seattle Sounders FC 2-0 at home on Saturday to win the franchise’s first playoff title and put an emphatic cap on the most successful season in MLS history. Toronto set a league record with 69 points in the regular season and won Canada’s domestic championship, the Voyageurs Cup, with a 3-2 aggregate victory over the Montreal Impact in June.

• The Montreal Canadiens have loaned Victor Mete to Canada’s world junior team. The 19-year-old defenceman, who has four assists and is averaging 14:52 of ice time in 27 games with the Canadiens this season, will join 32 other roster aspirants at training camp in St. Catharines, Ont., starting tomorrow. Team Canada has until Friday to select 22 players from their crop of 18 forwards, 11 blueliners and four goalies. The tournament gets underway Dec. 26 in Buffalo.

• The Vancouver Canucks will lose forward Sven Baertschi for at least a month after his jaw was broken Saturday when he was hit with the puck. That’s two-thirds of Vancouver’s top scoring line gone; Bo Horvat fractured his foot last Tuesday and will be gone for six weeks.

• The Columbus Blue Jackets and Toronto Maple Leafs became the ninth and 10th teams in NHL history to score in the first minute of a game and hold on for a 1-0 win in regulation time, the Elias Sports Bureau reports via the NHL. Columbus did it Saturday against Arizona, then Toronto did it Sunday against Edmonton. Teams that score in the first minute of the game are 22-9-2 this season.

• The Philadelphia Eagles became the first NFL team to clinch a post-season berth on Sunday and also lost quarterback Carson Wentz for the rest of the season. The team confirmed reports that Wentz tore his ACL on an awkward tackle in the third quarter of their 43-35 win over the Los Angeles Rams.

• Cristiano Ronaldo will match wits with Neymar in the next stage of the Champions League, the competition’s round-of-16 draw determined today. Ronaldo’s Real Madrid teams have won three of the last four European titles, but were slotted into the toughest matchup of the last 16 after finishing second behind Tottenham in their preliminary group. Paris Saint Germain, the powerful French club Neymar joined in August, scored 25 goals and allowed only four through six games in the group stage.

Other prominent pairings dictated by the draw include Tottenham vs. Juventus, who lost to Real Madrid in last year’s final, and Chelsea vs. Barcelona, which won the Champions League in 2014-15. The other matchups are Liverpool-Porto, Bayern Munich-Besiktas, Manchester City-Basel, Manchester United-Sevilla and Roma-Shakhtar Donetsk. The first leg of each matchup is scheduled for mid-February, with the second legs to be played in March.

• Detroit Tigers fans will have something to look forward to in 2018 after Alan Trammell and Jack Morris, members of the 1984 World Series-winning club, were elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame on Sunday by the Modern Era panel that was considering the candidacy of nine nominees whose careers started after 1987. Trammell and Morris each received more than the 75 per cent of the votes needed among the 16 panel members. Former players association executive director Marvin Miller was also under consideration, but fell short by five votes.

With their team contemplating a deep rebuild, Tigers fans will be able to mark induction day, July 29, on the calendar. The ceremony will also include any players selected by Baseball Writers Association of America voters. Those results will be announced Jan. 24.

• More than 48 hours after it was first rumoured, the New York Yankees and Miami Marlins have finally completed their trade of 2017 NL MVP Giancarlo Stanton. AP reports the Marlins will receive second baseman Starlin Castro and prospects Jorge Guzman, a pitcher, and Jose Devers, an infielder. Guzman is now the No. 3 prospect in the Marlins system as rated by MLBPipeline.com. The Marlins will also send New York US$30 million to offset the $295 million remaining on Stanton’s contract, provided he does not opt out of the contract when that window opens after the 2020 season.

Nutritional analysis

Baseball’s Winter Meetings kicked off Sunday in Orlando, which means the off-season is ready to begin in earnest. General managers and agents will be in one place and the movement of free agents can now start to shape rosters for the 2018 season.

Anecdotally, it seemed like the off-season was off to a slow start. As fans have become more invested in team-building machinations, the off-season has gained a brighter spotlight and it seemed like there was a dearth of movement once the World Series ended, qualifying offers were sorted out and teams knew which players were on the market.

Sunday started the beginning of week 50 on the 2017 calendar. From the start of week 45 on Nov. 5, there were only five major-league free-agent signings, the first of which didn’t come until Nov. 20. Only two of those five players had any sort of name recognition: the White Sox added catcher Welington Castillo, whom Jays fans remember from his five homers against Toronto in 2017, and the Rangers signed pitcher Doug Fister, who saw duty with the Red Sox last season. Two of the other three were career minor-leaguers signed to major-league deals.

Additionally, there were 11 players signed to minor-league deals with invitations to the big clubs’ spring training camp, and 22 players were signed to straight minor-league contracts.

Was this level of action out of the ordinary? Let’s check the data. The transaction data file at Retrosheet.org contains more than 88,000 moves made between December 1880 and February 2017. True free agency didn’t really become a factor in the majors until the reserve clause was bargained out of existence after the 1975 season following a court challenge by Curt Flood (1970) and an arbitration ruling against baseball in the cases of Andy Messersmith and Dave McNally (1975).

Below is a chart showing the number of major-league free-agent signings by calendar week from 1976 to the opening of spring training in 2017.

The data shows the peak of the free-agent season comes in week 51 after a sharp build in weeks 49 and 50. The longer increase from the end of the post-season generally begins as early as week 43, hitting a lower peak in week 46 and 47 before building again to the prime weeks. However, even though baseball is operating under the same basic rules since 1976, that doesn’t mean the current environment bears any similarity to the past.

Let’s break it down to the last 10 seasons and see what the free-agent data shows. Below is a chart showing each week of free-agent signings from the end of the 2007 post-season to the beginning of 2017 spring training.

We see the same general shape of data with signings starting to ramp up in week 45 and the peak coming in weeks 50 and 51. And if we zoom in on the last weeks of the year and look at the actual numbers, we can see that 2015 and 2016 have had their moves start to concentrate around week 50.

What’s unclear from the data is whether it’s teams or players that are driving the delay to the free-agent season. We can say that this off-season has had some unusual circumstances that may have had an impact: several teams were using resources on the chase for Shohei Ohtani; the availability of Stanton likely delayed some decision-making on the outfield and power-hitter free agents; and the sudden availability of the 13 international free agents stripped from the Atlanta Braves also may have drawn attention from the major-league market.

But now that Ohtani, Stanton and Kevin Maitan, the top player from the Braves investigation, have landed in their new spots, and now that the Winter Meetings are on, we ought to see a significant number of signings over the next two weeks.

Photo of the day

We swear there was a football game played in Buffalo yesterday afternoon. You just have to squint to see the evidence.

At nationalpost.com

• In case you missed it over the weekend, Scott Stinson was at BMO Field for Toronto FC’s domineering, breakthrough victory over Seattle in the MLS Cup final. As Reds captain Michael Bradley said after the match, hoisting the league’s playoff trophy “has been an obsession,” one that Sounders keeper Stefan Frei did his damnedest to try to ward off for a second straight year. Frei was incredible, Stinson writes, but on Saturday, TFC was even better.

• Seattleites can take solace in another bit of recent news: the NHL’s revelation last week that it intends to expand to 32 teams — and that their city is first in line to apply. Will cool, rainy Seattle embrace the fastest game on ice? The NHL is optimistic, writes Michael Traikos, as is the Toronto-born owner of The Angry Beaver, the hockey-centric Seattle bar that may soon have a team of its own to support.

TV tonight

All times Eastern

7 p.m. NHL: Colorado at Pittsburgh Sportsnet, TVAS
8 p.m. NHL: Vancouver at Winnipeg TSN3, SN Pacific
8 p.m. NBA
— Boston at Chicago SN One
— New Orleans at Houston NBATV
8:15 p.m. NFL: New England at Miami TSN1,4,5, RDS
10:30 p.m. NBA: Toronto at LA Clippers TSN2

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