Monthly Archives: November 2013

Rounding the Bases: Deals being made

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One week ago I stated that we may be waiting a few weeks before the MLB Hot Stove started to heat up and teams began making significant roster additions.

It turned out that this past week was in fact quite a busy one, with several free agent signings being completed and one major trade.

Fielder and Kinsler swap teams

At breakfast time on Thursday morning I was tucking into a bowl of porridge and enjoying watching the highlights of Day One of the first Ashes Test on Sky Sports News (enjoy the good times while they last, comes to mind) when I noticed that an MLB news item was about to scroll across the bottom of the screen. I expected it to be news of a minor free agent signing, but instead was taken aback to read that the Texas Rangers had swung a trade to acquire first baseman Prince Fielder from the Detroit Tigers for second baseman Ian Kinsler.

Just two years ago, the Tigers caused a major shock by coming out of nowhere and signing Fielder to a nine-year, $214m contract. Despite having a disappointing 2013 season, Fielder appeared to be set to stay in Detroit for years to come and yet all of a sudden the long-term commitment between player and team had been broken.

At first glance it looks to be a trade that should benefit both teams handsomely, not just in the player each team has required but the knock-on effects for their respective rosters.

The Tigers can now move Miguel Cabrera over to first base, where his limited fielding skills are better suited, and create an opening for their best prospect, third baseman Nick Castellanos. Kinsler will add a combination of some power and speed to the lineup and moving the majority of Fielder’s hefty contract (the Tigers have given the Rangers $30m as part of the deal to cover some of the remaining $168m) gives them some financial flexibility potentially to add another player or two or to add to the pot for a contract extension for Max Scherzer and, down the line, Miguel Cabrera.

As for the Rangers, they were desperate to make a big move after suffering late season heartbreak in the last two seasons. Acquiring a premium slugger is a statement of intent and moving to the homer-friendly confines of Rangers Ballpark should suit Fielder down to the ground. Moving Kinsler also frees up some space for the Rangers to let top prospect Jurickson Profar settle in at second base.

Angels and Cardinals

The Rangers’ AL West rivals the Los Angeles Angels also completed a trade this week, acquiring third baseman David Freese from the St. Louis Cardinals for centre fielder Peter Bourjos, with a couple of young prospects thrown into the deal too.

Freese will forever be a hometown hero in St. Louis for his 2011 World Series heroics, yet it looks like a good time for him to move on to a new challenge with the Angels. The Cardinals will probably move their infield players around so that Matt Carpenter shifts over to third base and Kolten Wong moves into second base full-time, potentially with former Detroit Tiger Jhonny Peralta joining the team as their new shortstop if the rumours from Saturday night are accurate. Bourjos, if he can stay fit and on the field, will be a better option in centrefield than the disappointing John Jay for the Cards, whilst Mike Trout will no longer be moved aside to the Angels’ left field and will instead be the number one centre fielder.

Pitchers getting paid

David Freese should be a good addition for the Angels, but their most pressing need over the offseason is to bolster their pitching corps. Another opening in the rotation has been created by Jason Vargas departing as a free agent as he agreed a four-year, $32m contract with the Kansas City Royals.

The signing was met by a fairly lukewarm response. In part this was because of the Royals rumours swirling in the hour before it was announced:

A “major-baseball announcement” immediately created visions for some of Carlos Beltran donning the ‘KC’ cap once again, so when the reality was a player you can neatly file under the words ‘solid’ and ‘dependable’ there was bound to be some disappointment.

Giving a four-year contract to a less-than-spectacular player also raised a few eyebrows, yet $8m per year for a good starting pitcher looks like being a good deal for the Royals on the current pitching market.

The San Francisco Giants spent $23m this week to sign 38-year old Tim Hudson on a two-year contract (£137k per week). Hudson’s 2013 season was ended by a horrible freak accident when the Mets’ Eric Young accidentally landed on the pitcher’s right ankle as he was covering first base. The Giants are confident that Hudson will come back from his fractured ankle as good as new and if he does then he should help the team in their attempt to get back to the postseason and to win a third World Series in five years.

Elsewhere in the NL West, the San Diego Padres have also signed a pitcher whose 2013 was impacted by injury. Josh Johnson has spent most of his career so far battling the tag of being an ace when not injured. Recently he’s spent more time injured than being an ace but the Padres have little to lose in signing him to a one-year contract worth $8m and, with Petco Park being a great place for a pitcher to ply his trade, it’s also a good setting for Johnson to have a good year and then earn a more lucrative contract in a year’s time.

Another veteran for the Phillies

The Philadelphia Phillies played at the Veterans Stadium for 33 seasons before moving to Citizens Bank Park in 2004. The team’s General Manager Ruben Amaro Jr has done a good job in recent years of honouring their old home by building rosters dominated by veterans and, just a week after signing 36-year-old Marlon Byrd to a two-year contract, he added another this week with the re-signing of catcher Carlos Ruiz.

Ruiz has spent his whole Major League career with the Phillies and even when his contract ran out at the end of the 2013 season, there always seemed a very good chance that he would carry on with the club.

Amaro’s decision to hand the 35-year-old a three-year contract worth a guaranteed $26m (annual salaries of $8.5m – approximately £101k per week – with a $500k 2017 buyout fee) made sure of that and immediately led to the GM’s thought processes (or more precisely lack of) being questioned.

Giving a three-year contract to a 35-year-old catcher isn’t ideal, but Ruiz is a good all-round player, not spectacular at anything but solid enough at the plate and behind it, at a position where merely being good carries plenty of value. Additionally the risk involved is mitigated slightly by the Phillies’ familiarity with him, from how he fits into the group as a personality to a detailed knowledge of his fitness.

And finally …

The Phillies kept hold of their catcher, but it looks like the Atlanta Braves have lost theirs. Brian McCann has been with the Braves for his entire professional career and his nine-season Major League run with the team always looked likely to come to an end this offseason when he became a free agent. Sure enough, late on Saturday night it was being reported that he has agreed a five-year, $85m contract (just over £200k per week) with the New York Yankees.

Rounding the Bases

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After a couple of weeks of rest after the World Series, I’m now back in off-season writing mode.

There will be a series of 2013 review articles leading up to Christmas touching on MLB, the British Baseball leagues (something that I wasn’t able to cover as much as I had hoped during the second half of the season) and International competition (from the high of the World Baseball Classic to the low of baseball’s latest Olympic rejection).

I’ll also be writing regular round-ups of the most important news from the Major Leagues, starting with this one today.

Atlanta Braves are on the move

Arguably the biggest news of the past week has been the surprise announcement that the Braves are planning to leave Turner Field for a new facility 10 miles away, with the projected opening being in 2017.

The reports make clear that there have been issues rumbling along about Turner Field’s ability to meet Atlanta’s needs in the coming years, but there had been little in the way of public comment about the Braves potentially moving until this recent announcement.

Turner Field is a relatively new ballpark itself, having been converted into its current state after the 1996 Olympic Games. It is proposed that the current stadium will be bulldozed which seems an awful waste.

It must be galling to the Oakland A’s and Tampa Bay Rays in particular as they are having little joy (to put it mildly) in finding a way out of their current ill-fitting venues. So desperate are they, the two teams would be forgiven for momentarily considering a far-fetched plan like trying to dismantle Turner Field and moving it somewhere else.

Mauer on the move

The Minnesota Twins announced that current catcher Joe Mauer will be ditching the so-called ‘tools of ignorance’ and wearing a first-base glove instead from the start of the 2014 season.

The fielding position of catcher is unique across sport. Even with some occasional rest days, playing the position over a long season takes a toll on the body and offers the constant risk of injury via foul-tips and home-plate collisions (the latter potentially being outlawed, or at least heavily regulated, in the near future).

Mauer’s future fielding position has been a topic of conversation for several years as he is so valuable to the Twins, both in terms of his contributions at the plate and in terms of his contract. It makes sense to move him out of harm’s way, but catchers generally are reluctant to give up the position.

In this case, Mauer has taken it upon himself to suggest the move after a concussion ended his 2013 season prematurely, a decision made easier due to the Twins not having an ideal first baseman on the roster already.

Hopefully the move works out well for Mauer. Twins fans are in a strange position in that in recent years their team has made decisions that delighted them (staying in Minnesota, building a wonderful new open-air ballpark, preventing hometown hero Mauer from being snaffled by the Yankees etc) but the performances on the field have been bitterly disappointing.

Player moves 

The Hot Stove is not bubbling yet, in fact it’s hardly even simmering. Exciting rumours are seeming hard to come by, let alone news of actual moves potentially being on the cards.  The Winter Meetings do not begin until 9 December and it’s quite possible there will just be a batch of minor deals, with maybe one or two leading free agents coming off the market, over the next three weeks.

The main free agent acquisition so far has seen the Philadelphia Phillies signing outfielder Marlon Byrd to a two-year, $16m contract (£95,470 per week).

Byrd put up a good showing in 2013, firstly with the New York Mets and then with the NL Wild-Card-winning Pittsburgh Pirates, but it came after a miserable 2012 when he performed poorly for the Chicago Cubs and Boston Red Sox and served a 50-game suspension for failing a drugs test. He turned 36 at the end of August and having earned $22m from twelve seasons on Major League rosters, being able to add a $16m contract to that is an incredible turn around for someone whose career looked to be finished one year ago.

So it’s great news for Byrd, but the Cinderella story for him will have Phillies fans fearing they’ve spent $16m on a pumpkin. After winning the NL East division five times in a row between 2007 and 2011 inclusive, Philadelphia have dropped off the pace in the last two years (their 73-89 2013 record was their first sub-.500 season since 2002) with ‘win now’ spending to sign or keep hold of veteran players creating an old and increasingly injury-plagued roster.

Signing Byrd doesn’t look to be a way to turn the tide in that respect.

Japanese player posting system

There may be one less free agent on the market this offseason. Japanese pitcher Masahiro Tanaka reportedly was likely to be made available to MLB teams, but this is now in doubt after MLB’s proposed new player positing agreement with Japan was withdrawn.

Players in Japan’s Nippon Professional Baseball League become free agents after playing for nine seasons and they can only seek offers from MLB teams before then if they go through the player posting system. The respective Japanese club will make their player available in a blind bidding process. If the largest bid is acceptable to the team, the player can then begin negotiations on an MLB contract. From the Nippon Professional Baseball League’s perspective this allows them to get the best fee, but that’s exactly why MLB doesn’t like it.

Paying transfer fees – as that’s effectively what they are – is alien to MLB teams and there’s a view among some fans in the States that the whole process should be scrapped. However, Japanese teams clearly cannot trade players in the way that MLB teams do between themselves, and receiving an amateur draft pick as compensation is not an option either, so a fee is the only viable way for a Japanese team to be compensated if an MLB team wants to acquire a Japanese player who is still under contract.

MLB understands this and their proposal was simply to revise the process so that the fee would be a defined point between the 1st and 2nd-best bids.  Nippon Professional Baseball League has failed to respond to that offer and MLB has now withdrawn it, working from the position of strength that it only effects a small number of players and that unless Japan’s league agrees to a system more to their liking, they will walk away and wait until players reach their nine-year free agent mark.

That will deny the very best Japanese players the opportunity to move to MLB during their prime, whilst taking away the chance for a Japanese team to receive a substantial transfer fee and potentially affecting the standing of Japanese baseball as their best players will not get the chance to showcase their abilities in what’s considered worldwide to be the best competition (in fairness, the Nippon Professional Baseball League is very popular in Japan, so they may feel keeping hold of their stars is better than any second-hand publicity boost through one of their players performing well in the States).

In short, there are a host of reasons why players and teams in Japan would want to retain the option of having a system to transfer players and MLB has now put the ball back in their court to achieve this.

Managerial set complete 

After the Detroit Tigers did indeed appoint Brad Ausmus as their new manager, that left the Chicago Cubs and Seattle Mariners as the two teams still seeking a skipper.

Those positions have now been filled with the Cubs appointing the San Diego Padres’ bench coach Rick Renteria to be their 53rd manager in franchise history and the Mariners opting for Lloyd McClendon who had been on the coaching staff of the Detroit Tigers for the last eight years following a five-season spell as manager of the Pittsburgh Pirates.

Both have substantial experience in coaching and managerial positions, showing that whilst teams are not afraid to give managerial newcomers like Ausmus a chance, there’s no reason for established coaches and former managers to give up hope that another opportunity may come their way.

 

Changing of the Old Guard

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The videos and photos from Boston’s World Series parade tell us all that the sad moment has come around again: the baseball season is over and there are going to be no Major League games to enjoy for several months.

Of course, the baseball off-season is really the baseball-playing off-season. November to February will not be light on baseball news to devour, digest and comment upon; far from it.

The player ‘hot stove’ will likely take a few weeks to really start to simmer, but the managerial merry-go-round is already in full swing.

The main baseball story to read about on Sunday morning was the reports that the Detroit Tigers are going to appoint Brad Ausmus as their new manager, taking over from the retiring Jim Leyland.

If the reports are accurate, there’s going to be a significant change in direction in Detroit as, on the face of it, the Tigers are moving from one end of the spectrum to the other.

Leyland was the personification of ‘old school’ among Major League managers, 68 years old with 22 years of Major League managerial experience and plenty of worry lines on his face to prove it. In contrast, Ausmus is 44, only a few years removed from ending his Major League playing career in 2010 and, aside from a brief stint as Israel’s World Baseball Classic manager, possesses precisely zero managing or coaching experience at the Big League level.

Ausmus hasn’t paid his managerial or coaching dues, but does that really matter? With 18 years of Major League playing experience as a catcher, it’s very questionable whether a few years of managing in the Minors or being a third-base coach would significantly improve his ability to manage a Major League team.

No two individuals are exactly the same and the path required to prepare oneself for managing will differ accordingly.

Leyland, for example, never made it to the Majors as a player. He played in the Minors for seven seasons and then spent ten years as a Minor League manager before joining Tony La Russa’s staff as a third-base coach with the Chicago White Sox. That combined experienced led him to his first Major League managerial appointment with the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1986. Ausmus was drafted by the New York Yankees out of High School the following year.

The initial response to reports of Ausmus’s appointment has been extremely positive, lauding him as an intelligent baseball man with all the communication skills required to get the best out of his players. It will take some adjustment on behalf of those players though as they were familiar with Leyland’s ways and routines.

There’s no doubt that it’s a great job for Ausmus to take on considering the playing talent he has at his disposal. That creates a certain amount of pressure as if things don’t go so well then fingers will be pointed at the new link in the chain and his lack of managerial and coaching experience will then be a talking point.

Walt Weiss took over the Colorado Rockies prior to the 2013 season and like Ausmus he came into it with only his Major League playing career to fall back on. The Rockies subsequently finished dead last in the NL West with a 74-88 record but no one saw that as a reflection on Weiss. Rightfully there were low expectations going into the season due to the playing roster he had to work with and Weiss was able to use the year as a learning experience.

However, given the choice of getting your feet wet in relative comfort with a team not expected to be in contention or diving straight in with a team that has reached two ALCS’s and a World Series in the last three season, anyone would gladly accept the pressure that Ausmus will be under in 2014. Fellow ex-catcher Mike Matheny will testify to that having completed the same leap as Ausmus in replacing Leyland’s old friend La Russa in St. Louis two seasons ago.

If Ausmus is confirmed in post with the Tigers, that will leave two Major League managerial vacancies still to be filled at the Chicago Cubs and Seattle Mariners respectively.

So far this offseason, the Washington Nationals have chosen former Arizona Diamondbacks third-base coach Matt Williams to replace the retiring Davey Johnson, whilst the Cincinnati Reds promoted pitching coach Bryan Price to take over from the sacked Dusty Baker.

When you add in Ryne Sandberg being confirmed as the full-time successor to Charlie Manuel after serving as the interim manger with the Philadelphia Phillies, there’s a real changing of the old guard taking place among the ranks of Major League managers. It will be interesting to see if the Cubs and Mariners follow this pattern with their appointments over the next few weeks.

Further reading

Full details of Jim Leyland’s playing and managerial career can be found on his Baseball-Reference page.