The 2021-2022 Non-Fungible Hot Stove Thread (Presented by Monkeyjizz)

these deals always more or less make sense when you do the WAR calculations and what not, the front offices and agents are all working off the same data. but obv we know most of these contracts go south way before the gradual WAR regression tables want us to believe, and these teams are only handing out whoppers this offseason. baez could be good for the tigers for a few years, he could also be horrible and useless with a contract further underwater than a shipwreck 12 months from now and nobody would be surprised. best of luck to both parties!

The Rangers hands down makes the least sense to me.

yes i would agree w/ that

i can’t get too worked up about deals that don’t extend into the players’ late 30s

like, baez will be overpaid, and probably sooner than one might hope. but i don’t expect that playing him will actively make the team worse, as has happened with miggy and prince albert for years on end

baez def the kind of player who could be cooked at like age 31 (two years from now), which is what happens w/ a lot of these deals that have presumed downside baked into the players mid to late 30s except then it turns out the player is a pumpkin almost instantaneously after the ink dries. jordan zimmerman was a 5 win player at age 28, a 3 win player at age 29, and then tigers signed him for his "prime years" and he never put up more than 1.5 WAR and was a money pit the entire time.

i understand the argument for why baez could be good for the next several years, he's an athletic up the middle player etc. but you're also banking almost entirely on that athleticism holding up for at least half the deal so that he's still a plus defender and baserunner, and/or his hitting not regressing to way below what is acceptable from a full time player let alone one being paid $23m per year. maybe it all goes right and he's giving them a good 3 or 4 WAR per year until he's 32-33... but given the history of how these big free agent deals go i would bet against that.

um

Major League Baseball secretly used 2 different types of baseballs last season

(i was able to get around the paywall by adding to pocket)

somehow when you sign a big free agent contract you immediately become half as good as you were for your previous team, somebody should look into this and see what the deal is

btw roberto perez just became the pirates’ highest-paid player (1 yr/$5m)

he is a career .206 hitter heading into his age-33 season

^^^which is another reason i can't complain about these signings. because i'm bitter

javy baez is a fun, exciting player. he will, when he's not actively berating his own fans, make detroit a more interesting team to watch. will he lead them to a championship? probably not; they only give out one a year.

the pirates aren't just cheap and stupid, they don't even care about being vaguely competitive. the biggest contract they've ever given out was six years/$60m to jason kendall 21 years ago. there are no reasons to watch a pirates game.

the blue jays didn't make the playoffs this year but i don't think any of their fans would call the season a disappointment? the rangers just became much more interesting, even if they never win a pennant. i think there's a lot of value in that for fans

i just watched the Kevin Gausman press conference. reading between the lines it seems like the Giants would not give him more than four years and i'm ok with that even though the Giants are losing an ace. Gausman only has two pitches and it did catch up to him in the second half of last year. all these NL West teams did was lay off of his spiller and then he had to adjust. he was not the same guy as they started to figure him out but still would have liked to have him back. he found a better deal and as a fan i can live with that.

jackie bradley jr is back patrolling the quirky fastnesses of fenway!! my dad is so happy

javy baez is a fun, exciting player. he will, when he's not actively berating his own fans

tbf he only ever did this to mets fans, which is excusable

btw puig signed in korea

Justin Verlander’s two-year, $50 million agreement for '22-'23 with Houston has been given formal approval by Major League Baseball, even at a time when the owners have locked out the players in the on-going labor battle.
MLB and the union have worked through the final details.

— Buster Olney (@Buster_ESPN) December 13, 2021

hmm

It might just be because there is no mlb news, but it feels
Like there are more players than usual signing with the foreign leagues.

You see, you're wrong there. There's lots of MLB news--did you not hear that Old Hoss Radbourn pitched 73 complete games in one year!

what is the union membership status of erstwhile major leaguers who go to japan?

Pretty sure ppl not under contract are allowed to seek employment overseas. Its how u get dudes playing winter ball

buck to the mets

good manager, let’s hope he’s learned something about using his closer

buck !

"Well, all of a sudden there's a problem with Alonso's swing..."

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/Z-9ls-ugums/hqdefault.jpg

he was one of the best baseball guys on seinfeld, as an actor. he knew how to not say or do anything and was effective for that

65 isn’t young, but it nevertheless feels like he should be older

I like it.

prince fielder is 37 years old. isn't that weird?

Yes--and Andruw Jones is only 44.

is this hot stove material? never know where to put ye olde general baseball news during the offseason

Camden Yards is being reconfigured to make it less of a launching pad, particularly for right-handed hitters. The Orioles are moving the left field fence back by nearly 30 feet feet (losing approximately 1,000 seats in the process) and also raising its height. According to MLB.com’s Zachary Silver, the distance to “true left field” will henceforth be 384 feet — in the words of GM Mike Elias, “very similar to PNC Park, in Pittsburgh.” According to Elias and assistant GM Sig Mejdal, the objective is increased neutrality. It’s no secret that pitchers haven’t been particularly enamored with taking the mound in Baltimore.

good

move the fences back, and move the rubber back, then we can #playball

i thought camden was always pretty neutral tho!

according to this, it had a park factor of 115 for 2010-2016:

This means that in the years 2010-2016, Camden Yards produced 108 runs for every 100 runs produced in the average MLB park, and 122 HRs for every 100 homers, for a mean Park Factor of 115.

This is an extreme hitter's park.

http://www.parkfactors.com/BAL

well shit

whoa, actual hot stove action

https://stlsportspage.com/2022/01/15/cardinals-add-surprise-to-international-signing-day-with-deal-for-outfielder-from-south-korea/

Won-Bin Cho, a power-hitting outfielder from South Korea, was one of 12 players signed by the Cardinals and immediately becomes one of the organization’s most-intriguing prospects.

Cho, 18, is a left-handed hitter who played center field for his high school team in South Korea. He has appeared on the international showcase circuit in front of scouts, including winning home run derby contests.

Cho announced last August that he was withdrawing his name from the Korea Baseball Organization draft so he could pursue signing with a major-league organization.

Cho, 6-foot-2 and 200 pounds, was considered by some scouts as a five-tool prospect and had been projected as a top pick had he remained in the KBO draft. He is the first Asian amateur player signed by the Cardinals.

sure

Rays owner Stuart Sternberg: MLB executive council killed Tampa/Montreal plan. He says sister city plans will be in the future for all sports and says MLB wasn't prepared to go first.

— Bill Shaikin (@BillShaikin) January 20, 2022

Automated strike zone coming to Triple-A in 2022 https://t.co/NvpohxWiqH

— NBC Sports EDGE Baseball (@NBCSEdgeBB) January 20, 2022

booooo (to Montreal getting nixed)

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FJ4C-vzWQA4QnTJ?format=jpg&name=small

i think it's the cardinal way that stands out to me. doing things the right way. having the best record of any non-NY/LA team with infinite money, through hard work and dedication - and maybe a couple tricks from Mr. George Kissell!!

it also stands out to me that the angels have the second best record in the AL west over that period of time, but yet never seem like serious playoff threats

also that the astros are still under .500 for that period. a lot of things standing out here

Angels surprised me the most

if you think about it, they're 8 games over .500 over a 10 year span and whereas some other teams might have had some great seasons and some bad ones to get them to that place -- i.e. the rangers -- i feel like the angels are just constantly mediocre. it sorta scans to me even tho i agree it's a bit weird to see them second over that time period. at some point there will be a reckoning over the longterm damage to baseball by having it's best player in 70 years basically never make the playoffs

It's not ideal, but what long-term damage would there be? A Google search turns up twelve HOF'ers who never played in the World Series, including Frank Thomas, Ryne Sandberg, Rod Carew, George Sisler, and Ernie Banks (as often pointed out, not even a playoff game). Trout's missed a lot of time the past few seasons; doesn't make him any less great of a player, but that hasn't helped L.A.'s postseason chances. It just seems like a weird statement to me, like the rest of the division owes Trout an apology or something.

Arte moreno owes trout an apology really

Idk if it's damaging the game now that we have acuna and tatis and vlad but it definitely sucks that trout and now ohtani don't get the national spotlight of the postseason

arte moreno sucks but tbf he's been more than willing to spend money -- he's just spent it poorly. certainly he doesn't owe trout or pujols or rendon any apologies

The AL Central owes everyone an apology.

god, i miss baseball. this is always the time of year when i reinstall out of the park baseball 201x and get really into it for 2 and a half days.

i missed this from last year:

Dodgers pitcher Joe Kelly, whose mother is Mexican-American, wore a mariachi jacket to the White House on Friday.

He got the jacket earlier in the week after asking a musician from a mariachi band if he’d trade for a jersey.

(Via @redturn2, @mgarijc, @ashleynicokelly) pic.twitter.com/iuvB4BkWxa

— ESPN (@espn) July 3, 2021

i know signing expensive relievers as free agents is a bad idea, yet i highly desire a joe kelly return to stl

joe kelly gives me life

I made the mistake of undertaking a league build in ootp that has gotten so daunting, I’m scarred to open it again

i'd like to think that they wouldn't go ahead and charge people during a lockout, but if you have mlb.tv you might want to stop it from automatically renewing on march 1: https://www.mlb.com/account/subscriptions