2022-23 Hot Stove thread

The length of some of these deals is just wild

― omar little, Wednesday, December 14, 2022 12:14 AM (eleven hours ago)

def appears to be a concerted effort by these teams to lengthen out the deals to lessen the AAV... i think primarily for luxury tax purposes? if you had told ppl a few years ago that these guys would be signing for less than $30m per year you'd have been called crazy but clearly there is some new strategy w/ these kinda deals. no idea if it's smart or not

making albatross contracts a problem for the next GM. maybe seeing more of this now that front office staff move around more often*?

*not sure even if this is true

Also in 13 years, $30 million might not even be a remarkable AAV in the baseball world

i was thinking about matt adams this morning, for some reason, and saw that he wasn't in MLB in 2022just now i saw he signed a minor contract deal with the Nats. he spent 2022 with the Kansas City Monarchs of the American Association (independent ball). guess who else starred on the 2022 Monarchs?

PETE KOZMA

currently batting .300 for the perth heat in pursuit of the CLAXTON SHIELD

STAYING HOT 🔥

Pete Kozma punches a single down to center field, going two for three at the plate!

Josh Reddick comes home to score the Heat's second run of the game#PerthHeat#ABL23 pic.twitter.com/sYFbceLzHB

— Australian Baseball League (@ABL) December 9, 2022

Pete Kozma punches a single down to center field, going two for three at the plate!

Josh Reddick comes home to score the Heat's second run of the game

this seems like a game update straight from Out of the Park Baseball, i love it

Australia you have no idea how much heat Pete Kozma is going to bring. you will rue the day that you ever heard his name!!

I'm just sitting here saying "Perth Heat" in my imitation of an Australian accent again and again, can't stop

Some of you probably saw that Josh Reddick tweet last week where he was (implicitly but clearly) deriding the money Cody Bellinger got.

he had a point! but bellinger's ceiling is MVP and reddick's was not

Just found out about the Correa deal. 13 years is insane but seems to be a new trend. I'm just happy the Giants didn't strike out. They're a big market team and had to act like it.

Free agent hitters don't want to come to San Francisco because of their ballpark. I hope this changes that narrative.

Correa to the Giants or that is my wish out of all of this.

― Bee OK, Monday, December 5, 2022

Got my wish

What’s the issue with the park?

https://blogs.fangraphs.com/why-are-teams-issuing-extremely-long-contracts/

i am too dumb to make any sense of this

What’s the issue with the park?

ESPN's MLB Park Factors lists Oracle Park as having the fewest home runs per game 6 out of the past 7 years, the one exception coming in 2013, when it was the 3rd lowest.

Oh. I don’t know why, but I always thought of it as a small park!

i don't think it's a size issue (though the fences get quite deep in left center, center, and right center) as much as it is that the weather in SF and the location of the stadium on the water depresses homers

The gaps are deep

It is a size issue as well, though they have made some changes that reduce some of the outfield sizes a bit:

In December 2019 the Giants announced plans to move the bullpens from the field to behind the center field fence. Prior to the 2020 season the bullpens were located down the first and third base lines. This move reduced the dimensions of the outfield fences in left-center field from 404 feet to 399 and in center field from 399 feet to 391 feet. It reduced the seating capacity by approximately 650 seats.

415-RC

aka “triples alley”

https://www.mlb.com/news/giants-triples-alley-origins

Yeah you see stuff in home games there that’s probably a homer in a ton of other parks! There’s a reason there’s only been 95 splash hits (into McCovey cove) in 22 years!

yeah, i just spent a long time trying to make a post comparing park factors and how correa might have fared in Oracle in 2022, rather than at Target Field (as well as judge, for comparison). park factors are a useful concept but they are very messy to apply to specific hitters. you can imagine a hitter like judge whose HRs are typically long enough that they'd be HRs in most any park, versus a weaker player (which is all of the, i guess!) who might barely eek out a HR in a hitter-friendly park and would instead be hitting long fly ball outs in a pitcher's park.

i prefer to use the statcast version (https://baseballsavant.mlb.com/leaderboard/statcast-park-factors) just because you can also take into consideration the handedness of the hitters, which is more important in some fields (the short porch in RF in yankee stadium, eg) than others, and because it also uses a running 3-year rolling average to help smooth out the variability.

for individual hitters, an even better option might be statcast's Expected Home Runs by Park, which applies real life stadium dimensions, wind, elevation, wall-height, etc, to a particular player's home runs. it leads to unexpected results, sometimes, compared to park factors. for example, using park factors alone, you would think that correa's HRs would be negatively affected by a move to Oracle. he hit 22 HRs in 2022 while playing home games at Target Park, which has a below-average HR park factor. you'd think that since Oracle has an even lower HR park factor, he would have hit fewer HRs if he had played in SF in 2022. but...no. Expected Home Runs by Park shows that Correa would have hit 23 HRs, rather than 22, if he had played all of his games at Oracle (https://baseballsavant.mlb.com/savant-player/carlos-correa-621043?stats=statcast-r-hitting-mlb#xhr-park). Judge would have hit 61 HRs if he played all of his games at Oracle (vs 73 HRs at the Reds stadium, or at Coors)

https://www.tsn.ca/mlb/new-york-yankees-carlos-rodon-six-year-162-million-deal-1.1893940

It's like one of those games of checkers where you just take turns jumping over each other--gain one, lose one.

From a Giants fan prospective. Comparing Gausman last year and Rondon this year.

After watching just about every start in Gausman's Giants history I understood passing on him. The teams in the NL West, especially the Dodgers, figured him out towards the end of the second year. Going to be interesting to see if history repesr itself this year. He recovered somewhat in the Wild Card round but wholeheartedly understand passing on resigning him.

Rondon is different animal and an ace. Losing out on this one hurts.

It wasn't the Wild Card, it was the Divisional best of five.

https://www.thescore.com/mlb/news/2517069

Not to single out one guy, but rather to look at him as a symbol for the whole off-season.

Benintendi's career highs:

HR - 20
RBI - 90
slash (best in each category, full season) - .304/.373/.465
OPS+ - 123
bWAR - 4.8
MVP votes - 0 (he did finish runner-up for ROY)
age - 28 on opening day

still more reasonable than the nimmo deal!

he's not as good as nimmo, but he's a year younger and $15m/yr doesn't seem crazy out of line for a 2-3 WAR player

meanwhile, this is still true

Largest free agent deals in Pittsburgh Pirates history: Francisco Liriano (3y/$39 million), Ivan Nova (3y/$26 million), Russell Martin (2y/$17 million).

— Travis Sawchik (@Travis_Sawchik) February 19, 2019

also, yikes

Eric Hosmer, whose entire contract is being paid by the #Padres, is designated for assignment by the Boston Red Sox

— Bob Nightengale (@BNightengale) December 16, 2022

Why don't you pay *us* to play?

btw the red sox lost three guys in the rule 5 draft last week, *then* decided to dfa hosmer and jeter downs. doesn't seem like great management

my estimation of bloom - and sure, ownership, too, because some of the big-picture stuff smells like ownership - really couldn't sink much lower at this point. i honestly wouldn't be surprised if they fail to secure devers.

dansbae to the cubs, 7 years, $177m, full no-trade clause.

(coughs)

Huh.

The 4 big free agent shortstops — Correa, Turner, Bogaerts, Swanson — signed for $1.107 billion.

— Joel Sherman (@Joelsherman1) December 17, 2022

The new Mendoza Line.

btw the red sox lost three guys in the rule 5 draft last week, *then* decided to dfa hosmer and jeter downs. doesn't seem like great management

yeah but the Downs one doesn't give them an open spot on the 40-man - they hadn't officially signed Yoshida yet, he's taking that spot.

j.d. martinez to the dodgers 1yr/$10m, which seems odd to me as i thought he had a never-ending series of player options with the red sox

and the pirates sent a message to the league that they really mean business by signing catcher austin hedges, a 30yo with a career .189/.247/.331 (54 wRC+) line. he's been worth exactly 0.0 bWAR in his eight-year career, and -1.3 bWAR over his last four seasons. a steal, at 1yr/$5m, because supposedly pitchers love working with him!

justin turner to boston, 2yrs/$22m

advantageous in that he'll be able to play third after the sox trade devers for 11 shitty prospects and one fourth outfielder

i had a feeling Martinez would go to a NL team, did not expect Turner to the BoSox tho

matt carpenter signs a 2-year, $12M deal with the Padres! (one guaranteed year and then a player option year for 2024). i loved being completely wrong on carpenter after 2021. i thought he was cooked, for real.

the rangers have strange ideas about how to manage their roster. they signed carpenter to a low expectations minor league deal last year, and he hit .275/.379/.613 in 21 games in AAA. then they released him. then he immediately went to the yankees and continued tearing it up for the rest of the season (until he got injured). it's odd because, what is the outcome they were wanting from him in AAA? he exceeded all expectations during his time there, and while it was only 21 games and you could argue about wanting to see a slightly larger sample before promoting him, why would you release him? especially on the fucking rangers, lol

andrew benintendi to the white sox, 5 yrs/$75 million

which makes sense, and i know that they were looking at trading for him at different times in the past couple of seasons, but it also feels like they could use a reliable slugger

yup. Benintendi was discussed a little upthread

Breaking: Carlos Correa and the Mets have a deal. $315M, 12 years.

— Jon Heyman (@JonHeyman) December 21, 2022

what the fuck

Whoa, this is actually real. The deal with the Giants fell apart due to problems with his physical.

A lot of FA deals are "pending a physical" but I can't remember one that actually fell through because of it. Certainly not one as big as this.

levels of "what the fuck" here:

- giants postponing the signing announcement and then the mets swooping in before anyone knew the deal had officially fallen apart
- mets adding another mega contract and pushing their total payroll with tax to like half a billion dollars
- mets signing him to play 3B when much of his value comes from being a good SS and he's never played 3B at any level
- 3 in the morning

- no one knows what the problem with the physical was

holy hell!

!!

Carlos Correa leaving the Giants medical office after “failing his physical.” pic.twitter.com/5viPoDxn0H

— Paul Sanchez (@PAlberto_EXE) December 20, 2022