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All along, the thought’s been that the Colorado Rockies were pretty likely to trade one of their three left-handed hitting outfielders before the start of the regular season. So naturally, they kept them all and then went out and signed another.

It won’t stay like this for long. The Rockies agreed to terms with Gerardo Parra on Tuesday afternoon on a three-year deal worth $27.5 million. Chris Cotillo reports a fourth-year option is included for $12 million. The contract looks fine; our crowdsourcing project pegged Parra for a three-year deal between $24-27 million, and that’s essentially what he received. What’s interesting is that Parra joins Carlos Gonzalez, Corey Dickerson, and Charlie Blackmon in a suddenly crowded and similarly-skilled outfield:

At this stage in their respective careers, Gonzalez and Dickerson are near-clones of one another. While Gonzalez has the name recognition, Dickerson is three years younger than Gonzalez and is likely the better hitter. On the other hand, Dickerson is very limited defensively and is coming off an injury-plagued season that featured trips to the disabled list both for plantar fasciitis and a pair of broken ribs. Both struggle mightily against same-handed pitching.

At this stage in their respective careers, Blackmon and Parra are near-clones of one another. Both are roughly league-average hitters who struggle against same-handed pitching. Both can play center field and not be a total disaster, though you’d rather see them in a corner. Parra once graded out as an elite corner outfielder — someone you’d think could transition to center with ease — but there’s more than one reason to believe in the defensive decline portrayed by the metrics over the last couple seasons.

There’s just too much going on here. Something’s got to give. And it might not take long:
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Sometimes, it’s only natural to wonder why it took so long for a trade to come to fruition. In an ideal world, the Nationals would have found a free agent outfielder with whom they could agree upon terms. In an ideal world, the Blue Jays would have found a free agent reliever with whom they could agree upon terms. Our world is less than ideal, though, and neither team found a fit. So a match was made between the two. Drew Storen will pitch high-leverage innings for the Blue Jays, now. As a result, Ben Revere will slap singles, run fast, and play the outfield for the Nationals.

This isn’t a trade that will make a monumental impact, either way. Revere, at his very best, is something like a three-win player who’s actually more like a two-win player, and the Nationals can keep him for another year after this one if they feel he’s deserving of a fourth trip to arbitration. Storen, at his very best, is something a two-win player who’s probably more like a one-win player, and he’s set to be a free agent after this season. Both will earn somewhere between five and ten million dollars this year. Nothing here moves any kind of needle too much. If it did, it wouldn’t make so much sense.

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It was surprising when Jim Edmonds got knocked off the ballot in his first year of Hall of Fame eligibility when results were announced a couple days ago. It was surprising that Ken Griffey Jr. received he highest percentage of votes in history, or it was surprising that he wasn’t unanimous, depending how you want to look at it. It was a bit surprising, maybe, that Jeff Bagwell and Tim Raines didn’t make it, and it might have been surprising how much ground Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens seemed to make up. There’s always little surprises. That’s life.

To me, though, the biggest surprise of them all was the fact that Trevor Hoffman nearly became a first-ballot Hall of Famer. In his first year of eligibility, the longtime Padres closer received 67.3% of the vote, the fifth-highest total on the ballot, just behind Bagwell and Raines and just ahead of Curt Schilling, Clemens, and Bonds. History has shown us that voters who receive such a high percentage of the vote at any time in their eligibility, let alone the first year, are bound to make it in eventually. Trevor Hoffman is going to be a Hall of Famer. It might even happen next year.

There are dissenting opinions with regards to the place of closers in the Hall of Fame, and it’s probably something worth thinking about and discussing. Hard to come away worse from a thoughtful discussion. For some folks, Hoffman is a clear Hall of Famer, and should have been in on the first ballot. For others, he was nowhere near the 10 most deserving players, and might not even garner a selection with an unlimited number of votes per ballot. In the interest of full disclosure, my position has been closer to the latter than the former, though I’m open to seeing the other side. That’s what this post is for.

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Hall of Fame voting season is over, the results are out, but Hall of Fame discussion season isn’t over quite yet. Maybe that irks you and you just want this all to go away, but if that’s the case, you probably didn’t click on this post to begin with. If you did, just think of this more as the appreciation of a career, tied to some voting results.

It should come as no real surprise that Jim Edmonds fell off the ballot in his first year of eligibility, receiving just 11 votes (2.5%). If you’d been following Ryan Thibodaux’s Hall of Fame tracker, you’d have long seen this coming, and it never seemed realistic that Edmonds would actually make it in in the first place. But it’s kind of sad, because Edmonds had a remarkable career, one that stands head and shoulders above the typical “fall off the ballot in the first year of eligibility” career, yet here we are.

It’s not the first time it’s happened. A couple years back, it was Kenny Lofton who fell off in his first year of eligibility. A couple years before that, and perhaps most egregiously, it was Kevin Brown. Dwight Gooden‘s first-ballot exclusion may have come as a bit of a surprise in 2006, and maybe the most famous example of this phenomena was Lou Whitaker’s first-year showing of 2.9% that dropped him from the ballot in 2001.

Edmonds isn’t the first player with a borderline Hall of Fame-worthy career to receive just one turn on the ride, and he won’t be the last. Some of Edmonds’ detractors will reference his laissez-faire, some might characterize it as careless or lackadaisical, attitude. If that’s the case, maybe we care about this more than Edmonds himself. And in some ways, maybe falling off the ballot on your first year is better than falling off in year two or three. Guys who fall off the first time around were never going to make it anyway, and there’s less recognition for the guy who falls off in year three after clinging onto the 5% threshold in years one and two. You fall off in year one with a legitimate case, and you get used as an example in an article.

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The list of athletes who are simultaneously good at their sport and social media is a short one. I don’t know much about the other sports, but in baseball, it’s pretty much limited to Brandon McCarthy, Brett Anderson, Glen Perkins and the recently-retired Dan Haren.

In Haren’s case, it starts with the handle, @ithrow88, a reference to the 13-year veteran’s diminished late-career velocity. Haren was never a hard-thrower, but by age 27 the decline had already begun, dropping from 92 mph to 91. By his age-30 season, Haren no longer averaged 90 mph on his fastball. The following year, the reality of throwing 88 was realized, and by his final season, last year, Haren’s fastball averaged just 86 mph, the second-slowest by a qualified non-knuckleballing starter.

The self-deprecating moniker serves as a refreshing departure from the false bravado we expect so many of our athletes to project. Coming to terms with our own physical decline is a near-unanimous realization among non-athletes at various ages, and so Haren’s ability to take his own deterioration in stride is something that resonates with the general public.

We like to be able to resonate with our favorite athletes, but we also enjoy being granted the opportunity to peek behind the curtain a bit. On Monday, an early afternoon session on the exercise bike led to an entertaining string of brutally honest tweets from Haren about his career. The topics range from plane crashes to Coors Field dread to pitcher-batter matchups and pitcher-pitcher matchups to the absurdity of the pitcher win to wine-drinking habits to poop, the latter of which is almost always funny if you’re a man-child like myself. It’s a fun stream-of-consciousness that’s worth a minute of your day. At the very least, you’ll get a chuckle out of it.

But one tweet struck me in particular, and I wasn’t the only one; it was the most popular tweet from the 14-message long rant. As soon as I read the tweet in question, I knew it required a follow up, and also that it would provide me an excuse to write a sendoff post to Haren, who had a remarkable career that hopefully won’t be overshadowed by it’s underwhelming conclusion.

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12:05

oblig:

12:05

august fagerstrom: this is what he tried to post:

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This year’s New Year’s Eve party was just way too crowded. A total mess. Chris Davis bumped into me and spilled my drink nearly as soon as I got there. He didn’t even apologize because he hadn’t realized he’d done it, due to the fact that he couldn’t hear anything over the way-too-loud, awful music Justin Upton was DJ’ing. The food ran out way too quick, no thanks to Yoenis Cespedes eating all the bacon-wrapped chicken bites, and I don’t even want to guess what was in that casserole Alex Gordon brought. Yovani Gallardo told me the same story like a dozen times. Doug Fister took it way too far with the noisemakers. Denard Span and Ian Desmond wore the same outfit, Juan Uribe got sick all over Howie Kendrick, and I don’t know who thought it was a good idea to invite Mat Latos and Ian Kennedy to the same party, but of course they got into it over Jessica again. I feel bad for the host, Wei-Yin Chen. He had so much running around to do, I don’t think he ever got a chance to enjoy himself.

The one redeeming quality was that everyone at the party (myself excluded — I don’t know why I was invited) had something in common, in that they were all major league baseball players. Not only that, but when the clock struck midnight and the ball dropped to take us into the new year, every player was still a free agent. It was the most crowded Still a Free Agent New Year’s Party in years.

It felt like it, at least. But was that really the case? There were certainly more people there than Max Scherzer’s dud of a party last year, but how did it compare to the banger Mark Teixeira threw in 2009?

Most of the guests of this year’s party were listed above. But when those guys aren’t all cooped up in Wei-Yin Chen’s apartment for an awkward, crowded New Year’s party, they’re playing baseball. This is where the NYE party metaphor ends, by the way. This is all interesting to us because of baseball, so let’s see what a baseball team made up only of unsigned free agents looks like.

In the interest of brevity, I stopped short of a full bullpen or bench, because this is good enough. But, look! You can still field a whole team! It’s not the greatest rotation in the world — Chen isn’t the ace of any realistic playoff contender — but it’s five major league-caliber starters who are all either likely or have a chance to be an above-average starter next year. The bullpen could use some work, but look at that lineup. The outfield is killer, and that’s with Dexter Fowler coming off the bench. Gordon-Upton-Cespedes-Davis at the top’s gonna score you some runs.

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The real nice thing about having Clayton Kershaw and Zack Greinke in the same starting rotation, aside from all the wins, is that they allow a team to lose two key starters for the season — Hyun-Jin Ryu to a shoulder injury suffered in spring training and a Brandon McCarthy to Tommy John Surgery after just four starts — without it crippling the team. The Dodgers would’ve preferred Ryu and McCarthy stay healthy, but with top-end talent like the Dodgers had, a lot can go wrong for things to still go right.

This year, the Dodgers had a chance to retain Greinke, but they narrowly missed out, with Greinke heading to Arizona. Whether or not they “missed out” on guys like David Price and Johnny Cueto doesn’t matter; the point is, those guys play for different teams, too. Without Greinke, the Dodgers rotation will be much different than it was in 2015, but in certain ways, it will be very much the same.

You start with Clayton Kershaw. We’re talking pitching here, so you always start with Clayton Kershaw. Kershaw is the best in the world and he’s got a clean bill of health when it comes to his arm, so there’s no better place to start. But after Kershaw, there’s still Ryu, who’s clearly an injury risk, and there’s still McCarthy, who’s clearly an injury risk, and there’s still Brett Anderson, who made 31 healthy starts last year, but made just 32 starts the past four years combined, and so he’s clearly an injury risk.

The Dodgers knew that’s what they had going into the offseason, and their first move to address the rotation, having missed out on the top flight arms, was an attempt to sign Hisashi Iwakuma. Iwakuma’s 34 years old, had an injury history in Japan and hit the disabled list last year, so he’s clearly an injury risk. So much so, in fact, that he failed his physical and the Dodgers decided to move on.

The guy they moved on to ended up being Scott Kazmir, who signed a similar contract to the one the Dodgers were prepared to give Iwakuma. When you think Scott Kazmir, you probably think injury risk. Granted, Kazmir’s averaged 31 starts a year over the past three seasons and has avoided the disabled list, so most recently, he’s been something resembling durable. Yet, still, there’s been the occasional skipped start due to shoulder concerns or early, precautionary removal due to tricep tightness and of course the three years of injuries that derailed Kazmir’s career and left him jobless, not too long ago. After all, the best predictor of future injury is past injury. While he’s been healthy lately, we’ll never live in a world where Scott Kazmir isn’t considered an injury risk.

So, to quickly recap, after Kershaw, the Dodgers had three injury question marks, who they tried to tandem with an injury question mark, but when that didn’t work, they went out and got a different injury question mark. Got it. With that in mind, let’s look at some numbers and graphs.

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