He wasn’t the majors’ first African American pitcher, or even the first to pitch for the Dodgers, but Don Newcombe collected some very important firsts in his role as an integration pioneer. Though he spent just 10 seasons in the majors in a career bookended by the color line and his own alcoholism — with a two-year detour into the Army during the Korean War to boot — Newcombe was the Dodgers’ ace during a period when they were a National League powerhouse. After his playing days ended, he found sobriety, and spent over four decades as the Dodgers’ director of community relations, as a counselor for players in their battles against alcohol and substance abuse, and as an exemplary ambassador for the game.

Newcombe’s full, rich life came to a close on Tuesday. He died at the age of 92 after battling a lengthy illness.

Alongside Jackie Robinson and Roy Campanella, who reached the majors ahead of him, Newcombe endured the indignities that came with being at the forefront of integration — the racial epithets, segregated and substandard accommodations, orders not to fight back — while helping the racially mixed Dodgers become the class of the NL. In his 10 major league seasons, the imposing, 6-foot-4 righty was part of three pennant-winning teams and two agonizing near-misses. Indeed, he became somewhat infamous for his hard and even heartbreaking luck in big games. Nonetheless, his talent was undeniable. On the mound, he went 149-90, with a 3.56 ERA (88 ERA-), 3.67 FIP (90 FIP-), and 35.9 WAR. He won 20 games three times, including in 1951, when he became the first African American pitcher to reach the milestone, and in 1956, when he won an NL-high 27 en route to the league’s MVP award and the first Cy Young Award, which at that point was given to just one pitcher for the two leagues. A legitimate threat with the bat as well, he often served as a pinch-hitter, and overall hit .271/.338/.367 with 15 homers, an 88 wRC+, and 8.7 WAR. After leaving the majors (1949-51, ’53-60), he spent a year in Japan as an outfielder and first baseman. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s a rare day when a player looks back on a championship-winning season with something approaching regret, but then, Dustin Pedroia didn’t get much chance to contribute to the Red Sox during their World Series-winning 2018 campaign. After being limited to 105 games in 2017, largely due to ongoing discomfort in his left knee, Pedroia underwent an experimental cartilage restoration procedure that was expected to cost him the first couple months of last season. He returned in late May, but played just three games before inflammation forced him back to the injured list, and he spent the rest of the season as a bystander as the Sox overcame his absence while romping to their fourth title in the last 15 seasons.

“I don’t regret doing it, but looking back and knowing what I know now, I wouldn’t have done it,” Pedroia told reporters in Fort Myers last week, referring to the surgery, called osteochondral allograft transfer surgery, which involves grafting cartilage from a cadaver. While basketball and soccer players had undergone the procedure prior to Pedroia, teammate Steven Wright was the only baseball player who had done so.

The 35-year-old second baseman, who had previously undergone surgery to repair a torn meniscus in his left knee in October 2016 (among his numerous other ailments), believes both that he pushed himself too hard and that some of the expectations with regards to recovery times were “a little off.” In retrospect, he believes that avoiding the surgery in favor of longer rest and rehab might have been a more productive route. “It’s a complicated surgery,” said Pedroia. “The cartilage in my knee is great now. The graft is the thing. You’re putting somebody else’s bone in your body. To get that to incorporate fully, there are so many things going into it that.”

For what it’s worth, Wright, who was limited to 53.2 innings last year by three separate trips to the injured list for left knee inflammation (as well as a 15-game suspension for violating the league’s domestic violence policy) and missed the entire postseason, is similarly less than enamored with the results of his cartilage restoration surgery, which took place on May 8, 2017, 5 1/2 months prior to Pedroia’s. “It’s been tougher mentally than physically,” he told reporters last week. “It’s a game where it’s tough on your body, but then when you’ve got a flat tire going out there trying to pitch, it makes it a little bit tougher.” Wright later said that his knee currently feels like it’s been from a flat tire to a spare.

In anticipation of Pedroia’s early-2018 absence, the Red Sox retained July 2017 acquisition Eduardo Núñez in free agency, but both he and utilityman Brock Holt struggled in the role, to the point of topping my Replacement Level Killers list in late July. To that point, Sox second sackers had combined for a sad-sack -0.7 WAR. On July 30, they traded for the Tigers’ Ian Kinsler, who was replacement-level as well, though he did represent a defensive upgrade. In all, the eight players Boston used at second base — a cast rounded out by Brandon Phillips, Tzu-Wei Lin, Mookie Betts (!), and Blake Swihart — combined to hit .252/.308/.350 for a 75 wRC+ and -0.3 WAR. Only the Giants and Tigers were worse in the last two categories.

All of the participants save for Phillips and Kinser (who signed with the Padres) remain on the Red Sox’s 40-man roster. President of baseball operations Dave Dombrowski told reporters last week that he’s not expecting Pedroia to play 150 games. “We’re hopeful that he’s a 125-game player at this point,” said Dombrowsk. “We do feel we have some people who are solid and can fill in. To fill in if [Pedroia] plays 120, guys like Holt, a guy like Nunez coming over there. Even some depth with Tzu-Wei Lin in our organization we like a great deal.”

Our current depth charts projections, which feature Pedroia getting 74% of the team’s plate appearances at second base, forecast him for a .272/.344/.390 line with 2.0 WAR, and for the group as a whole to return 2.5 WAR, good for 12th in the majors. While the Red Sox would probably be overjoyed if things unfold that way, history suggests there may be less reason for optimism. Along the lines of what I did for Troy Tulowitzki last August, I asked Dan Szymborski to put together a list of infielders who are over 30 — shortstops and third basemen as well as second basemen, in order to start with a larger pool than the Tulo study — and missed all or nearly all of a season, then returned to the majors. I used 100 plate appearances as the upper limit for the “missed” season (Pedroia had 13), and confirmed with a variety of resources that the players’ absences were due to injuries, not detours to foreign leagues or mere attrition. As before, I considered only players from 1980 onward. The resulting list of 18 players was less than encouraging, to say the least:

One can wave off individual results here and there on various grounds. Sports medicine has improved vastly over the past four decades, and in considering Pedroia, it’s debatable how much we can extrapolate from players’ failures to recover from injuries to other body parts, such as Jeter’s ankle, the shoulders of Burleson, Glaus, and Perry, or the elbows of Fernandez, Howe (who also underwent ankle surgery), and a quartet of Tommy John surgery recipients (Furcal, Izturis, Santana, and Velarde). We can also debate the propriety of comparing the fates of players who were 30 or 38 at the start of these sequences to that of a 34-year-old.

Even so, within the timeframe, I couldn’t find any examples of an over-30 infielder who was significantly above replacement level both before missing most or all of a season and then again in his return year. Gonzalez (the “Sea Bass” one) underwent microfracture surgery in his left knee in March 2008 and did post a big 3.0 WAR season in 2010; he’s in this table twice thanks to a 2012 torn ACL. And Velarde, who underwent Tommy John surgery, totaled about 10 WAR from 1999-2001, but both needed at least one more year to recover form.

That said, three players who had dreadful seasons pre-injury did rebound substantially upon returning. Lansford, the regular third baseman for the A’s from 1983-1990 (including their three pennant-winning teams from 1988-1990) was pretty lousy in the last of those seasons, then suffered serious right shoulder and left knee injuries while snowmobiling in Oregon in January 1991. A’s vice president Sandy Alderson said at the time, “Carney’s contract doesn’t say he can snowmobile and it doesn’t say he can’t,” adding that the team declined to pursue terminating his employment. Lansford played just five games in the 1991 season, but returned for a solid 1992 season before retiring.

Fernandez, who racked up 43.5 WAR in a career that spanned from 1983-2001, endured a career-worst season as the Yankees’ starting shortstop in 1995, then fractured his right elbow in March 1996. The Yankees turned to the 22-year-old Jeter, who went on to win AL Rookie of the Year honors while helping the team win its first championship in 18 years. Fernandez missed the entire season, then resurfaced with the Indians in 1997, hitting for a 93 wRC+ with 2.1 WAR; he spent three more years in the majors and accumulated 4.9 WAR.

Spezio, a useful infielder for the Angels (6.6 WAR from 2000-2003), struggled in the first year of a three-year, $9.15 million deal with the Mariners (67 wRC+ and -0.1 WAR in 415 PA) in 2004. Between being relegated to a backup role by the free agent signings of Adrian Beltre and Richie Sexson, missing 10 weeks due to an oblique strain, and then drawing his release in late August, he was limited to 51 PA in 2005. Divorce, depression, and substance abuse — the last two of which would further derail his career years later — were contributing factors to his 2005 struggles. Nonetheless, he played a significant role for the Cardinals’ 2006 championship team, posting a 123 wRC+ and 1.3 WAR in 321 PA.

Even with that trio in my quick-and-dirty study, the group of players I identified averaged a meager 83 wRC+ and 0.2 WAR in their returns. Limiting the player pool to those whose pre-injury seasons were worth at least 1.0 WAR, which clears out some light hitters whose careers were essentially on their last legs anyway, the averages are 81 wRC+ (down from 105 pre-injury) and 0.0 WAR (down from 2.4) — an even steeper drop that probably owed something to more complete players getting longer leashes.

All of which is to say that if history is a guide, the 2019 Red Sox may not get anything close to the Pedroia they’re used to, the one who has never really had a below-average season. Even in his most injury-wracked campaigns, when his bat has been about average (98 wRC+ in 2014, 101 in 2017), he’s played at a three-win pace, solidly above average if not up to the standard that helped him make four All-Star teams and win four Gold Gloves from 2008-14. That said, even a slog of a season is unlikely to mean the end of the line for Pedroia, given that he’s still owed $40 million through 2021 via the eight-year, $110 million extension he signed in July 2013.

If Pedroia can recover some semblance of form, the stakes are high; he still has a shot at a Hall of Fame berth. He’s got the hardware (AL MVP, AL Rookie of the Year, three World Series rings, two of them as starter), but with 1,803 hits, he needs two seasons worth of playing time to reach 2,000, a number that has functioned as a bright-line test for Hall voters when it comes to post-1960 players. Likewise he’s still short in JAWS. He’s 19th among second basemen at 47.3, 9.6 points below the standard, but he’s only 2.0 WAR below the seven-year peak standard (42.4 versus 44.4). Given Chase Utley’s retirement short of 2,000 hits, Kinsler’s fade, and the PED suspension of Robinson Cano, none of this era’s aging second baseman have clear paths to Cooperstown, but a functioning if not fully resurgent Pedrioa would be best positioned to change that.

Of course, talk of any resurgence is premature when discussing a player whose availability can’t yet be taken for granted. If he’s batting leadoff on Opening Day, per manager Alex Cora’s promise for when he’ll return, Pedroia will have hit the first big mark.

Free agency was supposed to be different for Mike Moustakas this time around. Last winter, coming off his second All-Star appearance and a career-high 38 home runs, the longtime Royals third baseman turned down a $17.4 million qualifying offer in anticipation of a multiyear contract, only to receive a frosty reception on the open market. Ultimately, he made a belated return to Kansas City on a one-year deal, was traded to the contending Brewers in late July, and hit free agency again this fall — this time without a qualifying offer and associated draft pick compensation. Yet once again, he only landed a considerably discounted one-year contract. He’ll return to the Brewers on a $10 million deal that includes a mutual option for 2020.

Moustakas, who turned 30 on September 11, hit a combined .251/.315/.459 with 28 homers, a 105 wRC+, and 2.4 WAR in 2018. His offense wasn’t quite what it was in 2017 (.272/.314/.521, 114 wRC+) but his defense improved significantly in terms of both DRS (from -8 in 2017 to 2 in 2018) and UZR (from -4.5 to 1.0). Given that he was finally more than a year removed from the right ACL tear that limited him to 27 games in 2016, that shouldn’t be tremendously surprising; according to Statcast, his average sprint speed also increased substantially, from 24.0 feet per second to 25.7, though even that puts him somewhere around the 15th percentile of major league regulars.

Moustakas’ defensive rebound helped offset his slight offensive downturn; his overall WAR was a bit ahead of his 2.1 from 2017, if still shy of his career-best 3.8 in 2015. He’s not what you’d call the most disciplined hitter; his 37.0% rate of swinging at pitches outside the zone places him in the 15th percentile among qualifiers, while his 7.7% walk rate puts him in the 35th percentile. He doesn’t strike out much (16.2%, 72nd percentile), but even so, 2018 saw his highest K rate since 2012, his first full major league season. A pull-happy hitter, he had 372 plate appearances against a traditional shift, the majors’ third-highest total. He hit for just a .243 average with a .311 slugging percentage and a 43 wRC+ in those plate appearances, which is 14th percentile stuff. Combine that with his non-blazing speed and you get a .259 BABIP, the majors’ 15th lowest among qualified hitters.

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For Bryce Harper, the comparisons to Mike Trout have faded with time. While the Angels’ center fielder has played at an MVP-caliber level in each of his seven full seasons — taking home two awards and finishing as runner-up in the voting four times — his ex(?)-Nationals counterpart has ridden a performance rollercoaster since winning his lone MVP award in 2015, with injuries, struggles against the shift, and shaky defense dimming his star at least somewhat. There’s little doubt that inconsistency is one factor in slowing down Harper’s market now that he’s a free agent, and may prevent him from reaching a record-setting payday, though it is hard to sort out how much of him remaining unsigned is the result of Harper-specific concerns, and how much is the market’s generally tepid temperature. Still, Harper is just 26 years old, as is Manny Machado, his top-tiered counterpart on the free agent market. Both players remain unsigned, even as camp has opened for pitchers and catchers.

Measured against what the 27-year-old Trout has accomplished — last May, Trout surpassed the JAWS standard for center fielders, the average of each Hall of Fame center fielder’s career WAR and his seven-year peak WAR (Baseball-Reference flavors), and he now ranks seventh in the metric — the two free agents’ resumés pale by comparison. Even so, at a time when so many teams are finding excuses not to invest in them, or at least not on the terms they’re seeking, it’s worth considering how the pair stack up historically. This isn’t about haggling over dollars, and it’s less about finding recent comparisons for the past few seasons put up by Harper and Machado, as Craig Edwards did earlier this winter, and more about situating the pair within a broader context, appreciating their accomplishments to date and where their careers might take them. Read the rest of this entry »

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Just under two weeks ago, when I was writing a piece connecting the unsigned players from among our Top 50 Free Agents list to teams that appeared to have needs, Wade Miley came off the board by signing a one-year deal with the Astros. A similar thing happened in writing that piece’s sequel, covering a handful of the best of the unranked and unsigned free agents, as Brett Anderson pre-empted the publication by re-signing with the A’s on a one-year deal. He’ll cost a pittance, as he’s guaranteed a modest $1.5 million, with another $1 million possible in undisclosed incentives.

Though it feels like he’s been around forever, Anderson just turned 31 on February 1. That said, the 2006 second-round pick by the Diamondbacks (out of high school in Stillwater, Oklahoma) has already spent parts of 10 seasons in the majors. I should emphasize the word parts there because, well, we’ve rarely seen a whole season from him. As a rookie with the A’s in 2009 — a season in which he entered ranked seventh on Baseball America’s Top 100 Prospects list — he made 30 starts and threw 175.1 innings en route to 3.5 WAR. But only once since then has he started 30 times in a major league season. Hell, only once since then has he even reached 20 starts in the bigs: in 2015, he completed a solid 31-start, 180.1-inning campaign for the Dodgers (3.69 ERA, 3.94 FIP, 1.6 WAR). Read the rest of this entry »

On February 1, I checked in on the 10 players who made our Top 50 Free Agents list in November but had yet to sign contracts, attempting to match them up with teams still in need of that missing piece. Since then, the much-anticipated J.T. Realmuto trade has gone down, and the first camps have opened to pitchers and catchers, but none of those 10 players has come off the board. Instead we’re left with an endless swirl of rumors and rationalizations. Bryce Harper has talked to the Padres and Giants, but they don’t want to pay him $300 million! The Yankees have continued to check in on Manny Machado, but won’t improve upon an offer termed “low” by a source close to the player! Mike Moustakas may return to the Brewers! This is quite a party.

Alas, not really. It’s frustrating to watch this broken system playing out, and it has to be even more so for the players — not only the aforementioned ranked ones, but the dozens upon dozens beyond them who are being frozen out as well. These are real people who don’t know yet where they (and their families, in many cases) are going to spend the better part of the next year, and they’re being squeezed to the point of accepting a fraction of the money they might have reasonably expected just a couple of years ago. In many cases, the fates of these unranked, unsigned players are interconnected with the pricier options; a team in the market for rotation help, pursuing the likes of Dallas Keuchel (No. 4 on our list) or Gio Gonzalez (No. 33) might wind up going for one of the starters below if they don’t land their top choice.

As with my previous roundup, what follows here is an attempt to match the best of the rest of those currently unemployed with teams in need, using a combination our projected standings and Depth Charts, MLB Trade Rumors, Roster Resource, Cot’s Contracts, and some imagination. Consider it prescriptive, rather than predictive; the further down the pecking order one goes, the more one may as well be throwing darts. Read the rest of this entry »

“Frank Robinson always went into second like a guy jumping through a skylight with a drawn Luger.”
— Jim Murray, Los Angeles Times, May 10, 1974

Frank Robinson may not have had the mythic grace of Willie Mays running down a drive to center field, or the staying power of Hank Aaron as he chased Babe Ruth’s hallowed home run record, but the mark he left on baseball, through the combination of his supreme talent and white-hot intensity, was of similar caliber. Though he never played in the Negro Leagues, as both Mays and Aaron briefly did, he was the spiritual heir to Jackie Robinson in bringing the Negro Leagues’ hard-charging style of play to the majors, and in blazing a trail beyond his playing days. At the tail end of a 21-year major league career that made him a first-ballot Hall of Famer, Robinson became the majors’ first African-American manager, and he spent more than 40 years working in baseball at the managerial and executive level.

Robinson passed away on Thursday at the age of 83 after battling cancer. Since 2015, he had served as a special advisor to the Commissioner and the honorary president of the American League, the final lines on one of the fullest resumés any player has ever assembled. Read the rest of this entry »

Nolan Arenado has ranked among the game’s elite third basemen for the past four seasons, and he’s already made headlines this winter. Last week, he and the Rockies averted an arbitration hearing when he agreed to a $26 million salary for 2019, a record for an arbitration-eligible player. Now, there’s optimism in Denver that the team could reach a longer-term deal that would keep Arenado in purple. It’s a move that not only would be in character for a franchise that has made a concerted attempt to keep its iconic players, but could also impact this winter’s frigid free agent market.

Arenado, who will turn 28 on April 16, is coming off a .297/.374/.561 showing with 38 homers, a 132 wRC+, and 5.7 WAR in 2018. He led the NL in home runs for the third year out of the past four, and while that feat owes much to Coors Field (he has an 87-71 home/road home run split in that span), improved plate discipline has helped him increase both his wRC+ and WAR every year since his 2013 rookie season. Last year’s incremental steps forward owe much to Arenado’s career-best 10.8% walk rate, more than double his 2013-15 mark (5.0%); that increase has keyed a 52-point rise in on-base percentage from his first three years (.318) to his last three (.370).

And then there’s the leather. Arenado has won a Gold Glove in each of his six seasons, and has won the Platinum Glove as the NL’s top overall defender, in each of the past two years; he also took home the Fielding Bible Award as the majors’ top third baseman annually from 2015-17. While UZR doesn’t value his defense nearly as highly as DRS (career totals of 37.6 and 109, respectively), the two marks converged last year (5.8 and 5, respectively). Beyond the numbers, his highlight clips are appointment viewing. Here is the MLB Network compilation of his dives, spins, barehanded grabs, and seemingly impossible throws that accompanied Arenado’s 2018 award wins:

And here’s perhaps his most famous play, his April 14, 2015 over-the-shoulder-and-over-the-tarp-roll catch of a foul ball:

This is an excellent, entertaining player, a franchise cornerstone who has helped take the Rockies to back-to-back playoff appearances for the first time in club history.

After making $17.75 million last year as part of a two-year, $29.5 million extension signed in January 2017, Arenado sought $30 million in arbitration, with the Rockies countering at $24 million. Even if he’d lost a hearing, he would have surpassed Josh Donaldson’s $23 million salary from last year with the highest one-year salary for an arbitration-eligible player. According to The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal, Arenado and the Rockies settled at $26 million after a face-to-face meeting:

Since then, Monfort has publicly expressed hope for the possibility of a long-term deal. On Monday, he told the Denver Post’s Patrick Saunders, “I’m optimistic that we are close enough that something will come about. It’s in Nolan’s hands, but my last impression with him is that this is something he wants to do.” While stressing that there was no timetable to complete a longer deal, Monfort added, “[W]hat I took out of [the meeting] was a good, sincere [attitude] of, ‘Let’s get this behind us, then let’s go on to the next step and see if we can work something out there.'”

Per to Saunders, Arenado recently said, “I think the future is much brighter in Colorado than it’s been in the past. That excites me and makes me very aware of what’s going on here.” Indeed, an impressive nucleus of young, affordable starting pitching (Kyle Freeland, Jon Gray, German Marquez, Tyler Anderson, and Antonio Senzatela) and the development of shortstop Trevor Story have been key elements of the Rockies’ recent success; that core is under club control through 2021 and ’22. What’s more, the team’s TV revenue situation is better than has been previously reported; the Rockies are making $40 million per year now, not $20 million, which was tied for last among the 29 US teams in Craig Edwards’ 2016 roundup. The team’s current deal runs through 2020, and negotiations for a new one are expected to get underway this summer.

With such a revenue stream, Monfort seems to feel that the Rockies can support a payroll that includes a major commitment to Arenado on a long-term deal. While Cot’s Contracts projects the team to set a franchise record with an Opening Day payroll just over $143 million — up from around $137 million in 2018 (14th in the majors) and $127.8 million in 2017 (15th) — the Rockies have only $40 million committed for 2021, and $23 million for ’22, though of course, the salary increases of their many arb-eligible players will increase those figures.

In marked contrast to the White Sox, whose history under Jerry Reinsdorf I examined on Monday, the Rockies haven’t shied away from sizable long-term commitments. Granted, Monfort and his brother Charlie were merely minority partners until December 2005, when they bought out Jerry McMorris, the team’s principal owner since 1993 (before that, oy, there’s a story). During the McMorris era, the Rockies signed free agents Larry Walker (six years, $75 million in April 1995), Mike Hampton (eight years, $121 million in December 2000), and Denny Neagle (five years, $51 million, also in December 2000) — of which only the first deal went well, the last two disastrously — and extended franchise icon Todd Helton (nine years, $141.5 million, covering 2003-11). The Monforts were the principal owners when the Rockies extended Troy Tulowitzki (10 years, $157.75 million deal in 2010), as well as Charlie Blackmon (six years, $108 million last April), and when they added free agents Ian Desmond (five years, $70 million in December 2016) and Wade Davis (three years, $52 million in December 2017). In terms of guaranteed money, all of those deals besides those of Neagle and Davis exceed the largest guaranteed contract ever signed by the White Sox, Jose Abreu’s six-year, $68 million pact from October 2013.

Whether on the watch of McMorris or the Monforts, not all of the Rockies’ big contracts have unfolded for the better. Some of that has to do with the particularities of playing at altitude — pitches don’t break as much, and athletes’ bodies don’t hold up as well — and some of it has to do with flawed evaluations of the players in question. At a time when so many teams are wringing their hands about spending money, it’s still noteworthy that the Rockies have stepped up to keep their top players. Extending Arenado, and assuming the risks that come with it, would be more in keeping with their style than (to return to my previous example) the White Sox signing Bryce Harper or Manny Machado.

Of course, Arenado has to agree to a deal for this all to come to fruition, and it’s a bit ominous to think of how the relatively grim landscapes of the past two winters might be helping to fulfill the vision that the owners colluded in the mid-1980s to make happen: star players staying with their teams instead of testing the market and creating bidding wars. Still, free agency isn’t an obligation that every star has to fulfill; the combination of comfort and a record-setting salary in a competitive situation isn’t something to be taken lightly.

On that note, if an Arenado extension is completed before Machado signs, it would likely set a new baseline for third basemen (by topping Alex Rodriguez‘s $27.5 million average annual value) and perhaps for all position players (by topping Miguel Cabrera’s $31 million AAV). That, as Rosenthal pointed out, will make it harder for any team in pursuit of Harper or Machado to argue that those younger, higher-profile players should be paid less money.

After the past two winters of slow (or even negative) growth, it’s difficult to put too much faith in long-term estimates, but using the FanGraphs Contract estimation tool with very conservative parameters — $8.0 million per WAR, and just 3% average annual inflation, as opposed to $9 million or more and 5% — suggests a valuation approach $300 million:

Dialing the inflation back even further, to 1%, yields a $279.7 million valuation, and cutting the dollars per WAR figure to a retrograde $7.0 million with that minimal inflation in place still yields $244.7 million. In other words, even using extremely modest assumptions, an eight-year deal for Arenado (presumably incorporating this year’s salary) should bypass Cabrera’s eight-year, $248 million extension.

Another byproduct of an Arenado extension might be a change in the Yankees’ current approach. Circa late November, Rosenthal suggested that their lukewarm pursuits of Harper and Machado — due to a logjam of outfielders in the former case and the infamous “Johnny Hustle” comments in the latter — was because they were more interested in pursuing Arenado (who’s about 18 months older than Harper and 15 months older than Machado) once he reached free agency. In January, SNY.tv’s Andy Martino wrote that Yankees might be working on an even more immediate timeline, “[P]eople briefed on the Yankees thinking say that GM Brian Cashman — who did not respond to a request for comment — has internally discussed the possibility of trying to trade for Arenado either now or during the season. One source said that the teams have likely talked already, but neither Cashman nor Rockies GM Jeff Bridich have confirmed this.”

In theory, if Arenado does cement his desire to stay in Denver long-term, the Yankees could circle back to Machado, whose list of suitors for a long-term deal appear to consist of the White Sox, Padres, Phillies, and a conspicuous lack of other teams. Then again, if Cashman and company have shied away this long, one expects they’ll concoct some other rationale for bypassing Machado and Harper. And it is worth noting that the possibility of signing Harper and Machado was offered as a potential rationale for not signing free agents last winter. While his resume is certainly impressive, it will be interesting to see if Arenado can avoid a similar fate. There’s always another young buck coming, after all, and Mike Trout is only under club control through 2020.

On the other hand, if Arenado and the Rockies don’t get a deal done, it will be very interesting to see how the summer plays out. With the Giants and Diamondbacks both rebuilding, and the Padres possibly looking to spend their way to an earlier competitive window by signing one of the big two free agents, the NL West probably won’t be the three-team race of yesteryear. A Rockies team that’s out of the playoff hunt could conceivably trade Arenado at the July 31 deadline — or even in August, given his huge salary — if he suggests he plans to move on next winter anyway. A Rockies team that’s still in the race for a Wild Card spot or even the NL West flag (something the Rockies have yet to win) as Arenado eyes the horizon would face quite a quandary.

In all of this, we have yet to hear Arenado definitively say that he wants to stick around, but that’s not uncommon. There’s no reason for him to surrender leverage until he’s secured what he wants, and besides, his real talking on that score will be done with a pen and a contract. Until then, this is all just cloud talk, though amid so much cynicism, it’s quaintly refreshing to hear a star and a team at least thinking aloud about sticking together.

With most of the game’s top-spending teams apparently determined to remain on the sidelines instead of wooing either Bryce Harper or Manny Machado, the White Sox have been conspicuous in their reported pursuit of both. That’s a surprise, given both the team’s recent lack of success and their historical avoidance of big contracts, but late last month, general manager Rick Hahn acknowledged that fans would likely be disappointed if they didn’t land one of the winter’s big fish.

Given that the White Sox haven’t finished above .500 since 2012, and that last year, their second year of a long-term rebuilding program, they lost 100 games — their highest total since 1970 — it might seem like an odd time to spend big money. Then again, at a time when so many teams appear to have lost their checkbooks, if Chicago’s desire to spend is sincere, they may be tapping into a market inefficiency. Considering their history under owner Jerry Reinsdorf, however, it’s fair to be skeptical until the ink is dry on a contract for either Harper or Machado.

For starters, note that of the 30 teams, only five have yet to sign a player to either an extension or a free agent deal worth more than $72 million:

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