I am, it brings me great shame to admit, an inveterate procrastinator. Last summer, the air conditioning in my car stopped working, and instead of taking it in to get fixed, I just waited until the weather cooled off and look, now I don’t have to worry about it all winter.

Perhaps you’re the same way. Perhaps you’re the same way and you run the baseball ops department of one of the 30 MLB teams. Need an outfielder? Eh, we’ll figure that out later. Bryce Harper signed his megadeal in March, for cryin’ out loud. There will always be help left on the market, one might reasonably infer.

But that’s not really the case anymore. Two things struck me when I was writing up the Tommy Pham signing last week. First, very few teams only need three competent outfielders. Even the Mets, who signed veteran starters to long-term contracts at all three positions, still had enough of a hole in the lineup to warrant going out to get a top-notch fourth outfielder/platoon DH.

Second, Pham was one of the last good options on the board. Read the rest of this entry »

Tommy Pham has only played in nine major league seasons, accruing a little more than seven and a half seasons’ worth of service time. It feels like it should be more. This man has drifted to so many ports, made headlines for conduct meritorious, ignoble, and points in between. He has lived and died a hundred times in a baseball uniform, and every one of those lives has been fascinating. Pham is as close as you’ll get among millennials to one of those old-timey ballplayers with an unbelievable backstory, like Dazzy Vance or Turkey Mike Donlin. Now he’s a New York Met, signed to a one-year, $6 million deal with another $2 million possible in incentives.

I’ll leave the fantasy football jokes to the comment section, but I will mention what Andy Martino of SNY noted as the news broke:

Yes, Tommy Pham slapped a man because of fantasy football, but the background work Mets did on him turned up intel that he's a very well-liked teammate and good clubhouse presence. The man he slapped was on a different ballclub, after all

— Andy Martino (@martinonyc) January 18, 2023

Read the rest of this entry »

Ordinarily, a minor league free agent with a non-roster invite wouldn’t warrant a standalone article. But Jorge Alfaro, who signed with the Red Sox on Monday, is not your ordinary player.

First of all, the path to regular playing time is relatively straightforward for Alfaro. He’ll be competing for minutes with Connor Wong and Reese McGuire. Wong has hit well in the minors but struggled in a brief major league audition last year, and he has an option year left. McGuire has been solid defensively the past two seasons, but his bat is not of such quality that the Sox would move heaven and earth to keep him in the lineup. If Alfaro plays well in spring training, there’s every reason to believe he’ll head north with the Red Sox and play regularly.

Alfaro’s contract indicates as much. If he makes the team, he’ll be paid $2 million, which is more than either McGuire or Wong will earn this season. He’ll also have two chances to opt out — June 1 and July 1 — if he hasn’t been called up by then. Minor league free agent or not, Alfaro aims to play in the bigs this year.

The second reason Alfaro is worthy of discussion: Well, he’s Jorge Alfaro. Read the rest of this entry »

On New Year’s Day, the Cubs’ first base-and-DH situation was a smoking crater. But now the fires have been extinguished and the hole is being filled with aggregate; the Eric Hosmer signing got the process started, and over the weekend, Chicago inked Trey Mancini — of the Italian national team, apparently — to a two-year contract.

Mancini’s coming off a bit of an odd year. He hit .268/.347/.404 in 92 games for Baltimore, then got traded to the Astros at the deadline and apparently forgot to bring his bats south. A disappointing .176/.258/.364 showing in August and September turned into an appalling playoff campaign in which he started 0-for-18.

So, in his most recent and most widely viewed major league experience, Mancini had onlookers saying things like, “But I thought pitchers didn’t hit anymore.” On the other hand, he’d been a consistent 20-homer guy across the first four years of his career, and even as recently as July had a wRC+ of 116. Perhaps his power wasn’t ideal for a middle-of-the-order bat, but he got on base and hit for a decent average. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re like me, you’ve spent a lot of time this offseason clicking around on RosterResource’s excellent Free Agent Tracker. Or perhaps not. Perhaps you have friends and family to attend to, or hobbies, or a rich inner life. Good for you. Don’t rub it in.

If you sort the unsigned players either by 2022 WAR or ’23 projected WAR, the same name comes up: Elvis Andrus. You remember him — that guy from the Rangers in the early 2010s. You’re probably aware he’s still kicking around, and also that he was quite good in 2022. And yet he remains without a job for 2023. Curious.

Andrus was part of the last generation of star shortstops who benefited from the Ozzie Smith scouting corona: If a shortstop was fast, hit for a high average, and played defense with skill and joie de vivre, he must be Ozzie Smith. Then the likes of Carlos Correa came along and now shortstops look like 3-4 outside linebackers. Read the rest of this entry »

Carlos Correa is a Minnesota Twin. There’s a contract, there was a press conference, he joked about his son growing up Minnesota Nice — after almost a month of bizarre uncertainty, Correa’s future is locked down. Which probably means you’ll start trusting this in your gut somewhere around mid-August.

Spare a thought for the Mets and Giants, both of which were thought to have signed Correa last month, before those deals fell through. Neither club deserves that much sympathy, because both reneged on $300 million-plus contract offers on the basis of troubling medical reports. The Twins seem convinced that Correa’s fibulas are not made of marzipan, after all. And don’t be a coastal snob, they have good doctors in Minnesota — the Mayo Clinic, and so on.

But while it was the Mets and Giants who left Correa at the altar, and not the other way around, both teams were ostensibly making plans to build a lineup around one of the best infielders in baseball. And while there was never any official announcement, the public was in a frenzy. Unlicensed swag was sold, tickets purchased, blogs posted on the premise that Correa would be a Met and/or a Giant.

Now, both clubs are bereft of their erstwhile top free agent signing. And both teams are left to contemplate Bolton’s First Interrogative: How am I supposed to live without you? Read the rest of this entry »

Hey, did you hear about the free agent who signed on Tuesday morning? Yeah, his name is Core… y Dickerson. So, yeah, not that free agent. Our deal is Corey Dickerson, to Washington, for one year and $2.25 million guaranteed, plus another $750,000 in performance incentives.

This is Dickerson’s third trip through the NL East since 2019, which is pretty enticing as a blind item, but then you realize that he was with the Phillies in 2019 but not ’22 and the Nats in 2023 but not ’19, and he missed the Mets and Braves altogether. That’s something of a theme for Dickerson’s career. He came up with the Rockies and was traded to the Rays in 2016, missing the two seasons in the past decade in which Colorado was good and having to sit through two of the last seasons in which Tampa Bay wasn’t.

But for as much as Dickerson has dodged playing for good teams for most of his career, he does have playoff experience, with the Marlins in 2020 and the Cardinals last year. He’s spent the past decade as an exemplar of a particular kind of player: a second-division starter who can be a meaningful platoon or bench player on a contender. That kind of player gets punted around a lot. Indeed, this will be Dickerson’s 11th big league season and his eighth team. He’s been traded in midseason twice and four times in total. (One of those trades was the deal that sent Germán Márquez and Jake McGee to Colorado in 2016.) Read the rest of this entry »

The San Francisco Giants started their week off by announcing a new free agent signing: right-handed pitcher (and sometime Elliott Smith look-alike) Luke Jackson. And for a career middle reliever, it’s a pretty big commitment: $3 million in 2023, $6.5 million in ’24, and a club option for ’25 that will cost $7 million if exercised, $2 million if not. That’s a total guarantee of $11.5 million over two years.

Jackson, 31, was originally a Texas Rangers draft pick, but spent the past six seasons with the Braves. He was last seen among the vaunted bullpen that helped carry Atlanta to the 2021 World Series title. Jackson tied with Will Smith for the most appearances by an Atlanta reliever (71) and had the lowest ERA on the staff (1.98). He made 11 more appearances in the playoffs. Nine of those were scoreless; the other two (four earned runs in 1/3 of an inning in Game 3 of the NLCS; two batters faced, two doubles in Game 6 of the NLCS) were very much not.

You might have clued in to the fact that Jackson hasn’t pitched in a meaningful game since the 2021 World Series, which was more than a year ago. If so, congratulations on remembering that it’s 2023 now — lots of people are still struggling with that. But yes, Jackson had Tommy John surgery in April of last year. Based on normal rehabilitation times, it wouldn’t be shocking to see him pitch for the Giants at some point in 2023, but it would constitute a minor medical miracle if he were able to return for Opening Day. Read the rest of this entry »

When I wrote up the Cubs’ signing of Drew Smyly, I reflected on the… let’s call it uninspiring state of the rest of the roster. Plenty of solid players, little star power, little upside to speak of. For a putative big-market team with (as of the Smyly signing) a payroll almost $20 million under the luxury tax threshold, that’s an easy enough problem to solve early in the offseason. Less so now, when most of the quality free agents have already found employment for 2023. So at the end of the Smyly post, I made a joke: “Could they convince Cubs fans that Eric Hosmer is Anthony Rizzo with a beard and thicker eyebrows?”

Good news, everyone: There’s a new Rizzo in town, and his eyebrows are magnificent.

Jesse Rogers of ESPN reported Wednesday afternoon that the Cubs had, in fact, agreed to terms with Hosmer. Years ago, the 33-year-old first baseman was the first marquee signing of what became the current Padres’ run of contention, but on August 2 of last year, he was deemed surplus to requirements. As San Diego completed the Juan Soto–Josh Bell blockbuster, the Friars shipped Hosmer to Boston, and retained almost all of the $13 million a year left on his contract for the privilege of doing so. Hosmer, who will make that amount in each of the next three seasons, will only cost the Cubs the league minimum, Rogers reports. Read the rest of this entry »

“Extend Devers!” they shouted from the streets and the rooftops and the churches and the public houses and the decks of fishing boats and the parking lot of the local Dunkin’ Donuts. “Extend Devers!” they cried for years, as Mookie Betts and Christian Vázquez were traded and Xander Bogaerts, Eduardo Rodriguez, Nathan Eovaldi, and J.D. Martinez left in free agency.

Surely this last stalwart of Boston baseball would not be allowed, encouraged even, to complete his career elsewhere. Rafael Devers is coming off the best offensive season of his career. He’s one of the best hitters in baseball; he’d be the best homegrown player the Red Sox had produced in a generation, had the Red Sox not also produced Betts.

And he’s staying put. News broke Wednesday night that the Red Sox and Devers have agreed to an 11-year, $331 million contract extension that will keep the color of his socks unchanged through the 2033 season. This deal supersedes the one-year, $17.5 million arbitration-avoiding settlement announced the day before. Your pleas have been heard, your prayers answered, your supplications fulfilled. Devers has been extended. Hallelujah. Read the rest of this entry »